The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2022
Airbnb pulled all 150,000 China listings after six years
Zero-COVID lockdowns made China's domestic homestay business too costly to keep running, so Airbnb shut it down and kept only outbound bookings.
Airbnb · 2022-05-24
What happened
Airbnb entered China in 2016, building a business of roughly 150,000 domestic listings by 2022 that had logged about 25 million guest arrivals since launch. Despite that scale, domestic China stays accounted for only around 1% of Airbnb's global revenue in recent years — a small business relative to the operational cost of running it.
China's zero-COVID policy made that cost worse: sudden lockdowns and travel restrictions through 2021 and 2022 made domestic bookings unpredictable and hard to service, on top of the compliance and localization costs of operating a foreign platform in China's regulatory environment. On May 24, 2022, Airbnb announced it would shut down its domestic listings and experiences business entirely, effective July 30, 2022.
The company kept a smaller China presence alive by letting Chinese users continue booking listings outside the country, betting on outbound travel resuming once pandemic restrictions eased, rather than trying to make the domestic business work.
Why it happened
- Domestic China stays generated about 1% of Airbnb's revenue, too small to justify the operational and compliance cost of running a China-specific platform.
- Zero-COVID lockdowns made short-term rental demand within China unpredictable in a way ordinary business planning couldn't absorb.
- Six years of building 150,000 listings had not produced a business large enough to be worth defending through a difficult operating environment.
- Airbnb chose a clean full exit over a scaled-down domestic operation, judging that outbound bookings from Chinese travelers captured most of the value at a fraction of the cost.
The lesson
A business line that stays under 1% of revenue for years is a candidate for a clean exit, not indefinite subsidy through a hard operating environment.
Aftermath
Airbnb's domestic China listings and experiences closed on July 30, 2022. Chinese users could still book stays outside mainland China, and Airbnb continued to court Chinese outbound travelers through that channel. The company did not relaunch a domestic China product afterward.
Sources
- Airbnb is closing its listings business in China — CNN Business
- Airbnb China closes domestic unit to cut costs as it bets on border reopening — TechCrunch
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