Ugh, to be honest I get tired whenever I see the "Why did company XYZ need so many people, they're just a website!"-type comments. While it is definitely possible AirBnB was bloated, it's not hard for me to imagine at all what all these people did.
AirBnB is a relatively high-touch business, so I imagine a huge number of those people were in customer support/customer relations, both for travelers and for property owners. AirBnB also operates in a huge number of countries, and each of those countries need (a) marketers, (b) people with regulatory knowledge (often at a level much more granular than the country level - and to head off any 'but AirBnB ignores the regulations!' comments, while that may be true, I guarantee they still have people that know what they are), (c) again, customer service people knowledgeable with the local language and customs.
Yeah typically happens with each layoff. It's nice that when times are good companies are able to spread the workload more. It helps increase code quality and quality of life for everyone working there. Also part of current employee numbers is hiring to keep up with projected growth etc.
If everything was so easy to build we should all quit our jobs and do our own single developer startup.
I would imagine that most AirBnB scams are in the other direction -- travellers defrauding property managers. If you are just a customer and you don't like the experience, you simply tell your credit card company that you aren't going to pay for it and the problem is solved on your end. Meanwhile, if you manage the property people can consume nights of service and end up not paying, and you're never getting that back.
I am sure there are horror stories where people didn't like their AirBnB, but I am also sure they didn't pay for that AirBnB.
While your points are valid, we can still consider the bloatedness hypothesis but just looking at the engineering team size.
Uber was similarly accused of being bloated and it definitely was on just the engineering team - several thousands of engineers for what is definitely a complex app but not that complex really.
Not at all what I said. I was absolutely surprised and asked a legitimate question. Ignorance is one's default state, hence why we're encouraged to ask questions when we're young.
Tell us why you think 7,500 employees is too high, in order to implement, maintain, and grow an online lodging and experiences marketplace in 191 countries.
Provide a source for that 500 headcount... Hotels.com lists 1100-1500 employees depending on where you look, and LinkedIn shows ~1600 employed by Hotels.com today.
With that said, Hotels.com is owned by a multi-billion dollar conglomerate called Expedia, which employees ~24K people across multiple brands. AirBnB is operating on their own.
Worked there a few years ago. Should be double now since they've extended to and filled a new building.
The whole group with Expedia was something around 15k if I recall well. It includes more than a hundred independent brands and products, plus a few massive white labels, covering an order of magnitude more languages and currencies than AirBnb. So better not compare the whole conglomerate to AirBnb (except as an evidence it's bloated).
The last media reports put AirBnb at 12000 or 15000 employees, but the article is mentioning a total workforce of 7500, so either the media were very off or a whole bunch of employees are not factored in. Either way it's a lot, no doubt the business can run with half of that.
Wikipedia lists ~12K employees at AirBnB, so I agree that some additional clarity would be needed to understand the discrepancy.
If you compare the ratios of operating income vs headcount between the two, the companies are nearly identical based on the metrics available in Wikipedia today.
I don't see how you could do a comparison since neither of the company publish any metrics? They're not public and not required to publish any financial or operational information. Turns out it's not even possible to figure out how many employees they currently have. ^^
Just one tip. Don't do the mistake of taking Expedia in place of hotels.com. Expedia is a large conglomerate of many companies that is not representative of just that one. It's like confusing the mobile related business of Samsung versus Samsung as a whole.
Apples and oranges. Hotels.com is a middle-man. When you have a problem with your stay, you talk to the actual hotel, which has its own front desk, customer service, legal, engineering, business, marketing, blah blah blah, teams.
The hotel contact number you got on the website and the receipt goes to a central support run by hotels.com, it doesn't go to the actual hotel.
The support can often sort our issues better than what you could do yourself. They're in a better position to pressure the hotel or rebook you somewhere else nearby.
My family vacation house which we let got a visitor through hotels.com through expedia and we don't have anything you mentioned. My guess would be whatever something is called be it Hotels or AirBnB they are working with everyone in the business in some capacity
Same with AirBnB. I’ve never contacted AirBnB support, but typically have 2-3 interactions with the host every time I stay at an AirBnB property. AirBnB are just a middleman.
Thanks for offering a legitimate response to a legitimate question. After finishing up work and looking for answers, I found (provided it is accurately sourced) this article [1] outlining targeted departments of the company I hadn't even heard of before, even though I've used the service extensively for recreation.
Obviously diversification occurs with these large companies, I just hadn't realized how much they had branched out.
Thought I misread that the first time through. What did those 7,500 do?