Save the date: Tune in April 9 for a Host Update with CEO Brian Chesky

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Save the date: Tune in April 9 for a Host Update with CEO Brian Chesky

Last week, CEO Brian Chesky spoke to our global host community in a live video message from his home in San Francisco. He talked about the impact the coronavirus (COVID-19) is having on hosts, answered some of your top questions, and announced new initiatives to help you get through this challenging time.

 

He also committed to staying in closer contact with our community of hosts. We know how important it is for you to hear from—and be heard by—Airbnb leadership right now. We’ve continued to hold global listening sessions where you’ve shared your own personal stories, offered up suggestions, and asked questions, and we’ll be bringing you more Host Updates with Brian over the coming weeks, too.

 

So tune in for another update from Brian at 3:00 p.m PT Thursday, April 9. You can catch it live at Airbnb.com/live, or watch a recording after the event.

 

Thank you for all of your feedback over the past few weeks. Please continue to share any questions you have in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to answer some of them in future Airbnb.com/live events.

107 Replies 107
Robin4
Top Contributor
Mount Barker, Australia

@Pilar1 

 

I said I wasn't going to watch the last one because I have been let down by so many of these 'drink the Kool-aid' sessions over the years. Pilar, I consider them to be a total waste of time.

I am 75 years old, going on 76, just going to the toilet for a pee wastes a sizable chunk of what is left of my life!! I don't need to listen to bull-'faeces' to fill up my day.

 

So I didn't watch it direct, but, I did relent and watch it on catch-up so that I could respond to comments that were made about it here on the CC.

 

This time I have no interest in the content, I don't want to be built up to be let down again....in fact I will not turn on the sound....I am only interested in the visual, the body movements.

Yeah, lets keep in the loop!

 

Cheers.......Rob

@Robin4
I'd take that 7 million listings stat with a bucketload of salt too Rob! 7 million in total if you add up every one that's been listed from company inception 12 years ago? Hmmm well, with a bit of creative calculation, that's possible I guess. It's worth noting here though, that l platform listing numbers exploded almost overnight, from 5 million to 7 million, aroun the very same time as the "duplicate listing" button showed up! As they would..  :)) 

@Robin4

Yes, I"ll be watching it, Rob. And I don't need a crystal ball, or to study his body language, to know that - as with every other video I've watched  of Brian over the past 3 or more years - I'm going to come away from it feeling deeply sad and desperately sorry for him. 

 

I make no secret of how passionately I  despise what his company has become in recent years, and abhor what I see as their abusive, exploitative, oppressive policies, and their unethical, unfair - and, in many jurisdictions, unlawful - treatment of their host base. And as long as they keep turning the screws tighter and tighter on hosts, and continue to strip us of our rights and  our autonomy, my views on that will never change. 

 

But I take no pleasure whatsoever in watching this man battling desperately to save the company he has put his heart and soul into building for over a third of his life. Over time, it's become increasingly clear that Brian's big, world-changing dream of magical travel adventures for all, has turned into every bit as much a nightmare for him, as it has for many of us. There is not a single shred of doubt in my mind though, that his original intentions for Airbnb were real, genuine and honourable, but he hasn't looked like a man at peace with himself, or with the path his company has taken, for a very long time now. 

 

Brian Chesky was a lamb to the slaughter for the VC and speculator wolves from Day 1. While he has been practically deified as some sort of Boy Genius by Silicon Valley and far beyond for the best part of a decade now, the truth is, he was just a reasonably bright young lad with a reasonably bright idea, a strong work ethic, a fierce determination, who more or less stumbled into way into becoming CEO of a multi-billion dollar global corporation. He was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 27 year old RISD design graduate, with zero business experience and not much more life experience, but also with the latest, greatest cool tech idea - when some very rich and very powerful people set their wily sights on him and started throwing millions and billions of dollars at him. There was only one way that was ever going to end. 

 

So while it's a safe bet that he'll no doubt come out with plenty to piss us all off royally in this video - as per - I'm truly not looking forward to seeing even more of the ravages these past several years have had, or the toll they've clearly taken on Mr Chesky. His struggle is written all over his face these days. And the increasing public evisceration of him, is really quite painful to witness. 

@Susan17  " There is not a single shred of doubt in my mind though, that his original intentions for Airbnb were real, genuine and honourable, but he hasn't looked like a man at peace with himself, or with the path his company has taken, for a very long time now. "

 

So what's to feel sorry for? He has a choice, every day, to move the company in a direction that would lead to hosts feeling appreciated, to make sure his CS staff are well-trained and give consistent advice, answers and solutions, to change the flawed review system, to take the company down a path that bears some resemblance to his original "real, genuine, and honorable intentions". Or he could resign if he objects to the direction the company has gone.

If he's not at peace with himself, why does he continue to be the face of something that disturbs him? And continue to mouth empty platitudes?  Is someone holding a gun to his head?

If only it were that simple, @Sarah977. His company has investor funding to the tune of $5.4 billion. Who do you think is calling the shots there.. Chesky or the guys holding the purse strings? He who pays the piper, calls the tune. 

 

Yes, he could resign. I'd imagine that would be be in many ways, like handing away your own baby though. And he's clinging on by a thread as it. He would be better off out of it altogether though, but he probably hasn't come to that realisation yet. 

@Susan17  IMHO, less like handing away your own baby and more like a few parents who have basically disowned their offspring,as painful as that might be, because the kid turned into a violent white supremacist, or a rapist killer, when nothing about their upbringing could have seemingly led to that.

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Hi@Robin4 

 

what would You consider to be "reliable statistics" in terms of 650,000 hosts on airbnb?

 

@Susan17 

 

Where do these data come from?

 

Robin4
Top Contributor
Mount Barker, Australia

@Ute42 

 

I can't tell you how reliable it is, and maybe @Susan17  has access to better stats than I do, but I get my information from this link.......

https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/airbnb-statistics

 

These people are research annalists and they are not just based around Airbnb, they do statistical analysis for a number of large organisations.

 

One figure jumped out at me from their Airbnb assessment. They said Airbnb are active in 220 countries, and my reaction was....Hang on, there isn't 220 countries on earth, are there a few on Mars I have come across yet that Airbnb have access to...and then I looked at it again and they state '220 countries....and regions'.

 

So Ute, use it as a guide, but don't bet your life on its accuracy!

 

Cheers......Rob

 

 

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@Robin4 

 

Thanks for the information.

 

If airbnb has some 700,000 hosts and 7 M listings, that's an average of 10 listings per host. That's a lot. @Susan17  always talks about professional hosts  dominating the website, maybe she is right.

 

Robin4
Top Contributor
Mount Barker, Australia

@Ute42 

Ute the majority of hosts have more than one listing, there are quite a lot of hosts with over 100 listings, and I am aware of three who have over 1,000!!

 

It is conceivable that the average per host is 10....but Ute, averages are very deceptive.

The average Australian driver hits 2.7 kangaroos for each 10 years of driving....I have only hit one in 60 years of driving, so averages mean jack sh*t to me!

 

Or I guess averages are telling me it's about my time to hit another one or two!  :-((

 

Cheers.....Rob 

@Ute42 @Robin4 

 

The figures quoted above (650K hosts, 7 million listings) are Airbnb's own figures @Ute42, and highly likely to we wildly inaccurate, and greatly inflated. (The rest of the stats included in the link that Rob provided have been cobbled together from a variety of sources - some reasonably accurate, some much less so, and others already outdated.. Airbnb's most recent valuation (this week) stands at just $18 billion, for instance, rather than the all-time high of $38 billion, as per the stats in the link. 

 

In the historical and continued absence of Airbnb releasing any real, authentic data though - and taking into account that some of the alternative data sources are pushing their own agendas too - we can really only speculate as to the true state of affairs in Airbnb-land, and reach our own conclusions based on what we're seeing. hearing and living. 

 

For example, according to the company, 92 percent of hosts in New York shared their primary residence between 2017 and 2018, and 79 percent of hosts used the money they earned to stay in their homes. 

 

However, data supplied by David Wachsmuth, Professor of Urban Planning at Mcgill University, highlighted that the far more pertinent and revealing figure is the huge amount of money the smaller number of "Pro"/commercial operators are bringing in. Overall, his data suggested that half of all Airbnb rentals were conducted by only 10 percent of hosts, who earned a full 48 percent of all the revenue earned in the city that year. That was some 5,000-people earning a combined $318 million. In contrast, the bottom 80 percent of New York’s hosts—the city’s 40,400 true home sharers—earned just 32 percent of all revenue, or $209 million, in 2017 (with the situation being infinitely worse in 2020)

 

Similarly, the 10 biggest hosts in Barcelona manage 996 apartments between them, while a further 666 manage five or more, and 3,633 host between two and four, a 2018 report by DataHippo found. 

 

An excellent and hard-hitting 2019 CBC series of investigations into rogue hosts in Montreal, discovered that just 10%  of Airbnb hosts received 63% of the reviews on the listings there. In other words, a group of just 568 host most of the travellers to Montreal who use Airbnb, and earn most of the revenue generated through the platform.

 

More recently in 2020, a March article by Wired's digital editor James Temperton (by far and away, one of the most savvy and clued-up reporters producing well-researched material on Airbnb at the moment) states that new data, compiled by City Hall in late 2019, shows that across all Airbnb listings in London, just one per cent of the capital’s hosts behind 15 per cent of the listings active on Airbnb at the time.

 

So while all Airbnb-related data does need to be scrutinised carefully, and often taken with a pinch of salt, there is an overwhelming amount of pretty reliable evidence out there to suggest that "professional" hosts with vast inventories are indeed dominating - and decimating - the platform. 

 

We don't need millions of data points and complex algorithms and small armies of super-smart data-analysts to tell us that though - all we need is a pen, a notepad, a bit of patience and an hour or two studying Airbnb search placements in any saturated (or even emerging) market, to see exactly how the land lies. 

 

James Temperton. Airbnb Has Devoured London, And Here's The Data To Prove It

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-london-short-term-rentals

 

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@Robin4  , @Susan17  ,

 

This is a good source of information I sometimes use: SimilarWeb. I believe they are based in Israel and they provide information on how many visitors an internet page has per month.

 

In Jan 2021 airbnb.com had 90.6M visitors while booking.com had 500M

 

https://www.similarweb.com/website/airbnb.com#overview

 

The source Robin provided, ipropertymanagement, says airbnb had 91M visitors in jan 2020 whitch is the exact same information that similarweb provides, i believe they have their data from them.

 

On similarweb You can check out the No of visitors of any website in the world as long as they can track enough data.

 

Meanwhile of course due to corona pageviews have taken a dive. In march 2020 airbnb had 55M visitors and the are now on rank 376 worldwide. Booking.com are on rank 112 right now, they are much bigger than airbnb.

 

I think the similarWeb data are pretty accurate. I once had dinner (and a few drinks) with management people from some other OTA and late in the evening they admitted that the similarWeb data are correct.

 

.

Typo: 2021 must be 2020

 

Sharon1014
Level 10
Sellicks Beach, Australia

@Ute42  The SimilarWeb website has it correct, 2020.  And reckon the traffic flow proportion is accurate.  Another local host friend is listed on Booking as well as Airbnb and she says they get 80-90% of their business from BookingCom

 

airbnb v booking.JPG

Lisa977
Level 2
Marquette, MI

Yes we are bleeding right now.  We can no longer apply for loans it appears. We have been told in Michigan NOT to apply for unemployment yet.  In Michigan we have been ordered not to work for 4 weeks now. It has been extended until May 6. Michigan cases and deaths are horrible every day. This will go on for some time.