Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup, all gone. The magazine. I don’t hate the magazine. The magazine makes sense to me. You’re a travel company. Airlines have magazines. That makes sense to me. You’re promoting travel. That’s marketing. The business goes to zero—basically less than zero. But by Q3, things do start to recover. We’ve both traveled this summer for long-term stays. A lot. I actually pulled together a great stat. There’s been basically two eras of the pandemic for Airbnb. There is the initial era, where everything froze up and they had to do this super onerous deal. But then there’s the second one, which is as we knew more about COVID-19 and understood how it spreads—it’s through the air rather than on surfaces, and all these things—people started making their own informed decisions around can I live my life safely? It turns out, Airbnb was actually a great option to live your life safely more so than hotels. I remember a moment where Airbnb’s bookings were down something like 50%, but hotels were down 90%. I don’t exactly remember which month this is, but I think that narrative is definitely one that played out during the pandemic. For me, personally, I have stayed in only one hotel since March. It was the only option, and it was in the middle of nowhere. I had to book the hotel, much to my chagrin, but I’ve stayed in six Airbnbs. That is illustrative of act two of the pandemic for this company. Totally. We’ve been less active than you since Jenny’s more tied to San Francisco than you guys are.…

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