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You know you’ve made it when you’re verb material. Google it. I’ll Uber there. Let me just Venmo you.
With over 2 billion guest arrivals since its inception, Airbnb, the travel company that upended the very idea of a hotel, has been approaching verb status for some time.
In the event that you need at least one former president to have used your product before you’ve really made it, the company checks that box, too. Barack Obama thinks he gave his first Airbnb host five stars.
But the verb thing. It's a rarefied and lucrative territory that just about any major company is (at least privately) angling towards. And maybe that’s why last week’s debut of Airbnb’s next chapter put verb ambitions front and center, proclaiming: “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” Or, as CEO Brian Chesky put it: “Basically, it’s the Airbnb of anything.”
The company unveiled a spate of new features that, indeed, majorly expand the company’s potential reach, branching out from homes and apartments to experiences and services.
Now, you can “Airbnb” in-home meals from professional chefs, appointments with personal trainers, or hair and makeup teams ahead of big events through the company’s newly revamped app. Everything’s been launched, but actually getting everything firing at all cylinders will take some time. Airbnb’s recent experience can be instructive for CFOs looking to guide a strategic pivot at their organization.
Building ‘the Airbnb of everything’: In any case, it’s all been a long time in the making, CFO Ellie Mertz told CFO Brew.
“If you think about our history, we have talked about what we call ‘expanding beyond the core’ for some time,” she explained, adding that the company started to do so before the pandemic, which swiftly recalibrated everything as travel screeched to a halt.
Now, the company is ready to focus on a new era of travel again.
“What we’ve done the last couple of years is continue to focus on that core business, make sure that we recovered well, and were in a stronger position exiting the pandemic versus how we entered it,” Mertz noted. The company spent the same period of time “retooling” its infrastructure and tech stack to make the innovations unveiled last week possible.
Mertz stresses that everything is still early days. But looking ahead, the goal is to “expand the brand awareness beyond just the accommodation. We want consumers to think about us for many aspects of their travel planning,” she explained. “We also want to build the brand around truly unique and compelling experiences, such that you don’t just think about Airbnb that two to three times a year that you’re traveling, but on a more regular basis, because you think, ‘Hey, what am I doing in my own town on Saturday night?’”
Big ambitions, sure, but while many of the direct brand awareness efforts will fall to other teams, as CFO, Mertz will be tasked with operating an increasingly multi-product company. She notes that over the last year Airbnb has already started making internal shifts to that effect.
“From my perspective, the role of portfolio allocation becomes even more important, thinking about how you are allocating resources across not just your core product, but next year’s product, and then those future incubation ideas [as well],” she said. Now, her team is increasingly “thinking about duration and scale [across the portfolio] in order to allow for a multi-year growth path, not just a ‘get to the next release’ or a singular focus on the core business,” she explained.
Traveling light? As Airbnb prepares for a new chapter, the travel industry at large grapples with what could be another era of weakened travel demand. Analysts anticipate a dip in travel demand in 2025, as travel-related companies deliver foreboding earnings reports and worries of a consumer spending pullback loom.
“Year to date, there has been a ton of headline volatility, most recently, obviously, focused on tariffs, but many things that have preceded it this year,” Mertz noted. “With travel, what we have seen historically—and I think year to date, we’ve seen the same—is that a lot of the macro headlines do temporarily impact booking behavior.”
Travel purchases like Airbnb bookings or hotel reservations are typically “very considered” purchases, she explained, due to their status as big ticket expenses. As such, in past periods of volatility, like October 7, 2023, travel plans don’t necessarily change, “but it did impact [consumers’] booking patterns.”
Similarly, “2025 has a lot of that macro volatility. That means that sometimes people are just booking later in the year than they would for the same trip,” she continued. “There is some consumer volatility, but I would say the desire and underlying health of travel remains strong.”
Regardless, Mertz is determined to continue driving transformation even in an era marked by uncertainty.
“We intentionally are not reactive to short-term movements. Certainly, we watch trends and try to manage the business as effectively as possible when there is volatility,” she said. “But we also, most importantly, try to keep an eye on the long-term goals and keep steady effort toward achieving those long-term goals, while obviously being mindful of…volatility.”