“Travel as we knew it is over”, says Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky
“It took us 12 years to build Airbnb, and we lost almost everything in four to six weeks,” the company’s co-founder Brian Chesky has said.
The company was preparing to go public this year, and now that is up in the air, he said during an interview to CNBC.
Chesky noted that Airbnb faces an uncertain future due to fear of outbreaks that are already being experienced around the world. “Travel as we knew it is over,” he said. “It doesn’t mean travel is over, just the travel we knew is over, and it’s never coming back.”
The CEO noted that at least in the United States, Airbnb is already recovering, although it does not want to have “false hopes and that its company is not absolutely out of the woods. “
Chesky, who founded online holiday rental service Airbnb with Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008, said that after the pandemic subsides, people will travel less to major tourist cities and will instead choose to visit less well-known destinations.
“No one quite knows what it will look like,” he said. “But I have a couple of thoughts. I do think that instead of the world population travelling to only a few cities and staying in big tourist districts, I think you’re going to see a redistribution of where people travel,” he continued.
Although the company was impacted heavily by the pandemic and the subsequent travel bans and lockdowns imposed by many countries, Chesky believes that travel for tourism will return – albeit in a different form from before the pandemic.
“I think that travel is going to come back,” he continued. “It’s just going to take a lot longer than, you know, we would have thought and it’s going to be different.”
In the United States Chesky reports that at the beginning of June, Airbnb had the same volume of bookings as it did in the same period in 2019. These bookings are due to people travelling domestically, he believes. “People are saying they want to get out of the house, but they want to be safe,” he said. “They don’t want to get on aeroplanes. They don’t want to travel for business. They want to go to cities, but they don’t want to cross borders.”
“What they are willing to do is get in a car and drive a couple hundred miles to a small community where they were willing to stay in a house.”
“I think more people are going to work remotely and work from home also could be work from any home,” he said. “And that’s an opportunity for Airbnb because you’re going to see major population redistribution on the table.”