Airbnb is back to renting out rooms, a practice it stuck to in its early years as many of its travelers can’t afford to rent an entire house.

The short-term rental company on Wednesday introduced a new service called Airbnb Rooms. Guests can rent a room in the same house as the host.

“We recognize that travelers are more frugal than they were a year ago,” said CEO Brian Chesky.

Chesky and Joe Gebbia—now the president of Airbnb—originally began in 2007 hosting guests in their San Francisco apartment to pay rent.

“It will be a very useful service for a new generation of travelers,” Chesky said. “The average Gen Z traveler is willing to pay less than $100 a night.” (Generation Z is usually defined as people born since 1996).

Last year, Airbnb made $1.9 billion — the first full-year profit in its history — thanks to increased bookings and revenue.

At the same time, Chesky explained, the company is trying to increase the transparency of housing prices when an interested person browses the site in search of a home. In this context, he predicted that if there is more transparency, there will be less cleaning debt, which in many cases appears long after the start of the booking process, which of course is a big complaint for users.

Also, Airbnb continues to “fight” with the organization of mass parties for rent, some of which also took place in scenes of violence. In particular, in the US and Canada next spring it is planned to launch a system for verifying the identity of visitors and reporting on any party organizations.

At the same time, the company is called upon to compete with its best and most experienced owners. This trend could threaten Airbnb as top hosts in the market, who are likely to build their own websites in parallel, account for a large share of bookings. As of 2022, the top 1% of Airbnb and rival Vrbo owners manage approximately 23% of the listings and generate approximately 28% of total revenue.
In fact, most of them are superhosts, i.e. those who have at least 10 trips or three bookings totaling 100 nights, as well as a high level of earning from booking requests, a low cancellation rate and ratings over 4.8 . /5 from visitors.