Airbnb’s CEO says he wants to make the app the Amazon of travel

• Airbnb’s CEO wants the company to become the Amazon of travel.
• Brian Chesky said the plan is for Airbnb to “be one place you go for all of your traveling and living needs.”
• The company is investing $200 to $250 million to launch the new offerings on the app in May.

Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, says he wants the company to become a travel Amazon — a one-stop shop for everything related to traveling and living.

In a Thursday earnings call, Airbnb’s chiefs said the company plans to invest $200 million to $250 million in launching new businesses and offerings on the Airbnb app. The latest offerings will be rolled out in May, Chesky said.

Chesky said the platform would “expand beyond short-term rentals into becoming an extensible platform with a range of new offerings.”

“We want the Airbnb app, kind of similar to Amazon, to be one place you go for all of your traveling and living needs,” he said. “A place to stay is just really, frankly, a very small part of the overall equation.”

He likened Airbnb’s new venture to Amazon, saying that the e-commerce giant started with books, expanded to the “nearest adjacency,” which was DVDs and CDs, and “pretty soon they were doing things pretty far adjacent from media and books.”

Chesky added that one of the company’s goals is to get people to use the Airbnb app more often.

“We’re not a very frequently used app. People typically use this once or twice a year, and I would love for it to be one day for people to use this once or twice a week,” he said.

The company reported revenues of $2.48 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024, up 12% from the same period in 2023. Its annual 2024 revenue was $11.10 billion, up 12% from 2023.

Airbnb’s stock price rose more than 14% in after-hours trading on Thursday.

Representatives for Airbnb did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside regular business hours.