Thread by @bchesky

Our Q1 results are in:

102M nights booked
$1.5B revenue (70% Y/Y)
$(19)M net loss
$229M Adjusted EBITDA
$1.2B free cash flow

2 years ago, our business dropped 80%, our IPO was put on hold, and some didn’t think we’d make it at all.

Here’s how we turned Airbnb around:

First, we simplified our business. We got back to our roots, prioritizing the everyday people who host their homes and offer experiences

We cut the vast majority of our projects, shuttered our business units, and made the painful decision to do a layoff

We significantly improved our cost structure, decreasing our cost of revenue (merchant fees and servers), and tightly managed our fixed costs

Next, we changed our approach to marketing. When travel stopped, we paused all performance marketing and shifted our focus to PR (there have been 1M+ stories written about Airbnb since then)

By 2021, we started investing in brand marketing again, but reduced our overall marketing spend from 34% of our revenue in 2019 to 20% in 2021

Revenue dramatically rebounded when people disproportionately started traveling closer to home, staying in Airbnbs in thousands of towns and cities

Soon, people weren’t just traveling on Airbnb, they were living on Airbnb.

In 2021, around 20% of our nights booked were for stays of a month or longer, and nearly 50% for a week or longer

These trends continue to this day. And now, urban and cross-border travel, which were the majority of our business before the pandemic, are back to 2019 levels

In 2021, we completely overhauled our product as the world became more flexible.

We made 150+ upgrades and improvements, including launching the “I’m Flexible” feature, which has been used more than 2 billion times

On May 11, we’ll introduce the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade

Here’s our shareholder letter (with reconciliation of all non-GAAP numbers) for more details: airbnb2020ipo.q4web.com/files/doc_fina…