Airbnb Is Fundamentally Broken, Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in a widely publicised interview.
“We never fully built the foundation,” Mr Chesky says: “We had a house and it had four pillars when we needed to have 10. Our system was designed for a much smaller company which grew like crazy”.
Last month, New York City tightened rules on short-term rentals, impacting a market which accounts for 80pc of AirBnB profits. Elsewhere there have been protests by hosts over shrinking profits and competitor Vrbo has made big gains.
Chesky says he is going back to basics, providing consistency, affordable prices, service, and reliability.
While hotel prices went up 10% in the last year but that prices for one-bedroom Airbnbs declined 1pc.While many companies are using generative AI to power customer service chatbots, Airbnb is applying the technology for quality control purposes with more AI developments are on the way before the end of the year.
“Verifying the legitimacy of a listing is just the first step,” Chesky says.
