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Hi @Robin4 ,
I am concerned about the wellbeing of airbnb as well.
Lufthansa, the famous german airline, has 763 planes, 700 of them are grounded. International travel has come to a complete stillstand and noone knows for how long this will be going on. A stillstand of international travel is a disaster for airbnb.
I think airnb had a total revenue of 4 B USD in 2019. They closed the 4th quarter of 2019 showing a loss of $ 276 M. In 2020 we now have 3 quarters to go. How much will their revenue go down in these 3 quartes compared to 2019 – 50% or 70%? And what kind of loss will that generate?
To add insult to injury Brian Chesky decided to refund all service fees to guests for stays from march 14 to april 14, that's one month. How much money is that? $200 to $300 M? He already had that money in the bank and now he's returning it all. I don't know if that was a wise decision.
Laurence Tosi, airbnb's ex CFO, wanted to go public in 2018 and he got into an argument with Brian Chesky about it. In hindsight 2018 would have been the perfect time to ipo the company. Their IPO is impossible in 2020 and it will be impossible in 2021 as well.
Will they survive? Or will Jeff Bezos take over the company. He must be making a hell lot of money these days when people can't leave their houses and buy everything online. Amazon has the data of hundreds of million people worldwide. Not only do they know where people live, where they get their parcels delivered to, they also know what people buy, how much the buy and how they pay. Airbnb-Verification would be a piece of cake for them, just verify Yourself by using Your Amazon account. You don't have an Amazon account yet? Sign up.
A takeover by Amazon would also end the ongoing airbnb softwareglitches. Amazon knows how to run a software, they have no glitches.
Oh boy, where will all this be ending up.
cc: @Susan17