Two sources familiar with the matter say that the company is closing its domestic business in China. The company is going to tell employees in Beijing as early as Tuesday morning.
The homes and experiences on the mainland will be taken down this summer.
In 2016 the company formally launched its mainland China business. Sources say that the segment was expensive and complex to operate. The issues were worsened by the Pandemic.
Despite in-country branding, stays in China on the platform have accounted for 1% of revenue over the last few years.
According to sources, Chinese outbound travel has been a bigger opportunity for the company and it will focus on providing listings for Chinese travelers going abroad. One source says the overlap between the businesses was not strong. A source says that an office in Beijing will have hundreds of employees.
The company's shares have fallen more than 30% this year, but they are still well above their IPO price. In the early days of the covid epidemic, Airbnb laid off 25% of its staff in May 2020, then went public in November of that year. In its IPO prospectus, the company mentioned that hosts in China used a separate cleaning program to prevent covid transmission than the uniform five-step cleaning process it implemented in the rest of the world.
The company has seen an increase in long-term rentals this year thanks to the flexible work arrangements many employers rolled out during the Pandemic. The Chinese business has been slower to recover as the country has been locked down to fight infections.
The company declined to comment.
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