Brian Chesky went on stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to tell a story about the future.
This story did something like this: 17 years ago, when Chesky co -founded Airbnb, people were skeptical. Who would never stay in a foreigner’s house, he growled. (In 2008, Seven investors have rejected The company, refusing what would have been a participation of 10% for $ 150,000.) But the startup has challenged the chances – it is now a verb, a name and a Fortune company 500 listed on the stock market with a market capitalization of $ 84 billion.
Now said Chesky, it was time for the company to have a new track again by redefining what “Airbnb” means something.
With the Airbnb services which have just been insufficient and the Recredible Airbnb experiences, Chesky painted an image of a world where you count on Airbnb as a center for a singular holiday experience. Chesky spoke of Airbnb as a market for unforgettable moments, once in life. Think: make pasta with a chef in Rome, dancing with a K-Pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a catering architect, fighting with a Luchador in Mexico, or even by spending a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes.
Chesky has closed with a new slogan: “Now you can Airbnb more than a airbnb.” The idea is that you “airbnb” a vacation massage – and would end up starting the “airbnb -id” massages, makeup artists and hairstyles not only on vacation, but when you are at home. In short, it is the launch of a Superapp which was both a slight repudiation of technology – “somewhere along the way, something derived, and we started to spend more time watching screens and less time in the real world,” Chesky told the public – and an incredibly Silicon Valley display.
This presentation, in which Chesky exhibited his best “founding fashion” character, was welcomed both with a fanfare and a criticism. The founder of Zynga, Mark Pincus, praised Chesky’s performance like “Steve Jobs-Esque. “” Others were skeptical That Airbnb users turn to the application in their daily life, without vibration and interviewed on the market price that Airbnb uses.
The truth, almost certainly, is somewhere between the two.
There are certain ways whose idea is logical. For example, if one of the residence reviews in an airbnb is that you lose the amenities of a hotel, he follows that the company would like to solve this problem. Travel is a spectacularly fragmented industry and Airbnb is not the only one to see the level of white space open to consolidation – McKinsey A estimated The fact that the global travel experience market is an opportunity that is worth the north of $ 1 Billion, but which is dispersed among a few online platforms and “countless smaller operators”.
At the same time, Airbnb’s ambition to become a destination for experiences is not new; The Airbnb product is experimenting is, after all, a revival.
Ellie Mertz, Airbnb finance chief, described the previous effort of the company as a victim of circumstances. “We have launched experiences many years ago,” said Mertz in an interview. “We started to extend it.
With the advantage of a “multi -year break”, Airbnb redesigned the experiences, said Mertz, providing more flexible prices, a higher verification to ensure higher quality offers and a redesigned application that facilitates research and booking of experiences that correspond to their trip.
“The current year is to launch,” she said. “We want to put these products and services in the hands of our consumers … Our ambition is to drive these companies so that they are on an autonomous basis contributors to our front line line. What Brian and I have said in the past is that we could build these companies in billions of dollars on an order of magnitude, in a period of three to five years. ”
For a company that generated $ 11.1 billion in revenues last year, an additional billion on the upper line could be significant. But ringing these income will take a lot of work and money, because Airbnb is essentially trying to create new consumption habits.
To help assert Airbnb experiences, the company Lance Airbnb Originals – a set of premium experiences, supported by Starpower. For example: Megan Thee Stallion was in the room while Chesky praised the original Airbnb that the company organized with it – a day with the star rapper in a specially built anime house. The objective for experiences like this is that these are days that you remember for the rest of your life.
At the end of the day, I was adopted on such a surprise experience – a listening party with luck The Rapper in Los Angeles, where the independent rapper Indie presented about ten new songs in a room full of influencers and, well, me. We sat in a room filled with bean bag chairs, green shift headphones and screens filled with words. It was an hour and a half when the world stopped.
It was intimate, surprising, and the kind of swamp of Starpower which seemed quite authentic – Chance The Rapper, whose last studio album was released in 2019, was held in front of the room when the demo was finished, answering questions on its music that only many people heard. Airbnb has not shared details on the financial terms involved in the partnership with these celebrities, although it seems sure to guess that anyway (share of income, costs or other arrangement), it is not cheap.
And that happens to the delicate part of what Airbnb tries to do, because it moves a new sophisticated addition to a sharing economy, the business scale. I do not think it is impossible that the airbnb thrust in these new vertical works – maybe I would like to reserve a makeup artist via Airbnb as a consumer – but I do not know if you can organize a large scale a market of singular and intimate experiences. They are often limited by definition and magic is difficult to project for quality worldwide.
The idea is somewhat paradoxical and may very well not work as criticism think. At the same time, you must ask yourself – it can also be an idea as to the rooster eye as to stay in the houses of others on vacation.
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
