Time.news – Airbnb will need millions of new hosts, i.e. millions of new ‘bed and breakfast’ owners, or housing, to meet the boom in travel and tourism demand that will arise as the world emerges from the pandemic.
Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, the largest online platform in the world that allows you to book accommodation and rent a house while traveling abroad, told CNBC.
“To meet the demand for the next few years, we will need millions of additional hosts,” Chesky said. “I think we will probably have a big problem he told CNBC – why I expect we will have more requests than we currently have. I foresee the arrival of a formidable travel rebound. Something never seen before. ”Airbnb currently has 4 million hosts and at the end of 2020 there were 5.6 million.
The travel industry is in turmoil as more Americans are being vaccinated and restrictions are easing. Airbnb, which relies on private individuals willing to open their homes to guests, will have to find new hosts, that is, it will have to recover an availability that had failed with the pandemic.
This is, according to CNBC, a problem similar to that faced by other companies in the gig economy such as Uber, which recently widened the purse strings, pledging to offer 250 million dollars to bring more drivers back to its platform.
“With the increase in vaccination rates in the United States, we are seeing that consumer demand for mobility is recovering faster than drivers’ willingness to provide the service,” Uber explained in a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. .
Chesky also said that probably Airbnb won’t offer “many incentives” to get new hosts to offer their homes, as he believes that there is already a huge demand for services. “I think all we need to do is keep telling our Airbnb story and the benefits of hosting. And we’re seeing a lot of interest,” Chesky said.
In this context, the CEO added, the company has launched a series of advertisements using photographs of Airbnb guests who stay in homes around the world and are grateful to their hosts, to try to create a sense of nostalgia towards this type of stays.
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