Airbnb is not slowing down. In fact, it plans to grow.
The short-term rental giant said it will spend as much as $250 million on new businesses in 2025.
“This is the year, you'll see the beginning of a new Airbnb,” said co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky in a call with analysts.
He did not specify the new businesses and only discussed the strategy of what he believes travelers will need.
“When people book an Airbnb, there's a lot of experiences and services and other things that would make this stay more special, and it would even include things they wouldn't think to search for,” Chesky said. “Eventually we'll move it further and further away from our core."
"Airbnb is used by, I think, 1.6 billion devices a year, so it's got a pretty big volume of users, but we're not a very frequently used app," Chesky continued. "People typically use this once or twice a year, and I would love for the one day for people to use this once or twice a week. And so that's kind of one of the goals over the long term."
The plans likely include more personalization and artificial intelligence. The company also plans to expand to Korea and Japan.
Revenue was $2.5 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024 and $11.1 billion for the full year 2024. But it doesn’t expect to remain so profitable, at least in the short-term.
“For Q1 2025, we expect to deliver revenue of $2.23 billion to $2.27 billion, representing year-over-year growth of four percent to six percent, or seven percent to nine percent excluding the impact of FX [foreign exchange],” Airbnb said.
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