New Airbnb CFO Takes Helm at Inflection Point for Travel Industry

When the pandemic gripped the world in early 2020, Mertz was part of the leadership team at the short-term stay and vacation property rental company. She recalls the switch to survival mode, focusing on raising capital, cutting nearly all discretionary spending and ultimately laying off 25% of staff.

Mertz’s record as a vice president of finance during the pandemic and her stewardship of Airbnb’s December 2020 initial public offering, one of the most successful IPOs in history, set the tone for her tenure and contributed to her promotion to CFO.

Mertz took the helm this month during another pivotal moment for consumer travel, as it eases off its postpandemic “revenge travel” highs. Domestic leisure travel began to decelerate in 2023, according to the U.S. Travel Association, an industry group, as consumers confronted higher borrowing costs and tighter credit conditions, along with the restart of student loan repayments.Airbnb is looking to Mertz and former CFO Dave Stephenson—who was promoted to a newly created role of chief business officer—to foster growth through a mix of geographic expansion, new products and investments in its people.

Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky noted that both executives have faced different challenges in their roles and evolving partnership. While Stephenson led the finance team with Mertz through the pandemic and the lead up to its IPO, Mertz takes over with the company on more solid footing, but perhaps a harder challenge, said Chesky, “which is to make us, to help us, reinvent the company, to become really a multi-product or multi-offering company.”

Geographic expansion, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, will be key to the company’s evolution and growth, said Kevin Kopelman, a managing director and research analyst covering hotels and online travel at TD Cowen.

“Airbnb has good exposure, but they definitely haven’t been as successful in APAC as they have been in North America and Europe,” Kopelman said. “There’s just a big potential growth area, and they need to make sure they have the best product that’s localized.”Airbnb’s core markets are mostly English-speaking, such as Canada and Australia, but also include parts of Europe, with strong penetration in France, for example. “There’s a huge amount of opportunity if we could even bring those other markets up to the levels of usage and penetration we’ve seen in those core markets,” said Mertz, speaking of Germany, Brazil and South Korea as examples of geographic growth areas.

“We’re trying to take a measured approach…and also learn as we go,” she said of identifying new markets. “On the international side, we don’t need big standing armies [of employees] in country. But it is extremely helpful to have core teams in these markets who can drive a lot of the local activations and, frankly, have knowledge of what localization is required.”

Kopelman noted increasing competition from aggregator platforms such as Google and traditional rivals such as Booking Holdings, Expedia and its vacation rental platform Vrbo, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Airbnb, which acquired the startup GamePlanner.AI in November, also is thinking about artificial intelligence to increase efficiencies in product development and for customer service. The AI startup—co-founded by Adam Cheyer, one of the founders of Apple’s voice assistant Siri—will contribute to Airbnb’s existing technologies that include large-language model chatbots and machine learning, she said.

“It’s particularly relevant right now as we seek to expand what we’re doing in a much more scaled way than we have historically,” she said, referring to AI use cases to increase efficiencies in product development.

The company also is deploying LLM technology and conversational AI tools to improve customer service; using computer vision models to help understand millions of listing photos and automatically identifying things like room type, view and amenities; and using machine learning to help guests find the best listings from an inventory of more than 7.7 million homes globally.

Beyond expanding geographically, Airbnb is expected to offer more services and products, such as cleaning services for hosts or localized experiences like Napa Valley wine tastings in California or tours of the Louvre museum in Paris, according to analysts.

“It could be anything related to the process of the customer checking in or services that can be provided during their stay,” TD Cowen’s Kopelman said. “That is something that Airbnb can certainly do very well. When it comes to new verticals, that is where it’s less proven, and that is going to be a bigger challenge.”

Write to Walden Siew at [email protected]