Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on offering new services, World Cup demand and host success

Airbnb shares they closed higher yesterday and this after the company announced it's expanding its in-app services. The home share company now offering things like a grocery delivery, doing airport pickups, storage for luggage and car rentals and I spoke to Airbnb's co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky and asked him what could be next. What's the next one on your list? What's what's like the thing that Brian Chesky wants? You know equipment rental is really really useful if you ever go skiing it's a pain in the butt if you don't own your own equipment. Go surfing you don't want to bring a surfboard on the airplane so I think equipment rental will be really really useful. I have a golden retriever named Chloe and I think pet services and pet care would be really really great. I like to work out at a gym but it's really annoying sometimes you go to a gym you want to get a day pass and they don't even offer day passes or like a salesperson will try to like get you to sign a membership so we're gonna have gym passes for travelers. I knew you were gonna say gyms I knew that I thought that was where you were gonna say it was like your top number one. That's my number yeah. So how are you gonna make it happen? Well I mean we kind of do a combination of sometimes there's companies that do all the heavy lifting for you and you can just partner with them that's kind of we would do Instacart with groceries you don't do groceries yourselves and sometimes there's not a big company and now you gotta do the heavy lifting and gyms is a little bit in between there are some companies that do it but it's pretty fragmented. There have been some stories about some hosts who had gotten a certain price before ahead of this World Cup because obviously it's gonna be super popular and it sounds like a couple of them at least or maybe more than a couple started canceling on people so that they could then re-up the price. How do you police that? You know it's really really hard because we want to you know allow some independence of the people on our platform and yet we want to make sure that people aren't abusing the platform they're not gouging prices and not doing baits and switches. So we are really really trying to crack down on this. We saw this happen a number of times with natural disasters like the LA fires where we prevented people from gouging prices for people evacuating and needing a place to stay and so we we try to put enough control to keep the marketplace healthy but not so much control that hosts feel like they are working for us because they're not they're really entrepreneurs. We talk on the program all the time about the impact of GLP-1s and you may say what are we talking about GLP-1s except my question to you is actually about people travel oftentimes for food. People go to New Orleans to eat through the city because that's what you do and I wonder whether either you're seeing a change or you think that you are thinking about shifts and changes in terms of how people behave. Oh that is a fascinating question. These like second, third order consequences of these other revolutions. The number one activity people want to do when they travel is see a landmark. The number two activity people want to do when they travel is eat food. The part of the reason they want to eat food is because you have to eat food to live but I think the other reason is that food is probably the best manifestation of a culture in a city. I'm gonna take a leap now and say even on GLP-1 I think travel might be the one time a year you want to make an exception in France and maybe have that meal. So I don't expect us to have the same impact as say the snack industry which I know is being hit really really hard. In my feed I constantly see these entrepreneurs who are telling me that I should go you know lease ten properties and then turn around invest in them and then you know make them all Airbnbs. They want to sell me a program of how to do this. What do you think of that? Okay here's a stat where we found. The highest rated Airbnbs are people that manage one listing. The second highest Airbnbs are from people who manage two listings. The third highest rated listings are people handle manage three listings. You see a pattern. It doesn't mean that all people that are managing lots of properties provide a worse experience but one of the challenges are two challenges. If your motivation is to do it for money rather than hospitality first. I mean you know clearly you're doing it for money. Everyone does their job for money but you also want to be passionate about the job and otherwise you're not going to get really high ratings. The second thing is I think you know one of the things we're seeing is we don't want people to be overly industrialized. If it's too turnkey, if it's too industrialized, then experience may not feel authentic. It may not feel local. Mayor Mamdani in New York was recently asked about whether he would ever approve Airbnbs in the city. He said no. I'm curious if you've had a conversation with him or want to have a conversation with him. I'm surprised he said no. I would love to have a conversation and if I had a conversation with the mayor this is what I would tell him. For years, for 15-16 years, we were told that there's affordability housing crisis in New York, that a lot of Airbnbs are taking off the market and if we regulated or banned Airbnb, what would happen is housing prices would go down. Well the experiment was played out two years ago and two years since the Airbnb ban, housing prices did not go down. They went up 8% and hotels went up even higher. What if we met with the mayor and we said you can only rent a home that you live in primarily so therefore you're not taking housing off the market. We could generate more than a hundred million dollars of transient occupancy tax. We can even limit it to certain districts of the city and ultimately what he'll find is the number one jobs of hosting Airbnb, number one retirees, number two healthcare workers, number three teachers, number four manufacturing construction. These sound like the people that voted for him. I think there's a way for both of us to win. The city of New York, the mayor, the residents and an Airbnb. You can see the entire interview with Brian Chesky on cnbc.com. Guys we get into so many other topics including AI. You know last time he sat with us on set in New York we were talking about sort of the stages of a AI bubble. He was very concerned about it. Just about nine months ago was talking about how we had moved from sort of excitement to maybe what he thought was the sort of exuberance level which is I think where he thought things got dangerous. He has a new and maybe provocative view about all of that and maybe that's a tease to go check it out online. Meaning he no longer thinks it's a bubble? I can't tell you. You need to go watch it. You know what I love about him is he always brings facts. You know when you you bring up this idea of renting more and more just off the top of his head. You know number one top rated ones are only have one. Second rated have two. You know they just he's a data guy and I love that.