We’re halfway through 2020, and Airbnb co-founder and chief executive Brian Chesky has admitted frankly that he feels global travel will “never, ever” return to what it was in the days before Covid-19 – and yet prospects are not all bad!
Chesky’s view of the future, delivered at the midway point during a devastating year for travel, appeared on news site Axios and on TV in the US. He foresees a future where people travel much more within their own countries, often driving rather than flying, and staying longer within regions relatively close to home.
Today, 1 July 2020, marks day 183 of the year 2020, with 183 days to go until this year ends. Although the pandemic will not necessarily end with this year, Chesky has had plenty of time to work trends out.
A few days before he spoke with Axios, Chesky told American news channel CNBC: “Travel as we knew it is over. It doesn’t mean travel is over, just the travel we knew is over, and it’s never coming back. It’s just not.”
Reaffirming this to Axios, he said: “I will go on the record to say that travel will never, ever go back to the way it was pre-COVID; it just won’t.”
Chesky says that in the US, people are driving to small places within about 300 kilometres of where they live. He says international travel remains a distant prospect.
People will “one day” get back on planes but they will still prefer smaller places as destinations, rather than big cities, he forecasts.
Chesky told Deirdre Bosa on CNBC that Airbnb would be OK because it was resilient, had dramatically cut its costs and slashed a billion dollars from marketing, as well as reducing its staff.
Speaking on trends, Chesky said: “People are saying they want to get out of the house, but they want to be safe; they don’t want to get on airplanes, they don’t want to travel on business, they don’t want to go to cities, they don’t want to cross borders.”
He also mentioned “something remarkable”.
“At the end of May and early June, we had the same volume of bookings in the United States as a year before – without any marketing!” Airbnb also had even more host properties on its books than before, he added.
As a final caution, Chesky also said: “One thing I’ve learned is not to try to get into the business of predicting the future. Anyone who has, has not done very well in the last few months.”
Highlights of Chesky’s Axios interview can be read here:
https://www.axios.com/airbnb-travel-coronavirus-3f7ac17c-89d7-4ba6-9b5b-8905e4aa888a.html
And a five-minute video interview of Chesky by Deirdre Bosa, broadcast on American news channel CNBC, can be viewed here. It’s worth watching, even though something disconcertingly spooky happens to Deirdre Bosa’s eyes momentarily at 1:46 on the clip!
Written by Peter Needham
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