‘When I look at New York, the only people that seem to have won are hotels. I don’t think New Yorkers won. I don’t think the city won. I don’t think people visiting New York won,” says Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.
Globetrender attended the recent Skift Forum in New York where Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky took part in a live video-call conversation with Skift co-founder Rafat Ali. Here is what he said in regard to the Airbnb ban by New York City that began to take effect in September 2023.
Chesky: “There’s been this giant question around what happens when you ban Airbnb in a city? And for 15 years, it was a theoretical question, because we didn’t know the answer. Then New York City decided to play out the experiment.
“Now we have a year of longitudinal data of what happens when New York City bans Airbnb. And there’s two results: one’s expected, one’s unexpected. The expected thing is that because there’s no Airbnbs on a short-term basis, the only place to stay in is a hotel. So, therefore, hotel prices went up. And hotel prices on a year-over-year basis have gone up 7.4%.
“What did it do to housing? Because the stated reason to ban Airbnb was to reclaim housing, to put it back in the housing market. It turns out the average rent in New York City has gone up 3.4%, and there are no additional vacancies compared to a year ago.
“I’m from upstate New York. My parents were social workers growing up, so when we would go to New York, what we’d do, we’d wake up at 5am, we’d go on the Amtrak train, we’d take the 6am or 7am train, we’d go down, get to New York at 11am, spend the day in New York and then we’d go back on the Amtrak train and get back to like Albany at like midnight.
“This is how a lot of people travel to New York, and the reason why is it’s just too expensive to stay there. Now, this is a bummer. It’s worse though, let’s say if you’re a patient that has to go to Sloan Kettering hospital and you can’t afford to stay overnight.
“We want to make sure that when we have regulation with cities, it’s a win win. And when I look at New York, the only people that seem to have won are hotels. I don’t think New Yorkers won. I don’t think the city won. I don’t think people visiting New York won. I think the only people that won were hotels, because they can charge more.
“Do you think there’s still an opening for more negotiations in the city? I think so, and the reason why is, New York is not one person, it’s many stakeholders. And those stakeholders change over time. We want to make a work of New York. We want to collect and remit hotel tax, we want to generate tax revenue, we want to oblige to the registration system…
“A year or two ago, it became very clear that Paris didn’t have enough housing or hotel rooms for the Olympics. And so we worked with the city of Paris to add more than 50,000 apartments. My message to New York is we don’t want to be the problem. We want to help you solve your problems. We are conciliatory and we do want to figure out a way to make this work.”