What Happened to Airbnb? – Vox

What Happened to Airbnb?

Airbnb knows people are unhappy. Its CEO, Brian Chesky, has acknowledged the “tens of thousands” of complaints across social media about the platform’s growing costliness. It knows that hosts’ expenses — like home insurance, property taxes, and the cost of labor for cleaning and maintenance — have climbed amid a period of high inflation. The internet is strewn with complaints of pictures that don’t match the actual property, extreme demands and rules from hosts, hidden cameras, reservations getting unceremoniously canceled, and more. And several cities are aiming to regulate short-term rentals, even setting down a de facto ban on them, as New York, one of the biggest Airbnb markets in the US, did in September.

Yet Airbnb, which launched in 2008, is also making more money than ever. Bookings reached an all-time high earlier this year, and the company raked in almost $2 billion in profits in 2022, marking its first full profitable year. Airbnb’s stock price is also up dramatically from where it was at the end of last year.

All this success is part of the company’s problem. What started as a scrappy idea offering an affordable alternative to hotels has now made Airbnb a target for lawmakers and a magnet for critics. Airbnb may not be collapsing, as some doomsayers are predicting, but it is facing a reckoning — an existential questioning of what it offers and where it will go from here.

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