Airbnb Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky outlined what changes are coming to travel after the end of the pandemic, in a recent interview with Bloomberg:
- In the first month of the pandemic, the firm faced a loss of $1 billion due to canceled bookings, leading him to declare: “Travel as we knew it is over.”
- Among the things that’ll be missing, he forecasts are overtourism, business travel, and, to a lesser extent, loyalty programs.
- Chesky also expects the rise of new and more varied destinations to visit, including resilient cities.
- Company-provided data show that while travelers are booking almost twice as many remote stays as last year, home rentals in urban markets are still struggling. For Labor Day, high-density destinations are making up just 20% of the site’s bookings, down from 40% last year.
- Even though inter-regional travel has been greenlighted throughout the Schengen Area, cross-border trips still represent just 15% of Airbnb’s bookings.
- Travel destinations will be defined less by border restrictions than by the potential for domestic tourism.
- Tourism-reliant, fly-to destinations will need to diversify their economies in the short term to weather a protracted drought in visits, while overlooked spots near big cities will continue to experience success.
- People will migrate away from cities for the coming 3-5 years, and prices will go down. Then, a new generation will discover cities as more livable and more affordable, and it will probably lead to a renaissance.
- In the long term, Chesky expects trouble for one sector in particular: business travel.
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