Airbnb aims to be flexible friend

One short year ago, Airbnb was staring at oblivion: demand had fallen off a cliff, and no one knew what long-term impact the pandemic would have on travel.

Given those circumstances, you suspect Nate Blecharczyk, one of the site’s three co-founders, is relieved to be facing today’s problem: there may not be enough Airbnbs to go round as travellers gain confidence and get moving. 

The number of active hosts on the platform — around 4m — has been mostly flat for the past six months.

Today, the company announced new features to tackle that problem. First, it has added options for flexible searches, for people who, now less tethered by work, are relaxed about exactly when or exactly where they travel.

“They aren’t looking just for Memorial day weekend,” said Blecharczyk, speaking to #techFT. “They have a lot more latitude in terms of when they travel, to take advantage of the availability and price.”

Second, the company has streamlined the process for new hosts looking to sign up. New features include allowing hosts to use public records data to autofill their listings with relevant information and gauge appropriate pricing for the area. It is also introducing AI tools such as image recognition to automatically arrange pictures in ways most likely to appeal to potential guests.

You can read all 103 of the changes here, though some of the “upgrades” are something of a stretch. Number 57, for instance, is a “new listing welcome”: a picture of Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky, and his dog Sandy, will be displayed alongside a thank you for signing up.

Other upgrades are designed to set Airbnb up for what CEO Brian Chesky has described as “the biggest [travel] rebound in a century”, one it doesn’t want to let slip to its rivals. One aspect the company is particularly confident in is a new age of business travel.

“I think for the one-day business trip, the two-day business trip, that use case . . . I don’t expect that to come back,” said Blecharczyk. “I expect there to be more week-long trips, especially if people are working remotely and coming to HQ or whatnot.”

He added: “I think that segment is really interesting for Airbnb. If you’re going to be on a business trip for a week or more, you’d like to have your own space. Maybe you’re bringing your significant other. A home makes a ton of sense. So I think that’s pretty permanent.”

But that can only happen if there are enough hosts, and so these latest initiatives come as no surprise to analysts.

“I think it’s clear why [Airbnb] are focusing on host acquisition,” said Steven Jankowski from short-term rental analysts AllTheRooms. “Even before Covid-19 hit, their host growth was slowing, and it still looks pretty flat as the virus recedes and we reopen.”

Richard Clarke, a travel analyst at Bernstein, said that Airbnb also faced greater competition from both online travel agencies such as Expedia and Booking.com and regional players and hotel companies that had invested in self-catered lets during the coronavirus emergency.

He also noted that early in the pandemic, Airbnb had forced hosts to refund guests affected by travel bans, resulting in “an element of disquiet” among property owners. “People fear that they risk cancellation more than at other platforms because [Airbnb] does have very flexible terms,” Clarke said.

Since the start of the pandemic, many of Airbnb’s bookings have migrated to destinations outside dense urban areas, previously the bedrock of its business. For instance, the company said that so far in 2021, there had been more searches on Airbnb for places to stay in Cornwall than in London.

That shift, Airbnb has said, is the key driver behind higher prices. The average daily rate for an Airbnb stay in the first quarter of this year rose to $160, up 35 per cent on the same period in 2020, according to company filings.

The Internet of (Five) Things

1. Jack Ma to step down from academy
Alibaba founder Jack Ma will step down as president of the elite business academy he founded six years ago, people familiar with the matter told the FT, as Beijing cracks down on the billionaire’s influence across Chinese society. Hupan University, an executive training programme that is reputedly as hard to get into as Harvard University, will also restructure its educational programme and has changed its name. We’ve also been investigating ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming’s decision last week to quit as CEO.

2. EU miffed at Eutelsat’s OneWeb move
Eutelsat has jeopardised its involvement in a new EU space-based internet service by investing alongside the UK government in the satellite broadband company, OneWeb, the EU’s internal market commissioner has warned. Thierry Breton said he did not see how Eutelsat could have stakes in two competing projects.

3. Ethiopia opens up telecoms
Ethiopia has awarded its first telecoms licence for $850m to a consortium including the UK’s Vodafone, at the start of an opening up of the world’s largest remaining telecoms monopoly in a fast-growing country of 114m people.

4. The trend to straight-to-streaming
Early at-home movie rentals were a necessary experiment during the pandemic. But as the US reopens after a year of empty cinemas, executives across the entertainment industry are questioning whether the industry has changed forever. Smaller-budget films, which don’t need to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales to break even, may increasingly become an at-home experience, reports Anna Nicolaou.

5. Google under threat in Russia
Tsargrad TV, an online channel that styles itself as a Russian Orthodox answer to Fox News, was taken down by YouTube last July over what it claimed was a US sanctions breach. Max Seddon in Moscow reports a landmark court ruling to have it reinstated could now put Google’s entire Russian business in jeopardy, as the Kremlin steps up attempts to force western technology companies to comply with its laws.

Tech week ahead

Monday: There are closing arguments today in the Apple-Epic trial as it draws to a conclusion this week.

Tuesday: Video service Vimeo spins out of IAC and lists on Nasdaq at a valuation expected to be in the region of $10bn.

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Wednesday: Chipmaker Nvidia reports earnings after the closing bell and is expected to show a rise in first-quarter revenue after demand for its gaming cards soared during the pandemic. Chinese ecommerce group Pinduoduo also releases quarterly results, Sony holds its annual corporate strategy meeting and it’s Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting.

Thursday: Business software company VMware reports first-quarter results after the close, along with earnings from Dell, Salesforce.com and HP Inc. Panasonic CEO Yuki Kusumi will lay out his business strategy as the Japanese appliance maker transitions to new leadership this year and to a holding company structure in April 2022.

Friday: JD Logistics, a unit of Chinese ecommerce platform JD.com, makes its stock market debut after raising $3.16bn. The regulator Ofcom publishes its annual report on how news is consumed in the UK.

Tech tools — Fender Mustang Micro

Jonathan Margolis has been reviewing musical gadget accompaniments including this £90 portable, personal guitar amp from Fender. It is rechargeable and plugs neatly and directly into your guitar — no messy leads — and offers, just like a proper amp, a range of 12 different sounds and 12 effects into your wired headphones or earbuds. There are also buttons to “lighten” or “darken”, as Fender puts it, the overall sound and Bluetooth streaming so you can accompany recorded music.