Airbnb is cutting 25% of its workforce as the coronavirus pandemic continues to pummel the travel sector.
About 1 900 Airbnb employees across the world will be affected, CEO Brian Chesky wrote in an e-mail to staff on Tuesday.
“We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime, and as it began to unfold, global travel came to a standstill,” Chesky wrote. “Airbnb’s business has been hit hard, with revenue this year forecast to be less than half of what we earned in 2019.”
The San Francisco-based start-up, which was poised to be the blockbuster stock listing of the year, has raised US$2-billion in capital and dramatically cut costs in a bid to weather the slump.
“While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived,” Chesky wrote. “Because of this, we need to make more fundamental changes to Airbnb by reducing the size of our workforce around a more focused business strategy.”
As a result, Airbnb will be pausing its efforts in transportation and scaling back its investments in hotels and luxury travel, he said. — Reported by Olivia Carville, (c) 2020 Bloomberg LP