A message from our new Global Head of Hosting

You may have heard us say that we’re going “back to our roots.” But what does that mean? At Airbnb, we started out with a close working relationship between our employees and hosts. Lots of our best ideas came directly from you, and many of you even visited our offices in the early days.

We’re returning to that type of collaborative partnership that can help make each other better. We’re also highlighting what drew guests to Airbnb in the first place—the magical human connection that only hosts like you can provide.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Catherine Powell, our new Global Head of Hosting who is committed to giving you more transparency as we rebuild our business around hosts. Catherine joined us six months ago from Disney to lead Airbnb Experiences. By creating her new position, we’re unifying the teams that focus on hosts of homes and experiences. Similarly, we’re dedicated to helping all hosts on Airbnb feel part of one community, whether you’re listing your house, a boutique hotel, or an online experience.

While listening to hosts around the world, here’s what we heard that you want—and how we’re delivering it:

As you may know, Airbnb recently made the difficult decision to reduce the size of its workforce. Travel recovered faster than expected, and we weren’t ready to provide the community support that was needed. We’re actively working to solve this to make sure everyone gets the answers they’re searching for.

We’ve already started sharing insights about how travel is evolving, and we know you’re interested in exploring more of this type of information. Our new Opportunities tab, located under the Performance section of your dashboard, is just one example of how we’re rolling out access to local travel and booking insights. Stay tuned as we share more insights to help give you more control over how you host.

We’re committed to sharing clear info about the programs and policies that affect you. We’ll also be helping you better understand what we’re trying to solve—and giving you ways to let us know what you think along the way. Here’s how we’re doing that:

• We’re rolling out a series of workshops with hosts around the world to partner on new ideas
• These workshops will take your voice into account to influence all of the important decisions that affect our community
• This is the start of more focused efforts to gather regular feedback from hosts
• We’re also creating webinars to offer more guidance on topics based on your suggestions

Hosts have so much creativity and ingenuity, and we’re unlocking that by leaving room for your ideas that can make all of us better. Please check back for more Host Updates with Catherine, which you can always find here in the Resource Center. As always, thank you for being part of our host community.