Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-term and long-term homestays, experiences and services. It acts as a broker between hosts and guests and charges a commission on each booking.
| Airbnb, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: ABNB |
| Industry | Online marketplace, hospitality |
| Founded | 2008, San Francisco, California |
| Founder | Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Brian Chesky (co-founder and CEO) |
| Services | Short-term accommodation booking, Airbnb Experiences, Airbnb Services |
| Website | airbnb.com |
Founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, Airbnb grew from an air mattress in a San Francisco living room into one of the largest accommodation platforms in the world, with two million people staying through the service each night by October 2019. Its name is an abbreviation of the original AirBed and Breakfast.
The company owns no property. Its scale relative to its asset base made it a defining example of the platform business model, and its effect on housing markets has made it one of the most heavily regulated technology companies in the world.
History
Founding
In October 2007 in San Francisco, the roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, seeking help with their rent, put an air mattress in their living room and offered it as a bed and breakfast during a conference held by the Industrial Designers Society of America, when travellers were struggling to find lodging in the city. The idea proved successful enough that the pair recognised a possible business.
In February 2008 Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate, joined as chief technology officer and third co-founder. They built a website offering short-term accommodation and breakfast to people unable to book a hotel in a saturated market, and launched airbedandbreakfast.com on 11 August 2008.
The founders raised 30,000 dollars by selling breakfast cereal named after the two candidates in the 2008 United States presidential election, Barack Obama and John McCain, mostly at the Democratic National Convention. The episode brought them to the attention of the programmer Paul Graham, who invited them to the January 2009 winter session of his startup incubator Y Combinator, which provided training and 20,000 dollars for a six per cent interest.
With the site already built, they used the investment to fly to New York to meet users and promote the service, returning to San Francisco with a profitable business model to present to investors. By March 2009 the site had 10,000 users and 2,500 listings, and the name was shortened to Airbnb.com to remove the association with air mattresses.
Growth
Airbnb won the app award at the South by Southwest conference in March 2011. In July 2014 it introduced a redesigned site, mobile application and logo, and announced a partnership with the business expense service Concur.
In April 2015, following the easing of restrictions on American businesses operating in Cuba, Airbnb expanded there, among the first United States companies to do so. In November 2016 it launched Experiences, allowing users to book activities as well as accommodation. In January 2017 it led a 13 million dollar investment in the restaurant booking application Resy alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, Ben Leventhal and Mike Montero, and in May 2017 launched Airbnbmag, co-published with Hearst Communications.
In February 2018 the company announced Airbnb Plus, a set of homes vetted for quality, comfort and design, and Beyond by Airbnb for luxury rentals. In April 2019 it produced and financed the documentary Gay Chorus Deep South through its Rausch Street Films division, selling the rights to MTV.
Pandemic and public listing
During the COVID-19 pandemic bookings fell by as much as 96 per cent in some cities, while rising in many rural areas as travellers sought isolated accommodation. The company pledged 250 million dollars to compensate hosts for guest cancellations and laid off approximately 1,900 employees, about 25 per cent of its workforce across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
On 10 December 2020 Airbnb became a public company through an initial public offering on the Nasdaq, raising 3.5 billion dollars. Shares worth 238 million dollars were offered to hosts at 68 dollars each.
Recent developments
In March 2022 Airbnb suspended business in Russia and Belarus following international sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In May 2022 it ceased operations in China, citing complicated and costly regulations requiring it to transmit detailed guest information to the Chinese government, information capable of being used to track individuals, together with a decline in business during lockdowns. China had represented less than one per cent of revenue.
After temporarily banning parties in rented homes in August 2020 during the pandemic, Airbnb made the prohibition permanent in June 2022, a position supported by hosts and by neighbours who had complained of nuisance, and introduced enforcement technology in August 2022.
In May 2025 the company expanded beyond accommodation with Airbnb Services and a redesigned Experiences platform, allowing users to book chefs, massages, personal training, hair and makeup services and photography. In June 2025 it became a sponsor of the FIFA Club World Cup under a three-year partnership to provide official fan accommodation at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, and the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup in Brazil.
Offices
Airbnb opened its first international office in London in October 2011, followed in early 2012 by Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Moscow and São Paulo, in addition to existing offices in San Francisco, London, Hamburg and Berlin. It opened in Sydney in November 2012 and Singapore in December 2012, and announced its European headquarters in Dublin in September 2013. In April 2022 it adopted a policy of unlimited remote working for almost all employees.
Funding history
In April 2009 the company received 600,000 dollars in seed funding from Sequoia Capital, with the Youniversity Ventures partners Jawed Karim, Keith Rabois and Kevin Hartz participating, at one cent a share. Greylock Partners and Sequoia invested 7.2 million dollars in a Series A in November 2010 at 21 cents a share on a split-adjusted basis.
In July 2011 Andreessen Horowitz, Digital Sky Technologies, General Catalyst and the A Grade Investments partners Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary invested 112 million dollars at 3.21 dollars a share. In April 2014 TPG Capital invested 450 million dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation, with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price and Sherpa Capital, at 20.36 dollars a share.
In June 2015 General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital, Tiger Management, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, GGV Capital, China Broadband Capital and Horizons Ventures invested 1.5 billion dollars at 46.55 dollars a share. In September 2016 Google Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures invested 555.5 million dollars at a 30 billion dollar valuation, and in March 2017 a further one billion dollars brought total funding above three billion dollars at a 31 billion dollar valuation.
In April 2020, at the depth of the pandemic, Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners acquired one billion dollars of shares at an 18 billion dollar valuation together with one billion dollars of debt at interest rates between 9 and 11.5 per cent, terms that reflected the severity of the company's position at that moment.
Regulation
Short-term rental platforms have been subject to extensive regulation. Proponents of restriction argue that short-term letting reduces the supply of affordable housing and raises long-term rents, because short-term rentals can be more lucrative for landlords and attract investors who bid up house prices. Supporters of the platforms argue that the effect on housing costs is minimal and that the remedy for unaffordable housing is to increase supply. Lisbon is cited on both sides: a moratorium on short-term rentals there did not reduce housing costs and increased hotel prices.
In rare cases landlords have been accused of illegally evicting tenants in order to convert properties to short-term rentals.
The hotel industry has lobbied for additional regulation of a competing sector, and the platforms lobby in turn. Beyond government restrictions, many homeowner associations limit short-term rentals, and neighbourhood groups have raised concerns about congestion, noise and safety.
Major cities including New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris have imposed registration requirements, night limits or near-prohibitions. New York City's Local Law 18, enforced from September 2023, requires hosts to register and to be present during stays, which removed the large majority of the city's short-term listings.
Controversies
Racial discrimination
In July 2016 the former attorney general Eric Holder was engaged to help design an anti-discrimination policy after reports that hosts were refusing bookings from guests whose names suggested that they were black. Academic research had documented measurable differences in acceptance rates by perceived race. As part of the resulting reforms, photographs of prospective guests are withheld from hosts until a booking request has been accepted.
Housing supply and local opposition
The most substantial and enduring criticism concerns the platform's effect on residential housing. In cities with constrained supply and high tourist demand, critics argue that whole-home listings operated commercially remove long-term rental stock, raise rents and hollow out residential neighbourhoods. Airbnb has responded by supporting registration systems, imposing night caps in some markets and removing listings from operators judged to be running unlicensed hotels, while disputing the scale of the effect attributed to it.
Safety and screening
The platform has faced criticism over guest and host safety, including incidents of hidden cameras in listed properties, assaults, and deaths at properties including a mass shooting at an Airbnb rental in Orinda, California in 2019 that prompted the permanent party ban. Reporting has also examined the company's practice of settling serious incidents confidentially through a dedicated safety team.
Terms of service
In 2014 the linguist Mark Liberman criticised the length of the legal agreements Airbnb members must accept, calculating that the terms of service, privacy policy and other documents amounted to 55,081 words, comparable in length to a short novel though considerably less readable.
Content moderation and political controversies
In August 2017 Airbnb cancelled bookings and closed accounts belonging to attendees of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, citing terms requiring members to accept people regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.
In January 2021 the platform permitted attendees of the attack on the United States Capitol to book accommodation in the Washington area, at a time when most hotels near Capitol Hill were refusing far-right groups. The day after the attack, facing the possibility of further violence around the inauguration of Joe Biden, Airbnb banned all bookings in the region before the ceremony.
China and Xinjiang
Airbnb was accused of excessive willingness to provide information to Chinese authorities, which contributed to the 2019 resignation of an executive and former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after six months in post. The company was also criticised for carrying listings on land owned by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a Chinese state paramilitary organisation sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act over the persecution of Uyghurs. In 2019 critics reported that some hosts in China refused to rent to Uyghurs.
Beijing Olympics sponsorship
Airbnb was among the fifteen leading sponsors of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Human rights organisations asked the company in March 2021 to withdraw its sponsorship as part of diplomatic and activist boycotts over alleged human rights violations by the Chinese government, in particular the treatment of Uyghurs. The requests were not acted upon.
Co-founder's government role
In February 2025 the co-founder and board member Joe Gebbia joined the Department of Government Efficiency. Concern that the role undermined democratic institutions prompted calls to boycott the platform.
See also
References