Apparently internships are deferred till next year. Don't know how that'll work.
It's entirely possible Airbnb never comes back after this, and that a competing product will not be able to fill its shoes. The regulation free zone that Airbnb was able to grow in no longer exists and will never come back, at least in the more urban areas. I'm not sure how they come back from this.
They have 12k employees from what I've heard, there's significant fat to trim. Hopefully they can stay afloat.
> from what I've heard, there's significant fat to trim
My company was pitched to redesign our Oakland office by Airbnb's architects who used their airbnb HQ work for our pitch. They had truly spared no expense in the design, we came away actually horrified at how overpriced and needlessly overdesigned things were. We didn't go with that vendor and in fact their office design was so opulent it served as an example of what not to do - we swung our design the other side of the pendulum and simplified and streamlined our office!
I did an electrical estimate for an unnamed software company office buildout a few months ago. The light fixture package alone was $19/sqft, not including labor. Our entire scope is usually $15-18/sqft, which includes all labor, material, rentals, permits, and taxes.
I wasn’t sure if they just wanted to blow a bunch of money, or if the architects were taking them for a ride.
People will return to travel, and some may prefer apartment-style accommodations over a crowded hotel.
There is also a lot of investment in the ecosystem on the part of landlords; some will fail but others will want to return to the airbnb model. In some cases have no choice -- a ski or beach condo isn't going to easily find long-term tenants.
I don't doubt that the market for travel and accommodations will return. What I doubt is whether Airbnb can weather the crisis without meeting financial ruin, and whether they can continue to fight the legal battles around the world they need to win to survive.
Additionally, I would think that AirBnB hosts will begin to consider local, longer term renters rather than keeping housing-stock out of the longer term market in order to extract more from the short-term market.
Seems like they have enough cash to ride this out. But yes very possible that they'll need to scale back dramatically and change their business model entirely. I'm guessing even after restrictions are lifted, people will be hesitant to travel and stay at airbnbs, and also many hosts will be nervous staying on the platform.
Airbnb (anecdotally form what I've seen) is one of the largest employer for data-engineers and data scientists. I wonder if this will be a watershed moment to see if they actually do need the amount of data work business wise.
That's fair, but since the economics of giant ecommerce companies are extremely sensitive to every step of the funnel, I think they'll discover it's worthwhile.
An 0.1% increase in conversion anywhere along your funnel is significant with billions of dollars pointed at the funnel.
Yes, even aside from all the ill will AirBnB has generated (both cumulatively and specific to this event), you have to ask: when was the last time you went to an AirBnB and it felt clean? Most hosts seems to do the absolute bare minimum since they know that the review system is mutually assured destruction.
In my experience, there is a large range in the effort hosts put in, and low fungibility as a result. There is a bit of signal in the reviews, but not usually enough to be very helpful. Some hosts really do try to make it a hotel quality experience and sweat the details. On the other hand, a host once blamed me for not bringing my own bath towel after I was surprised to find that there were no towels at all in the unit, including in drawers and closets.
I've used AirBnBs a lot and there has been a range of cleanliness. I've never had one that wasn't clean enough to stay in though. The large majority of my AirBnB/VRBO/etc... experience has been in Europe so that may contribute to my experience.
yeah it's def region dependent. There's hacker hostels in the bay that look and smell like frat houses. You can't help but get the feeling the host is exploiting immigrants/summer interns who don't know any better.
Other than searchability and "the audience", does the space really need a platform, per say? The value to the host is that there's lots of users, and the value to the users are that there's lots of hosts. To me this layer should be a lot thinner.
What if there were a centralized verification place as a public service? Surely insurance would not be the hardest thing to come by. We in the US basically have a "social credit system" but its all implicit, based on credit reports. Why couldn't someone else provide a clearinghouse for "users renting something"? I realize there's a bit of overlap with some draconian "social credit score" government things, but there's some really legitimate economic benefits to having centralized identity - again we effectively have that within financial markets thru the credit score.
Isn't it more the illusion of insurance? There are sooo many stories of Airbnb dicking either hosts or guests around during claims, that I cheer and hope for their demise.
It's entirely possible Airbnb never comes back after this, and that a competing product will not be able to fill its shoes. The regulation free zone that Airbnb was able to grow in no longer exists and will never come back, at least in the more urban areas. I'm not sure how they come back from this.
They have 12k employees from what I've heard, there's significant fat to trim. Hopefully they can stay afloat.