MEXICO CITY (appro). – The CEO of the company Airbnb, Brian Chesky, complained that the covid-19 pandemic ended his tourism business, built in 2008, dedicated to private and tourist accommodation by leasing properties around the world.
“We spent 12 years building Airbnb and we lost almost everything in a period of four to six weeks,” Chesky said on Tuesday, the 23rd, in an interview with the US economic news portal CNBC.
“It’s hard to know what I mean. I think one thing I’ve learned is not to try to get into the business of predicting the future. In March, everything almost stopped.
“Two.5 billion people looked down and it’s not surprising that we spent 12 years building Airbnb and lost almost everything in a matter of four to six weeks,” he noted.
He said that what happened in the last three months was something completely different, because people want to be safe, they don’t want to get on planes, they don’t want to travel for business, they want to go to cities, they don’t want to cross borders.
“What they are willing to do is get in the car and drive a couple of hundred miles to a small community where they are willing to stay in a house and because of that, even though our business hasn’t picked up, it’s very clear that it happened. something very remarkable at the end of May and beginning of June, we have the same volume with reserves in the United States as last year,” he explained.
He considered that the trips will return, only that they will take much longer than expected.
“Our cost was reduced and it was an incredibly difficult, harrowing experience because we said ‘we don’t know how long the storm is going to last,’ so I’m hoping for the best, but I’m planning for the worst.
“So if there is a takedown or multiple stops, if communities are closed, if travel is stopped, we are fine because with this change we have reduced almost a billion dollars in marketing,” he said.
He also talked about downsizing their staff, they’ve been slimming down and streamlining their roles, they’ve been resilient, they’ve launched online experiences on what ‘people can do from home’ and they have a large percentage of their bookings and they have longer stays, almost a fifth of their stays are longer than 30 days.
“We have not lost any hosts on our platform or, should we say it differently, we have more hosts today than before covid started. So the important thing here is that the market is resilient, the community is resilient, I think a trend that is going to happen is that traveling as we knew is over and will never come back,” he considered.
This is because instead of the world’s population traveling to a few cities or staying in large tourist districts, they will travel to thousands of local communities.
He doesn’t see extinction as likely, but he does have “pretty ambitious” real estate expansion plans. That is why, he indicated, they are adding people who work remotely and who can work from any home.
“It is an opportunity because there will be a great redistribution of the population at the table. Not everyone will want to live in a city, and since we do not know how to say the total cost of the labor force.
“So we told our team that there will be one of the layoffs, but we weren’t going to want this twice, so when it’s cut it needs to be cut deep enough to not do it again and we have enough money to take care of it.” people, because we spend almost a billion dollars on marketing, but now we are not spending anything on advertising and our business is probably more efficient and profitable than we think, “he said.
For this reason, he added, work is being done to make the business more efficient, but at this time, he acknowledged, it is not agile enough. He added that they are not going public this year, they are not committing for the remainder of 2020.
“We want the world to be ready for Airbnb and that means a little bit more of the sustained recovery that the market needs to recover a little bit and we just have to weigh our options so that we don’t have anything to say but we don’t rule anything out.
“Something difficult could be just around the corner, so maybe we just have to start living in a world a little more measured,” he stressed.
He assures that these last four months have been a lesson to the world and he, he said, is trying to follow his own advice, to be more careful and more attentive.
“Travel as we knew it, it’s over. It does not mean that traveling has ended, but rather that the model we knew has died and will not return, ”he indicated, after acknowledging the uncertain future that the company faces.
The company’s crisis forced the company to cut 25% of its workforce and went into debt for 2 billion dollars to try to withstand the fall, which produced a 40% reduction in its value in the private market.
Airbnb had 6 million accommodation listings in the world. In Mexico he had 100 thousand. In 2018, Airbnb calculated that an economic spill of 2.7 billion dollars was generated in the country.
The only way out for the CEO is for the hosts to apply health and safety measures to receive guests.
His statements have been criticized on social networks, because Airbnb, which he created together with Joe Gebbial, is still listed on the stock market. In 2019, the company was valued at $31 billion.
His comments became a trending topic on Twitter, among users who criticized Chesky, whom they consider a “real estate speculator” and who defended his business model with the free market.
