This Is What the Future of Travel Will Look Like, According to Airbnb

The company is betting on the lines between work and leisure, home and
away continuing to blur.

Courtesy Airbnb
From the perspective of March 2020, you might have thought the pandemic

would be a disaster for Airbnb. With vacation travel canceled indefinitely, how

could a company dedicated largely to renting out holiday homes survive? 

In the short-term at least, these fears were well founded. Airbnb took a beating

in the initial months of the pandemic and had to lay off around 25 percent of its

staff. But once that initial crisis was over, the pandemic has been surprisingly

good to the company. 

With the mass move to remote work, more and more people started using

Airbnb to escape cramped homes and test out new places to live and work while

they were untethered from the office. As I reported last August, this led the

company to predict a significant rise in the number of digital nomads once the

pandemic ran its course. 

According to a fascinating new article from Protocol editor David Pierce, the

passing months have only caused Airbnb to double down on these predictions. 

Article continues after video.

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Blurring the lines between home and away

More and more "the lines between travel, living and working are

blurring," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently proclaimed. 

Internal company data shows that people are booking longer stays on the

platform to a greater variety of places. That's not just a sign that more workers

now have the flexibility to work from wherever they want. It might be a first

step toward more of us rethinking the concept of home entirely. 

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Airbnb "once operated like an alternative to stodgy hotels, but is now embracing

the idea that it can be an alternative to permanent housing as well," Pierce

writes. "What WeWork wants to do for offices -- unbundle them, and simplify

the process of getting and using them -- Airbnb wants to do for homes. It's not

just out to get the Hyatts and Hiltons of the world anymore. It's coming for the

one-year leases and the mortgage payments too."

The future of travel according to this vision isn't a switch to one kind of vacation

over another. It's that the idea that vacations and home start to lose their

boundaries entirely. You live and work wherever you happen to want to be that

month, creating one great swirl of leisure and work, home and away. 
Speaking as someone who lived much this way for the better part of a decade

when I was younger, it's easy enough to spot the limits of these predictions.

Having school-age kids generally brings nomadic lifestyles to a screeching halt,

and having that freedom in the first place is out of reach for many for financial

and practical reasons. Plus, while short-term nomadism can be a mind-

expanding adventure, longer term the downsides of the lifestyle start to reveal

themselves. A lack of investment in any particular community can leave you

feeling rootless, lonely, insubstantial, even like a bit of a freeloader on the hard

work of building a fair and functional society. 

So will everyone who gained location flexibility out of the crucible of the

pandemic end up breaking their lease to jet off to Bali or Bermuda for months

on end? Clearly not. But will more of us decide to do an extended house swap

when the kids are on summer break or bounce around for a few years in our

twenties (or sixties)? Airbnb is betting on it.