coping with a bad trip at airbnb
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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
The news would get far grim-
mer before Halloween was over.
Just before 11:00 p.m. in Orinda,
Calif., an affluent Bay Area suburb,
inside a home booked through
Airbnb, gunfire erupted during a
party, leaving five dead and four
others injured. The gathering had
been promoted on social media as
a “mansion party”; more than 100
people were present when police
arrived. The home’s owners did not
hide their frustration. “Airbnb does
not release the customer informa-
tion before they really book, so we
have no way to know [their inten-
tions],” Michael Wang told the San
Francisco Chronicle. His listing in-
cluded a guest limit and an explicit
prohibition against parties, Wang
continued, “but people lie.”
Concerns about fraud and safety
have shadowed Airbnb throughout
its rise. But the shooting and the
Vice article, both widely picked
up by other news outlets, dragged
those issues into the foreground at
a particularly inopportune time:
Just six weeks earlier, Airbnb had
announced its intention to go pub-
lic in 2020.
With trust plummeting among
investors and customers, Airbnb’s
leaders scrambled. Over the ensu-
ing week, while in New York City
for a conference, Chesky canceled
meetings and cleared his sched-
ule. He spent hours on the phone
with Airbnb executives and boardInside the company’s San Fran-
cisco headquarters on the morn-
ing of Oct. 31, employees wore
costumes and smiles. Cofounder
and CEO Brian Chesky was grin-
ning in chef ’s whites, handing
out “Chesky’s Chips” cookies to
staffers. One of tech’s best-known
CEOs was role-playing as a pastry
chef in a nod to an upcoming
product launch—a new category
of “Experiences,” centered around
cooking, that travelers could book
through Airbnb.
But even as they snacked,
employees were hearing about
an exposé published earlier that
morning, one that was inch-
ing closer to virality with each
furious retweet. The website Vice
had uncovered an Airbnb scam
that spanned at least eight cities
and nearly 100 listings. A shady
management company was relying
on fake identities to con guests,
booking them in attractive-but-
phony listings and then redi-
recting them to flophouses. The
article illustrated how easy it was
to exploit Airbnb’s lax oversight
and how little Airbnb did to help
victims, logistically or financially.
The reporter, Allie Conti, had
been ensnared in the scam; she
would later tweet that the FBI had
contacted her about her article but
that she “still [hadn’t] been able
to have a meaningful conversation
with a human being at Airbnb.”members, along with some outsid-
ers. “I was calling early customers,
people I had known, people who
had criticized us,” Chesky tells me.
The agenda for each call: What
Airbnb would have to do to restore
confidence. On Nov. 6, Chesky
announced the most sweeping
changes to Airbnb’s rules since its
founding in 2008. Among them:
“100% verification” of the providers
of Airbnb homes and Experiences,
a 24/7 hotline for neighbors with
complaints, and a clearer policy for
rebooking and refunds for guests.
Many of those moves had been
in the works, Chesky now says, but
he acknowledges that some had
been “many, many years away,”
until the Halloween crisis forced
the company’s hand. He tries to
give that timeline a positive spin:
“It allowed us to operate with more
urgency than I think I could have
naturally asked the company to do.”
The work has just begun—and
the company is far from nailing
down how it will do it. Consider-
ing there are more than 7 million
Airbnb home listings, in roughly
100,000 cities and towns across
almost every country on earth,
this is a massive undertaking. And
the fact that Airbnb has built a
global brand, a $35 billion private-
market valuation, and a business
that analysts estimate will generate
between $4 billion and $5 billion
in revenue in 2019, all without
having implemented most of those
security steps, goes to the heart of
the challenges it faces.
In the subject line of an email
to employees days after Hallow-
een, Chesky said that Airbnb is “in
the business of trust.” The slogan
cuts two ways. The company has
built its rapid growth on a system
that essentially requires hosts and
guests to trust each other. Case in
point: Under many circumstances,
a would-be host or guest can list or
rent a property on Airbnb without PREVIOUS PHOTO: COURTESY OF AIRBNB