Toby Howell

So far, that vision has run into some tough sledding.

Excited hosts plowed money into renovations and raised prices expecting a flood of foreign visitors.

But as the tournament grows closer, many cities still sit below 50% occupancy and are forced to rely on hope for some stragglers to come through.

But hope is not a strategy.

CEO Brian Chesky says Airbnb wants to become the everything app for traveling and living, using this summer as the launching pad.

One big shift is that for the first time, the app will have a dedicated hotel category, a major switch up for a company that used to be proudly anti-hotel.

It's also reaching its tentacles into other areas of the travel stack, from car rentals and grocery delivery to airport pickups.

Neil, as the core home rental business is facing oversupply issues in some markets and regulatory headwinds in others, Airbnb is trying to keep customers within their ecosystem in other ways.

Big summer ahead to see if they can pull that vision off.

The thing that scares Airbnb the most is that they turn into a commodity, because we've spoken about this before, if a AI-style agent can eventually handle booking, if I can go onto ChatGPT and say, find me a home in the Sonoma Valley for the summer,

that means I'm not going to Airbnb anymore.

I'm going to a chatbot.

So they are at risk of losing that direct customer relationship, which is, you know, the end all be all for an app like that.

So they are looking at some other apps, you know, a lot of apps out in China are everything apps, WeChat, Alipay.

This is where you can handle lots of different parts of your financial life and your travel life.

And so Airbnb and Uber is actually pursuing this.

They want to

Use the proprietary customer data that they have that they know Neil likes to travel to Sonoma in the summer to bolt on other features like, hey, if you want to go to Sonoma but you don't want to stay in a house, here's a hotel for you.

Here's a car for you to pick you up from the airport.

Do you want to order food when you get to your house?