Prediction: Airbnb will be worth $1 Trillion ♥️
It's not about if, it's about when.
Welcome to the 41st edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
Prediction : Airbnb will be a Trillion dollar company.
Fact : Brian Chesky is making sure it does.
Here's How 👇🏻
Quick back story 🗓
Early 2020, covid-19 destroyed travel as a category. But, if you look at last 3 months, travel is 20% up than pre-covid levels. That's all the context you need to learn this lesson.
Fast forward 10th May'22 ⚡️
Airbnb made the huge announcement of the airbnb summer 2022 release. It's 'the' master stroke I spoke about in the headline.
Three new Airbnb features 🎯
Split Stays 🏡 🏚
Airbnb categories 🙌🏼
Air-cover for guests ♥️
Let's understand one-by-one 👇🏻
Split Stays 🏡 🏚
A feature that splits your trip between two homes. For example, when browsing the Jim Corbett National Park, Split Stays might suggest a pair of homes offering luxury stays as well as night watch camping stays inside the jungle.
Lessons to be learned 🎯
When you have a supply & demand marketplace, you are limited by supply on the weekends - especially with travel as a category. This allows Airbnb to almost double their inventory without changing a thing in real world. They just have to guide users to pick specific stays on weekdays vs weekend rather than choosing their competition.
AirCover for guests ♥️
Essentially everything that can go wrong with a stay during travel. From check-in experience, to stay mismatch to building a 24 hour safety line to call. This has been a major problem to get luxury segments in who crave the hospitality / peace of mind with a Taj. It's crazy to offer this at this scale.
Lessons to be learned 🎯
What airbnb is doing is solving for trust. Trust will solve for ticket sizes, frequency of bookings and referral rate. And, the rest is going to history.
Airbnb categories 🙌🏼
You no more need to put a location where you want a airbnb stay, you can just select a category - stays with great Design (opens homes designed by world class architectures), OMG stays (opens homes with shapes that you have never seen) & 52 other categories.
Lessons to be learned 🎯
First, shaping the demand to categories with higher average ticket size per stay. Second, improved website visit to conversion rate. Site visitors take weeks to decide where they want to go. Converting a travel into money in hours than weeks. Shorter sales cycle. Third, solve for properties which are under the long list of catalogs. Discovery sorted without ruining user experience.
I'm blown 🤯
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