Mr Blecharczyk, did you go on holiday abroad this year?

Timo Kotowski

Editor in business.

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I went on my first trip abroad in November.

I was in Paris, but not on vacation, but for a business meeting.

Unfortunately the stay was very short.

I hope to be able to come back to Europe soon and this time to be able to stay longer.

Is the pandemic changing travel?

We see two developments.

First, closer destinations are becoming more popular.

Many people have refrained from traveling abroad for 20 months.

At home, however, they felt trapped and wanted to get out - often into the countryside.

There are millions of rural accommodations on Airbnb.

In the first quarter, trips abroad made up only 20 percent of bookings.

But whenever a country opens, demand increases.

In the summer, the foreign share of bookings reached 33 percent.

The second trend started earlier and will survive the pandemic: stays are getting longer.

Because the differences between living, working and traveling are blurring.

You have to explain that.

Because of the pandemic, many employees are not allowed into the office.

You are holding video conferences.

You can do this not only from your own home, but from any home.

We conducted a survey: 66 percent of Germans expect more flexibility in the future.

In addition, more people are booking longer stays and also working at the travel destination.

In the evenings and on weekends they take time for private experiences.

At the end of September, 20 percent of the nights booked on our platform were stays of one month or longer.

A new travel category has emerged.

How is Airbnb getting through the crisis?

The first three months of the pandemic almost came to a standstill.

But vacationers wanted to set off again in summer 2020, albeit to other destinations.

In the summer of 2019, the ten most popular cities on Airbnb accounted for 11 percent of all overnight stays booked.

Most recently it was less than 7 percent.

The Costa Blanca in Spain was booked more than Madrid, the Portuguese Algarve more than Lisbon.

In addition, there were long-term stays that could become even more important in the future.

In the last few months a travel revolution has taken place with many new trends, which we have taken as an opportunity to adapt our product accordingly.

That made 2021 a very successful year for us.

Airbnb also went public at the end of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic.

Was that the right time?

Definitely.

We had to make drastic decisions quickly at the beginning of the pandemic.

That would have been more difficult if we had already had a diverse group of investors.

With the shareholders at the time, who had known us for a long time, we were able to move forward quickly.

What choices were those?

Before Corona, we were in the process of expanding into several new fields: flights, hotels and more.

They were all good ideas.

In the crisis, however, we no longer had the resources to do all of this at the same time.

We made losses, had to cut costs and lay off employees.

Above all, we decided to focus again - on our core business with accommodation.

Announcing something before the pandemic and changing the story in the crisis would have unsettled new investors.

It was helpful to correct the price before going public.

Now is it “back to the roots”?

Definitive.

We had started chasing chances.

But there are well-established providers in the online market for hotels and flights.

It is more difficult there to create real innovations.

We prefer to use the strengths of our developers where we are already leaders, with home sharing.

One example is our new flexible search on Airbnb.

We have seen that users experiment a lot with different travel dates.

Now you no longer have to enter fixed dates for arrival and departure, users can generally search for a week or month in summer and display the most interesting or affordable destinations.