Airbnb to shed 1,900 staff
Airbnb is to lay off around a quarter of its global workforce as its revenues plunge to less than half of what it earned last year.
At the same time, the San Francisco-based short-stay booking platform will pause its development in transport and Airbnb Studios and scale back its investment in hotels and luxury.
CEO Brian Chesky said ‘travel in this new world will look different, and we need to evolve Airbnb accordingly’.
He told staff: "We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime."
He added: While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived. Because of this, we need to make more fundamental changes to Airbnb by reducing the size of our workforce around a more focused business strategy.
"Out of our 7,500 Airbnb employees, nearly 1,900 teammates will have to leave Airbnb, comprising around 25% of our company. Since we cannot afford to do everything that we used to, these cuts had to be mapped to a more focused business."
Airbnb has not revealed how many – if any – UK staff will be included among the1,900 redundancies. The company has said they will receive 14 weeks’ pay.
Last month, put in place a hiring freeze, suspend its marketing, cut executives’ salary and announced that it did not expect to pay bonuses for 2020.
The company is raising $2 billion in new debt funding at a valuation of $18 billion.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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