CEO
Brian Chesky said the company is “getting serious” about hotels and will be
adding a hotel interface to its app.
Airbnb has seemingly set itself up for hotel expansion — and on Tuesday, Co-founder and
CEO Brian Chesky said the short-term rental giant is adding a hotel interface
to its app.
“The
concrete thing is we are now getting serious about hotels,” Chesky said while
on a video call at Skift Global Forum. “We bought HotelTonight. We always had
intended to integrate it into Airbnb. Then the pandemic hit, and similar to
Experiences, we put everything on hold.”
Chesky
shared, as he has in the past, that Airbnb rebuilt its tech from the ground up
for the launch of its Services and relaunch of its Experiences verticals. The
work done can also be applied to hotels, Chesky said Tuesday, noting that, like
a service, a hotel has different offerings, a hotel has different rooms.
We’re going to bring a lot of boutiques and a lot of independent hotels on Airbnb. What we found is that the vast majority of people who come to Airbnb, if they don’t find a home they like, they go to another website to book a hotel. [If] we just have hotels there, then they’re gonna get an infinite amount of bookings, because we are accessed by 1.6 billion devices a year.
Brian Chesky
“We’re going
to bring a lot of boutiques and a lot of independent hotels on Airbnb. What we
found is that the vast majority of people who come to Airbnb, if they don’t
find a home they like, they go to another website to book a hotel,” he said.
“[If] we just have hotels there, then they’re gonna get an infinite amount of
bookings, because we are accessed by 1.6 billion devices a year.”
Airbnb, he
said, is “building a first-class” interface to showcase homes, inns and bed and
breakfasts.
“It will be
integrated into the core tab, the ‘Homes’ tab will, you know, maybe it changes
to the word ‘Stays’, and there will be a carousel — like those interface
rows that you swipe — we’re going to pilot it in a few different cities,
including New York, and we’ll see how it goes.”
The
discussion follows a fee structure change that positioned the company to
compete with online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Booking.com. On
Tuesday, Chesky said the fee structure change came in an effort to simplify—and
“this is how the hotel industry does it,” he said.
Weeks before
the single-fee structure shift was announced, Chesky said on the company’s Q2
earnings call that while homes are “the heart and soul” of Airbnb, “hotels
would be a great supplement.”
Chesky has
been open about his intent to transform Airbnb into an “everything” platform.
He said last
week that he wants Airbnb to grow into a “platform for everything you need to
travel and live around the world — not just travel — but travel and live.”
Airbnb
announced in early 2019 that it was acquiring HotelTonight. The company said at
the time the purchase gave it the chance to “accelerate our work to build an
end-to-end travel platform that serves everyone.”
Note: This story first appeared on PhocusWire