Brian Chesky, the chief executive officer (CEO) of vacation rental company Airbnb, has said that he will start living full-time in properties listed by his company. Chesky added that it will help Airbnb improve the experience for people who are free to live and work from anywhere as offices are shut because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Starting today, I’ll be living on Airbnb,” Chesky said in the first of a series of tweets on January 18. "I’ll be staying in a different town or city every couple weeks. This week I'm in Atlanta. I'll be coming back to San Francisco often, but for now my home will be an Airbnb somewhere.”
Chesky added that since the invention of commercial flying, it is the coronavirus pandemic that has led to the biggest change in how people travel.
“For the first time, millions of people can now live anywhere,” the Airbnb CEO added. “Remote work has untethered many people (obviously not everyone, but a large chunk) from the need to be in an office every day.”
Chesky said that this trend reflected in Airbnb bookings. “From July to September, 1 in 5 nights booked on Airbnb were for stays of a month or longer, and nearly half of nights booked were for stays of a week or longer,” he added.
The Airbnb boss added that in 2021, one lakh guests booked stays for three months or longer with his company.
With the Omicron variant stalling the plans of organisations to return to offices, Chesky said he expected the biggest travel trend in 2022 would be people spreading out to thousands of cities and staying there for months or whole seasons.
Chesky said it was likely that many people would become “digital nomads” by relinquishing their leases for fixed rented accommodations.
The Airbnb CEO described this trend as the “decentralisation of living”, something that is changing the identity of travel. He added countries would compete amongst themselves to attract remote workers.
“So that’s why I’m living on Airbnb,” Chesky added. “It’ll be fun, but more importantly it will help us improve the experience for people who can now live anywhere.”
Airbnb allows owners to host their properties on its platform. The company estimates that it has 4 million hosts across the world.
In March 2021, the company had announced that in India, women hosts collectively earned over Rs 16 million by renting out their properties in 2020.
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