The vacation rental company Airbnb forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Tuesday and reported a lower second-quarter profit, as it flagged weakening demand from US customers.
Shares of the company were down about 12% after the bell.
Domestic travel in the United States has been pressured since the start of the year as more Americans grow cautious about travel spending amid growing economic uncertainty.
The San Francisco-based company reported quarterly profit of $555m compared to $650m last year.
It’s become a terrible company. I say “become” because like many tech-era enshittified companies, it started out as an actual good idea.
Pre-2015, we stayed in a beautiful home in Paris and had nice conversations with the live-in owner, some friendly extra-room places in Brooklyn, an adobe home in New Mexico, and other places that were actually really people just renting out spare rooms or buildings and trying to be efficient/friendly with their extra space.
But now it’s entirely “passive income”-obsessed real estate mogul-wannabes who bought up properties and are now bleeding them for the maximum profit. Zero-amenity empty properties with Walmart art on the wall and the smell of dog pee, cleaned by a service and run by a company who owns 300 of them.
The last straw for us: Last year in Spain, we had a host threaten physical harm to us before check-in. We saved screenshots of the messages with the actual threats, and AirBNB support said they would rebook/refund on a recorded line. Then inexplicably AirBNB reversed course, refused to actually issue a refund, just repeated the same BS about needing to cancel in the contract timeframes, and when we threw up our hands and reversed through AmEx, AirBNB disputed the reversal 7 times before finally giving up. AirBNB is just awful.
Stick with hotels: (usually) cheaper, better amenities, and no drama.
Motel 6 is always cheaper than airbnb (and better).
I hope they drop further. recently I had to deal with a profile with an AI generated profile picture and probably fake name who had 133 properties under their name and responded almost instantly to any queries
It’s crazy its hung on this long.
Everyone I know stopped using it like five years ago. I really thought Covid would have killed it.
Whenever it finally dies tho. It’s going to be a lot of housing back on the market in a very short time
The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the system in which it’s operating which requires enshittification.
Just spent a few days in an Airbnb with no hot water and an air conditioner that leaked condensate into the space. It was a constant drip that they knew about, put a trash can under, and didn’t fix, just like the hot water. I’m done using that service. It’s filled with the worst land bastards.
I’m surprised it took this long.
I’ve found that even Motel 6 is almost always (95%+ of the time) way better than airbnb.
