Airbnb is growing a lot slower than it was just a few years ago, but CEO Brian Chesky is hopeful the company can turn it around.
The Airbnb cofounder and CEO discussed the company’s growth rate during an interview on Tuesday at the Skift Global Forum conference, where Chesky appeared virtually.
Chesky was asked to address how the company’s revenue growth has slowed over the past several years. Airbnb saw 40% revenue growth in 2022, 18% growth in 2023, and 12% growth in 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, its revenue grew 6% year-over-year. In the second quarter, it was up 13%.
“Listen, I’m not happy about where the growth rate is at the company,” Chesky said. “I think Airbnb should be growing significantly faster. It should at least be growing in the teens, and I aspire to run the kind of company that’d be growing at more than 20% one day.”
In order to do that, Chesky said the company needed to accelerate its core business, aka home rentals, and “layer on many businesses.”
Chesky said that previously Airbnb was a “hypergrowth” company, noting he had cofounded it from his apartment with his roommates. “We grew the company like a rocket ship, but what happened was we didn’t really build a lot of the foundation to build a sustainable company,” he said.
When the pandemic hit, he said Airbnb focused on cutting costs and becoming profitable. The company went public in 2020 and was profitable by 2022.
He said Airbnb realized it had built a vacation rental home company, but that it needed to “rebuild the entire company from the ground up” in order to have many more businesses, rather than just one.
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“That’s what we’ve been doing. The final stage is now we reinvent ourselves,” Chesky said.
He outlined the company’s big bets, including growing its home rental business domestically and abroad, expanding hotel offerings, and its experiences and services, both of which Chesky said he believes will be multi-billion dollar businesses one day.
Airbnb relaunched experiences and launched services in May. The idea is that travelers staying at Airbnb, or even locals at home, can book things like private chefs, personal trainers, photography, and massages on demand and directly to their door.
Chesky has been enthusiastic about the potential of Airbnb to be an “everything app,” where countless types of experiences and services can be booked. He’s said on several occasions that he got inspiration from Amazon, which transitioned from selling books to selling everything. He’s also said Airbnb is going to become an AI-first app.
Chesky said Tuesday that he firmly believes Airbnb will accelerate growth next year, adding, “We’re not putting out any guidance. I don’t want to overpromise what we’re going to do, but I don’t think that people should take our extrapolation of deceleration and extrapolate that forward.”
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