The popular travel destination site Airbnb announced Thursday that it would allow employees to work remotely and is rolling out a plan to allow its workers to “live and work anywhere.”
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky sent an email to workers around the world explaining the shift.
“We started this process by asking a simple question—where is the world going?” he wrote. “The answer is obvious—the world is becoming more flexible about where people can work. We see this in our own business.”
The CEO acknowledged, however, that there is a difficulty to create impactful connection when there is limited in-person interaction, saying, “Zoom is great for maintaining relationships, but it’s not the best way to deepen them.”
“The right solution should combine the best of the digital world and the best of the physical world,” he said. “It should have the efficiency of Zoom, while providing the meaningful human connection that only happens when people come together. We have a solution that we think combines the best of both worlds.”
He also said he trusts his team to be able to do the work remotely.
The new remote work plan has five elements:
1. You can work from home or the office
2. You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change
3. You have the flexibility to travel and work around the world
4. We’ll meet up regularly for team gatherings, off-sites, and social events
5. We’ll continue to work in a highly coordinated way
The company also noted how it is “actively partnering with local governments” to create an easier process for more individuals to travel and work around the globe. Chesky pointed out how more than 20 countries currently offer remote work visas and more efforts are underway.
He also said a “small number of roles will be required to be in the office or a specific location” to carry out their main job requirements, and those workers had already been told of this expectation.
The move could make sense for a company that was negatively impacted by the pandemic but has recovered due to the lingering effects it brought to work culture.
Chesky pointed to the fact that people adjusted their use of short-term rentals post-pandemic in his email to employees, stating, “We wouldn’t have recovered so quickly from the pandemic had it not been for millions of people working from Airbnbs,” adding how during the second half of 2021, 20% of Airbnb nights booked were for periods of more than a month, while half were for durations of more than a week.
A 2021 study of 20 main Airbnb markets by LendingTree showed the impact the pandemic had on the company. Short-term rental listings went down in 19 of the 20 areas studied between May 2020 and March 2021, The New York Times reported. Broward County, Florida, saw an increase in listings.
The study noted that many short-term listings got out of the market, but the ones that remained made people stay longer in the properties.
“In 15 of the 20 markets analyzed, the average minimum nights required to book a short-term rental increased,” it added. Some areas were impacted by legislation that made people book short-term rentals for a longer period of time, but “[n]ot all cities that saw an uptick in the minimum required length of stay enacted new legislation.” Some places saw their minimum required stay duration go down over the time period, but they were in areas that “tended to cater to short-term stays already with average minimum lengths of roughly less than a week,” per the report.