Airbnb Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky wants to show people that hosting through the site isn’t “risky” – and lists a room in his own San Francisco home to make that point.
“It’s a really nice room,” Chesky said Wednesday on “CBS Mornings.” “There’s a bit of Airbnb history. I’ll bake you some fresh cookies. You can come to the gym with me, we’ll go for a walk in the park. We’ll do a lot of fun things.”
Chesky said he “wanted to show people if I, the founder of Airbnb, could do it, that you could do it too.”
“We verify the identity of everyone who books,” he said. “We have booking filtering technology, which uses fairly advanced machine learning to ensure that we can take signals from suspicious bookings to block what we suspect are parties. We have 24/7 support So, I feel pretty good about that.”
Airbnb has over 4 million hosts worldwide. To help those who are still new to the process, the site enlists the advice of its most experienced web hosts.
Starting this week, Airbnb is launching a new service called Airbnb Setup which will connect potential new hosts with “Superhosts”. Comparing it to Apple’s Genius Bar, Chesky said new hosts are matched with Superhosts in their region.
“They can walk you through the process,” Chesky said.
Airbnb is also rolling out a new feature called Aircover, which verifies the identity of all Airbnb users starting this spring. Chesky said Airbnb also offers $3 million in damage protection.
The home-sharing business has proven resilient. It was founded during the Great Recession in 2008. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, it lost 80% of its business in eight weeks, leading to layoffs and cutbacks.
Since then, Chesky said Airbnb has rebounded and he doesn’t see the business slowing down anytime soon.
“We’ve stayed lean, disciplined. And now we’re very profitable. So we’re not hitting the brakes. We’re actually hitting the accelerator,” he said.
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