Airbnb had seemingly set itself up for hotel expansion—and on Tuesday night, 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 includes 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 that 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.”
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Airbnb, he said, is “building a first class” interface to showcase homes, inns and bed and breakfasts.
"It will 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.
And, 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."
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly reported that the new hotels interface would be available in the coming months.