airbnb

Fortune Staff

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

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The Future 50

The online marketplace lets people rent their homes, condos, and apartments along with providing them with activities like cooking lessons and guided visits to

Airbnb | 2021 The Future 50

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Airbnb

Airbnb | 2021 The Future 50 | Fortune

Chloe Taylor

Airbnb CEO says the best advice he was ever given was ‘counterintuitive’ to what most people would tell you

/2023/05/25/airbnb-ceo-cofounder-brian-chesky-best-advice-paul-graham/

Steve Mollman

Paul Graham explains the one quality startup founders need—and most people lack

/2023/05/20/startup-founders-need-this-characteristic-and-most-people-lack-it-says-venture-capitalist-paul-graham/

Nicholas Gordon

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky ‘guarantees’ many bosses calling people back to the office ‘are going away to the Hamptons for the summer’

/2023/05/11/airbnb-brian-chesky-remote-work-hamptons/

Trey Williams

Airbnb’s CEO spent 6 months living in his company’s rentals—and found the core problem with his business

/2023/05/04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-lessons-rentals/

Glenn Fogel says despite recession worries and financial crises, there’s “pent-up demand” for travel 

Booking CEO: Travel will be last expense cut in a downturn

Leadership

Glenn. So great to see you to talk about what's going on in the travel business. And you recently reported revenues at your company booking holdings that revenue surged 56% in the past year. Everywhere you look, travel is booming. What's going on. Yeah, I know we are very pleased with those numbers. $17 billion of revenue. A real uh something that we, we, we didn't know when the pandemic was going to end. But certainly it seems that we are beyond the pandemic era and people had a long time where they wanted to travel but they couldn't travel. And then once people felt it was safe to travel, once government stopped their restrictions, everybody wanted to travel at once and almost, but there are some areas not quite as fast, Asia, a little bit slower, but it's coming back to now. Do you see travel continuing to boom. One of the things I would say is look, we've been through a lot recently. Well, one thing that we've all learned is that things can change very rapidly right now. We're very positive on travel. We talked about it in our earnings call a few weeks ago we talked how well January was and how optimistic we were. Now just recently, we see financial crisis in the US with some banks having some issues, we see a bank in Europe having a problem. And people have been saying maybe there's a recession on the horizon. What's really puzzling is that every day we're hearing news and bad news about a recession, inflation and about stock prices falling. Why are consumers still booking trips paying high prices for airline tickets or for hotels? It looks like a disconnect, doesn't it though, Suzie? The reason I think really is that pent up demand for so long? So many people wanted to travel so bad and they couldn't and they have a lot of traveling still to do. Maybe they won't do something else but they'll do their travel. What about China? It's going to open up for business. What could this mean for, for your company? Do you see more people booking trips to China? Look, we'd like to recover. We'd like to get some of that business back. Nobody's really sure how fast that's going to happen though. It's going to come back. Absolutely. And I think it's going to come back slower than a lot of people have been expecting. Tell us a little bit about connected travel booking is best known for booking hotels. But now you've gone beyond that, booking flights, arranging airport transfers, arranging for sightseeing experiences. How are customers responding to this? Service. Well, we call this our connected trip and we're building it out because we know how frustrating it can be for a consumer when you're traveling, having to deal with lots of different vendors. And if something goes wrong, having to make multiple calls, we know that's not the best way to travel. We know tying it all together into one seamless, frictionless way. That would make life much easier. That's why we're building out this connected trip. But to be perfectly honest, we're still very early on it. Well, you're sort of acting like a travel agent. But how is your service different than dealing with a, a traditional travel agent and having a connected trip? I want to have all the personalization and all the great relationship that I had with that old style human travel agent. But I want technology to make it even better in terms of what the best prices are, we should be able to come up with what the best price are. So I want all the part of the beautiful part of that human being by one done through technology and that's what we're working towards. You're also now offering bookings for homes and apartments when people are traveling. But when people think about renting a home or apartment, they think airbnb. So what does it take to beat the powerful and successful business of Airbnb? You know, it, it, it's kind of funny because um what you just said is so true of everybody in America. Now, we are an extremely global company. A lot of people don't know that, but, you know, we had over 300 offices around the world. We operate almost every country in the world in terms of where we can put somebody. If somebody in Europe is looking for a home or an apartment or a villa, they'll say booking dot com in the US. You're right. They'll probably say airbnb or well, more and more people are beginning to think of booking dot com as we continue to build up our inventory in the U. Si Am very confident that given the strength we have in that sector, this is what we call alternative accommodations, given the strength we have that in other parts of the world. There is no reason we shouldn't have as competitive and offering in the US as we do everywhere else. And I am very, very uh conscious of how important it is to have. Every single accommodation is available to a consumer, Glenn. You talk a lot about the importance of travel's role in climate change. You've been a strong advocate of protecting the environment and you also say that travel is a force of good because it connects people and cultures. But how do you reconcile the fact that airlines are big polluters and that undermines the impact of travel as a force for good. What do you say to that? And we understand that the industry does have a problem in terms of emissions and not being as sustainable as it should be. And we know that the suppliers, the airlines hotels are working that way, we're doing our part too. So in examples of flights on kayak, for example, there's actually a meter, you could do a way to find out how much in terms of emissions does the flight you're thinking of taking actually emit and that way you can choose flights that have less emissions. That's a great way for consumers to help out. But another way is our, what we call our travel sustainability badge with our accommodation partners. Over 400,000 partners are part of this and what they're doing is they do things in their business to make it more sustainable. And we then on our site will show that these properties are doing their part to be more sustainable for consumers who want to choose to go sustainably, they'll see those hotels or homes or whichever type of accommodation and they'll choose those and that will help incentivize other properties to be more sustainable. Well, you've written many op ed articles urging the travel industry to decarbonise. I'm just wondering to what extent are you getting through to business leaders, travel companies, even travelers. Are they doing enough? Well, absolutely. Everybody I think in the industry recognizes that there is a problem. Some people are doing more efforts than others. That's true. But when I talk to the CEO S of the major airlines, they are trying to do it when I talk to the CEO S of the major hotel chains, they're doing their part too. What's interesting is the consumer, consumers talk about how much they want to travel sustainably. I'm not seeing them using their wallets yet to prove that that is really true.

Naba Banerjee, Director of Trust Product, Airbnb
Abhijit Bose, Managing Vice President and Head, Center for Machine Learning, Capital One
Nicole Eagan, Chief Strategy and A.I. Officer, Darktrace 
Moderator: Verne Kopytoff, FORTUNE

Brainstorm A.I. 2022 - In A.I. We Trust Shaping Confidence And Safety

Conferences

Naba Banerjee, Airbnb
Abhijit Bose, Capital One
Nicole Eagan, Darktrace 
Moderator: Verne Kopytoff, FORTUNE

In A.I. We Trust? Shaping Confidence And Safety

Brainstorm A.I. 2022 - In A.I. We Trust? Shaping Confidence And Safety

Brian Chesky told Fortune "If anything, we're not stepping on the brakes, we're really probably stepping on the gas."

Amid tech layoffs, Airbnb CEO says "business is going really well"

Tech

In 2020, we lost 80% of business. We didn't know when it was coming back, we knew eventually come back, but we didn't think we'd be back for a while. I'm 41 I started this company, I was 26 there's something that happens when you start a company like Airbnb and suddenly you're like in your twenties you have this idea and then one day like 100 million people use your app. That's that's a crazy experience. Most people have never experienced that and I was lucky enough to have that experience. But one of the things that happens to a lot of founders like me is people can sometimes kind of fall out of love with the core business. They have this huge success and they want to go on to the next thing And I had that experience before the pandemic. We were focusing on like flights and all these different businesses and then the pandemic happens and we had to get back to the roots, we lost 80% of our business and we had to like save the business, save the company at that moment. You know, I think we all felt back in love with the core business. I'm just curious sort of your view and thought on like how both like some of the layoffs in tech have gone, as a. whether you guys see more coming for Airbnb where you guys are in that space after the 2020 layoffs in 2020 we left 25% of our workforce, which is a lot. First thing I did is I wrote this letter that was very transparent. We went step by step about what happened, how we got here. We gave people a large amount of severance, a large amount of health care and a pandemic. But we did some really unique things like we created alumni directory. So if anyone got laid off they could opt in for us publishing the information and directory and other recruiters could reach out to them. And I believe we had like hundreds of thousands, not millions of people visit their profiles and a large amount of people got other offers. So I was proud of how we handled it. We only have 6000 employees. We did more than $3 billion of free cash flow last year. So that basically means we do nearly around half a million dollars per employee in free cash flow, not revenue free cash flow. We do more than a million dollars per revenue per employee. So we're really lean company and we only were planning on hiring 7% more staff this year before the economy slowed down. Not because we didn't want to growth because sometimes the fastest way to grow is to have really small teams that can move really quickly and nimbly. So yeah, we don't have to make any more changes. The business is going really well and if anything, we're not stepping on the brakes were really probably stepping on the gas. How do you ensure that the hosts are living up to a particular quality? I think the name of the game is reasonableness and transparency. That's, we're doing a checkout test more broadly. Airbnb is as good as our hosts were, as good as our homes and I've been obsessed over making sure homes are good value. We have great customer service, people feel safe. It's really good quality control, not focusing yet on the next big Moonshot, making sure that the core service works as you expect in it, exceed your expectations. And that's really one of the main things that I'm focused on right now. We have lots of exciting innovations coming later next year. We have lots of huge new ideas coming in 2024. But the first priority of the company is to make sure that what we're known for people love because if they don't love it, they don't want anything new from us.

As more and more business processes rely on AI, corporations have a role in ensuring complex systems and products are harmless. 
 
The AI and machine-learning systems that underwrite so much of businesses’ digital transformations today are designed to serve millions of customers, yet they are defined by a relatively small homogenous group. Even with the best of intentions, these individuals cannot readily pinpoint their own biases. While the biggest tech companies in the world are putting together fast-growing teams to tackle the ethical problems that arise from the widespread collection, analysis, and use of massive troves of data, there is growing awareness - and irrefutable evidence - that AI is learning moral choices and prejudices. Where do the greatest dangers lie, how should leaders think about them, can they be regulated away, and if so, by whom? 

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. We will also discuss if AI should be governed and what an artificial intelligence Bill of Rights might look like. 

Brainstorm A.I - Values and Value

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. 

Values and Value

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. We will also discuss if AI should be governed and what an artificial intelligence Bill of Rights might look like. 

Airbnb

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Future 50