The Airbnb brand is displayed on the Nasdaq digital billboard in Times Square in New York on December 10, 2020.
Kena Betancur | AFP | Getty Images
Airbnb is going to need millions of recent hosts to meet incoming demand as journey picks up once more, CEO Brian Chesky instructed CNBC.
“To meet the demand over the coming years, we’re going to need millions more hosts,” Chesky mentioned in an interview that aired Friday on CNBC’s “TechCheck.” Currently, the home-sharing platform has four million hosts.
“I think that we probably will have a high cost problem where there will probably be more guests coming to Airbnb than we’ll have hosts for because what we think is we think there’s going to be a travel rebound coming that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Chesky added. “We are working our hardest to get more hosts on the platform.”
The journey business is seeing an uptick in enterprise as more Americans get vaccinated and state restrictions ease. But for Airbnb, which depends on folks to open their houses to friends, the company will need to ramp up its variety of hosts as a substitute of constructing out more actual property or including flights to meet demand.
It’s the same downside confronted by different corporations within the gig economic system like Uber, which not too long ago introduced a $250 million stimulus in an effort to convey more drivers to its platform.
“As vaccination rates increase in the United States, we are observing that consumer demand for Mobility is recovering faster than driver availability, and consumer demand for Delivery continues to exceed courier availability,” Uber said in a submitting with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Chesky mentioned Airbnb is not seemingly to supply “a lot of incentives” to convey new hosts on board since there’s already an enormous quantity of demand for service.
“I think that all we have to do is just continue to tell our story of Airbnb, and the benefits of hosting. And we are seeing a lot of interest,” he mentioned.
As a part of that, Chesky mentioned the company has achieved issues like launch its “made possible by hosts” advert marketing campaign. The company rolled out a lot of ads utilizing images from Airbnb friends staying in houses all over the world, in an effort to create a way of nostalgia.
