22 April 2020, 17:00 GMT+8
PHOTOGRAPHER: KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Back in March, when sheltering in place was still a novelty, Airbnb Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky hung an oversized print from his company’s in-house magazine on a bare wall above his sofa, hoping it would brighten up his home office.
Airbnb Inc., which Chesky founded in a much more modest San Francisco living room in 2008, is among the world’s most valuable lodging companies.
By comparison, Chesky’s problems don’t rate; he’s safe and comfortable working at home. But that hasn’t made the past few months any easier. “I’m not sure if there’s a more difficult thing that a CEO of a travel company could ever do than go through this,” Chesky says. “You feel like you were T-boned, or like a torpedo has just hit the ship.”
Chesky started Airbnb in the middle of the last global cataclysm. To homeowners struggling through the U.S. foreclosure crisis, Airbnb offered a way to help cover the next mortgage payment. To would-be travelers who couldn’t afford fancy hotels, it played up the character of the rentals its cash-strapped “hosts” were offering. Why stay at a cookie-cutter hotel in a financial district when you could rent a room in a cool-but-gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn or the Mission and stay a few more days?
Chesky sheltering in place.
PHOTOGRAPHER: KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Twelve years later, Airbnb is widely seen as Silicon Valley’s most promising still-technically-a-startup—especially after the previous holders of that title, Uber and WeWork, were consumed by scandals that cost each company’s founder-CEO his job.
Airbnb says this isn’t true. “Let’s be clear about why he’s endured as founder-CEO. He’s both a good CEO and a good person,” says Alfred Lin, an Airbnb board member and a partner at venture firm Sequoia Capital. “He’s larger than life and all of those things, but he’s navigated well.”
Early in the crisis, Chesky says, he told his board he wanted to meet virtually on Sundays because he planned to make three months’ worth of decisions every week.
Not all hosts were satisfied by the gesture, which gives them a small fraction of what they would have originally made and does nothing to address the underlying issue: how the company will find customers willing to stay in other people’s homes after all this. In April, Chesky struck a deal for $1 billion in debt and equity from Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners.
The Silver Lake deal includes warrants that value the company at $18 billion, down 40% from what investors thought it was worth in 2017.
Chesky has cut ad spending and says he plans to focus on fewer new projects.
Hotel executives, who themselves are scrambling to deal with the fallout of the coronavirus, have taken some comfort in watching Airbnb suffer after a run of wild growth and good press.
But the home-sharing business, much more than a chain hotel, depends on strangers trusting strangers.
As younger travelers embraced Airbnb, the site attracted lots of design-savvy hustlers who married a feel for interior decorating with an instinct for arbitrage. Before long, entrepreneurs were leasing Manhattan apartments for $4,000 a month and bringing in twice that amount by listing them on Airbnb a few nights at a time.
This development led to a backlash from cities, which saw Airbnb listings as unregulated hotels that were driving up rents by taking apartments off the market.
Chesky’s ambitions were expansive, if quirky. He began publishing a glossy travel magazine.
Bookings crashed after China put Hubei province and its capital, Wuhan, where the virus originated, on lockdown.
Change in New Airbnb Bookings
12/29/2019 to 3/29/2020
Data: AirDNA
By the second week of April, coronavirus cases were still climbing steadily, and it had become clear the shutdown would last a lot longer than the more optimistic early predictions.
Chesky says he doesn’t know if the company will return to profitability next year and that everything is on the table. The company has already ended contracts with temporary employees early, and it canceled $800 million in marketing spending. Other actions, such as full refunds to all the guests who can’t travel, have thornier implications.
Airbnb had more than $1 billion worth of reservations on its system when the social distancing measures took effect, and unlike hotels, which don’t charge a guest’s credit card until checkout and usually allow no-penalty cancellations up to 48 hours before check-in, home-sharing sites generally require customers to prepay for their lodgings.
This dynamic isn’t unique to Airbnb—big hotel chains also offload risk to hotel owners—but Airbnb hosts, unlike hotels, are often sole proprietors without credit lines or much capital.
Predicting the shape of a travel recovery is easier than pinning down the timing. Destinations that can be reached by car are a good bet to recover first, says Michael Bellisario, an analyst at investment bank Robert W. Baird & Co. Beach resorts seem like a better bet than the urban destinations where Airbnb tends to be strongest.
Most industry analysts take it for granted that travel will bounce back, because that’s what has happened in the past. Rich Barton had already signed a deal to sell Expedia to Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp. right before the Sept. 11 attacks. Barton, now CEO of Zillow Group Inc., says he figured IAC would back out of the contract, but Diller was unfazed and went through with it. “Rich, honey,” Barton recalls Diller saying, “if we don’t travel any more, we have bigger things to worry about than whether or not to buy the company.” Expedia’s revenue has grown 20 times since then.
Chesky at home baking cookies. “I’m betting on the idea that when social distancing is over, people are going to eventually want to connect,” he says.
PHOTOGRAPHER: KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Chesky is making a similar wager, hoping that the post-Covid-19 recovery will look a lot like the recovery from the last recession, with hard-up Americans more eager to list spare bedrooms, garage apartments, and second homes, even if it means taking in an asymptomatic contagious traveler.
If that sounds speculative, it’s more fully realized than the new plan for Experiences, the money-losing business Chesky loves that centers on tours and cooking classes.
Chesky argues that the sense of alienation that’s come with the pandemic could be the key to getting things going again. “Oddly enough, though I’ve not physically seen another human being in quite a long time, because of the crisis, you talk to people more,” he says. “So everyone is kind of closer together.”
The biggest risk to the company, and the toughest to plan for, will be the pandemic’s effect on people’s psyches.
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