As we all know, Airbnb Inc. is an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation and tourist activities. The company started off as Air Bed n Breakfast in 2008. The CEOs Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia thought of this idea on a trip, they could not pay rent for housing and decided to rent out a part of their apartment to support the trip cost. The idea stuck and they started building a website with a co-founder Nate Blecharczyk.
It started with 2 hosts and for comparison’s sake, today there are about 4 million hosts in Airbnb. The company was one of the first startups unicorns to emerge in mid 2000s. At their first launch, they received only 2 bookings which within a time span of 6 months went up to 80 bookings. Though the response they were getting were weak in the beginning, the idea received a lot of funding and within 4 years was having international expansion. The company officially changed their name from Air Bed n Breakfast to Airbnb in 2009 to incorporate bookings of apartments and whole houses instead of just rooms.[1]
Airbnb from the start is a big company for their contribution to social causes like disaster relief tools, providing housing for displaced residents and their logo
“Belo” represents the universal symbol of belonging. [2]
Starting from 1 country, currently Airbnb has homes in more than 100,000 cities across the globe. Today, Airbnb has partnership with International Olympic Committee, and it was official alternate accommodation provider for 2016 Rio Games. Though Airbnb’s popularity is reaching across the world, so are the laws and regulation tightening over some of the company’s policies. For example, in New York city, Airbnb users can only list 1 home at a time. They also cannot rent an entire apartment for less than 30 days. Paris being one of the largest market for Airbnb in the world, had a restriction in 2017(ELAN law) which required Airbnb hosts to register their houses and display their registration number in the listing [5].
In September of 2019, Airbnb announced its plans to go public in 2020.[4] The company was valued $31 Billion in September 2017. This was before the pandemic hit the globe.
As the upended global travel has impacted the hotel/lodging industry severely, and also raised questions around the safety of such hotels and vacation rentals, Airbnb though had an impact was one of the least hit companies in its industry. One of the reasons being, the company has no maintenance costs towards a listing.
This does not mean the company was not impacted at all. The company did lay off about 1900 employees, took out billions of dollars in loans to offer hosts deep cleaning guidance and retooled its website to promote getaways and cabins far from the urban areas. Such steps were taken as there was a revenue drop of about 80% in a span of 2 weeks to Airbnb and as stated by the founder, they did not know how long it was going to last.
Though the pandemic was causing havoc for every company, it came as a surprise that the CEO made the company public at a price of $68 a share in December 2020 [3]. The company is currently at $175 a share, within a time span of 4 months.
At the end of the day Airbnb is one of the companies who has proved resilient in a global pandemic.
Part 2: Discussing Infrastructure of Airbnb
[1] Airbnb (2021) https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/
[2] LogoDesignLove (2014) “Airbnb introduces the Bélo” https://www.logodesignlove.com/new-airbnb-identity
[3] Olga Cam, Mohammad Rajjaque (2010) “Airbnb going public is a maverick move” The Conversation.https://theconversation.com/airbnb-going-public-is-a-maverick-move-151784
[4] Steven Tweedie,Aaron Holmes(2019) “$31 billion Airbnb announces plan to go public in 2020” Businessinsider. https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-announces-plan-to-go-public-in-2020-ipo-2019-9
[5] ZAW THIHA TUN (2020) “Top Cities Where Airbnb Is Legal or Illegal” Investpedia.https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/083115/top-cities-where-airbnb-legal-or-illegal.asp
[6] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/airbnbs-new-head-design-believes-design-led-companies-dont-work/
