Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky took to the stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, outlining an ambitious expansion for the company that aims to redefine how users interact with its platform, moving beyond accommodation to a comprehensive hub for travel and local activities.
The announcement centered on a new ‘Airbnb Services’ initiative and a significantly relaunched ‘Airbnb Experiences’.
Chesky began by reflecting on Airbnb’s origins 17 years ago, a time when the concept of staying in a stranger’s home was met with considerable doubt.
He recounted how, in 2008, seven investors famously rejected the nascent company, declining what would have become a 10% stake for $150,000.
Despite this early skepticism, Airbnb burgeoned into a globally recognized brand and a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company, now boasting an $84 billion market capitalization.
Drawing parallels to that foundational period, Chesky positioned the company’s latest move as another pioneering step, intended to broaden the very definition of “Airbnb-ing.”
He envisioned a future where users rely on the platform for a cohesive vacation experience, a marketplace for “unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime moments.”
Examples cited included making pasta with a Roman chef, dancing with a K-pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a restoration architect, or even wrestling with a luchador in Mexico City.
The company’s new tagline, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb,” encapsulates this broader ambition.
The idea is for users to initially book services like a massage while on vacation through Airbnb, and eventually extend this behavior to booking services such as makeup artists and hair stylists even when at home.
This positions Airbnb as an emerging ‘superapp’, aiming to encourage more real-world engagement.
“Somewhere along the way, something drifted, and we started spending more time looking at screens and less time in the real world,” Chesky told the audience.
Enthusiasm tempered with questions
The announcement, delivered with Chesky’s characteristic ‘founder mode’ energy, garnered a mixed reception.
Zynga founder Mark Pincus reportedly praised Chesky’s presentation as ‘Steve Jobs-esque’.
However, other observers expressed reservations about whether users would adopt Airbnb for daily, non-travel-related services and questioned the platform’s proposed marketplace pricing.
The strategic rationale behind the expansion touches upon addressing existing user needs and tapping into a significant market. If a drawback of Airbnb stays is the lack of hotel amenities, providing access to local services offers a direct solution.
The travel experiences market itself is a vast and fragmented industry.
McKinsey has estimated this global market to be worth over $1 trillion, currently dispersed among a few large online platforms and numerous smaller operators, indicating substantial room for consolidation.
This isn’t Airbnb’s first foray into the experiences sector; the current Airbnb Experiences offering is a relaunch of a previous initiative.
Airbnb Finance Chief Ellie Mertz explained the earlier version’s trajectory: “We launched Experiences many years ago,” Mertz said in an interview. “We started to scale it.
The pandemic hit, we put it on the back burner, and haven’t really done anything with it until this point.
Mertz detailed that the intervening “multi-year pause” allowed Airbnb to reimagine the Experiences product with more flexible pricing, enhanced vetting for quality control, and a redesigned app for easier discovery and booking.
“The current year is about launching,” she stated.
We want to get these products and services into our consumers’ hands… Our ambition is to drive these businesses such that they are on a standalone basis material contributors to our top line. What Brian and I have said in the past is the ambition is that we could build these businesses into billion dollar revenue streams over an order of magnitude, in a three-to-five-year period.
Generating such revenue—an additional billion dollars would be a notable contribution to Airbnb’s $11.1 billion revenue from last year—will require significant effort and investment in fostering new consumer habits.
‘Airbnb Originals’ and curated star power
To spearhead this push, Airbnb is launching ‘Airbnb Originals’—premium, curated experiences often involving celebrities.
Rapper Megan Thee Stallion, for example, was present at the launch event as Chesky highlighted an “Original” experience developed with her: a day spent with the star in a specially designed anime house.
The goal is to create deeply memorable, once-in-a-lifetime events.
The financial arrangements for these celebrity partnerships were not disclosed by Airbnb, though such collaborations are typically resource-intensive.
This highlights a potential challenge: integrating these high-touch, curated offerings into a business model traditionally built on the scale and decentralized nature of the sharing economy.
While the appeal of booking unique experiences or local services through a trusted platform like Airbnb is clear for consumers, the ability to curate and scale “singular, intimate experiences” globally while maintaining quality presents a complex operational hurdle.
Despite potential criticisms and the inherent difficulties in scaling “magic,” the company’s new direction mirrors the audacious, perhaps even “cock-eyed,” vision that initially propelled Airbnb from a questioned startup to an industry leader.
The early skepticism surrounding these new ventures might, in an ironic twist, signal another transformative phase for the company.
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