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Why Airbnb’s Big Launch Fell Flat—And How to Make Sure Yours Doesn’t
Ash + Lizzy
May 17, 2025
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This week, Airbnb rolled out a major update: a new visual identity, the relaunch of Airbnb Experiences, and a new product line called Airbnb Services. Users can now ‘Airbnb more than an Airbnb’, whether that’s booking a haircut or renting a dance lesson with a Kpop star.
They executed the launch well:
And yet… it didn’t quite land.
It didn’t break the internet. It didn’t change the narrative. And most online chatter focused on cleaning fees and confusion over why they relaunched something they already rolled out.
Everyone talks about distribution, and Airbnb has that in spades. But all the distribution in the world won’t save your launch if the messaging can’t hook users.
It got us thinking about what a successful launch looks like in 2025, where Airbnb went wrong, and how other companies can learn from Airbnb to amplify their next major moment:
Optimize for owning your story
Airbnb landed coverage in every major publication. The problem is they gave 20 publications license to tell their story for them, leading to headlines like “Airbnb’s in Midlife Crisis Mode” and “Airbnb’s new ‘Hairbnb’ strategy is not going to cut it”.
There were positive headlines too, but it was notable that Chesky didn’t time the launch with a sit-down interview on Dwarkesh or Theo Von. There wasn’t even a talking head video of Chesky explaining the new vision. While every other tech CEO leans into video interviews to precisely tell their stories, it was surprising to see Chesky opt for a non-video traditional business publication rather than a video format with a top creator.
Hire someone terminally online
Airbnb has 6M+ followers on Instagram and 366K+ on TikTok, yet their TikTok launch video only got 3,900 views.
There was no coordinated influencer push. No viral remixes. No native, culture-savvy content strategy. If you’re a consumer company gearing up for a launch, it’s well worth it to invest in someone chronically online to scale your reach. Strong organic social, even just one video asset, can launch you into another stratosphere if you can get it on your users’ feeds.
Peel back the curtain
This launch introduced a new design and new user experiences—but there wasn’t much behind-the-scenes storytelling. No design team interviews. No sneak peeks at how they curated the top new experiences.We live in a behind-the-scenes era. People don’t just want the end product—they want the process, the debates, the hard calls. Everything is content, so show us how the vision came together.
Leverage your founder’s brand
Brian Chesky went viral not that long ago for coining the term “founder mode”. Yet he’s been pretty quiet since this launch, with just a few tweets focused on the new design.
In 2025, people click on people, not brands. If you’re running a ‘bet the farm’ campaign, your founder’s channels shouldn’t be an afterthought—they should be a core part of the strategy. Most Airbnb users won’t see Chesky’s tweets, but the thousands of founders, operators, and builders on X will. This was a moment for him to share his thinking, break down the strategy, and instill trust in investors and fans that he knows what he’s doing. That’s how you keep the narrative alive after the press cycle ends.Address your customers’ critiques and message against them
Airbnb’s been dragged for years over cleaning fees and out-of-touch host rules. It’s not entirely their fault, but once you’re stuck with that kind of reputation, ignoring it isn’t an option. If you don’t get ahead of the criticism, it’ll hijack your launch.
Take a page from HBO Max. When they announced yet another rebrand, they knew the internet would roast them. So they beat everyone to the punch—launching a self-aware social campaign that poked fun at themselves, delighted fans, and disarmed the trolls. If you know the jokes are coming, make the first one.
Airbnb’s launch was by no means a flop, but it wasn’t the moment it could’ve been. Comms has evolved far beyond press hits. It’s about reaching your users with messages and content they’ll actually consume. A little creativity and a peek behind the curtain can go a long, long way.
📱 New in non-traditional media
Tracking the newsletters, podcasts, and creators reshaping media influence.
📰 In the news
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The TechCrunch exits keep coming. Charles Rollet has moved to Business Insider, where he’ll be covering “Big Tech, the AI startups everyone's talking about, & more”.
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⭐️ Favorite story of the week:
“Anthropic’s lawyer was forced to apologize after Claude hallucinated a legal citation” - TechCrunch
Some things you just can’t make up. AI is coming for a lot of work, but when it breaks—and it will—you’ll want a good comms team around to help clean up the mess.
⚡️ Steal this pitch
Here’s a real pitch we used to land expert commentary coverage for our client:
Subject: 6-year e-commerce supply chain attack exposes lurking risks
Pitch:
Complex supply chain attacks can stay hidden for years, silently compromising thousands of organizations before finally striking.
A six-year dormant supply chain attack targeting Magento platforms compromised businesses globally, including a $40B enterprise, exposing how stealthy third-party risks can cripple even the most robust organizations. This attack involved backdoor extensions from trusted vendors, turning essential business tools into silent weapons. This follows a concerning trend that [COMPANY] has observed across industries from open-source utilities to medical devices - where trusted software becomes the perfect Trojan horse.
[COMPANY] security experts are available to discuss:How organizations can stay alert to modern attacks that use transitive dependencies and trusted vendors to compromise systems as demonstrated in the Magento and XZ Utils incidents.
How to quickly implement proactive detection methods given backdoor and malicious code can stay hidden for extended periods of time.
Frameworks to mitigate risks in AI-assisted development pipelines given “hallucinated” dependency risk and the difficulty of verifying code produced by large language models.
💫 Client wins
Our clients are making headlines. Check out coverage our clients got this week in American Banker, North American Clean Energy, and TFIR.
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