Airbnb says its employees can work from home or the office moving forward, and their compensation won't change if they move, unless it's to a different country
But Here's The Fine Print Kevin Hurler / Gizmodo : Airbnb Will Stop Giving Refunds for Covid-19 Walter Frick / Quartz : Airbnb's five rules for work-from-anywhere Emma Goldberg / www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org : Airbnb tells employees they can work remotely forever. Brendan Morrow / The Week : Airbnb to allow employees to permanently work from home: ‘This is where the world is going’ Sam Shead / CNBC : Airbnb CEO says staff can ‘live and work anywhere’ Mitchell Clark / The Verge : Airbnb announces it won't dock employees' pay if they go remote Bulletin : Friday, April 29, 2022 — Note to email readers: Some clients will cut off our rundown due to length. Coen Hewes / The Home Office : The Best Country to WFH, AirBnB Going 100% Remote, and remote work under Russian occupation Mariella Moon / Engadget : Airbnb adopts permanent remote work option for employees Tweets: Brian Chesky / @bchesky : Today, we're announcing that Airbnb employees can live and work anywhere. Our design for working at Airbnb has 5 key features: Brian Chesky / @bchesky : 2. You can move anywhere in the country, like from San Francisco to Nashville, and your compensation won't change @csuwildcat : This is a really smart mode of operation that matches the realities of the more advanced digital age we live in: https://twitter.com/... @fnthawar : Congrats @Airbnb + lots of overlap with how we think about this for @Shopify ✅ live *anywhere* for 90 days ✅ work remotely ✅ meetup IRL regularly ✅ rethink geo compensation ✅ 2 release events per year ❌ work from office https://twitter.com/... John Bull / @garius : ...unless Airbnb have destroyed the long-term rental market in your city. https://twitter.com/... Brian Chesky / @bchesky : 1. You can work from home or the office—whatever works best for you Nick Bloom / @i_am_nickbloom : Airbnb is going fully remote, with quarterly in person retreats. This full-remote + occasional retreat option is popular in tech: e.g. Airbnb, Upwork, Quora & Automattic In other industries #WFH hybrid 3-2 or 2-3 dominates The 5-day return to the office seems have died in 2021 https://twitter.com/... Jennifer Keesmaat / @jen_keesmaat : AirBnB goes fully WFH. Historically, midsize cities stagnated when they could not attract employment/new jobs. Decisions like this represent a sea change. Smart small and midsized cities and towns will capitalize on this opportunity to grow. https://twitter.com/... Jake Wharton / @jakewharton : If your company won't do this for you then unionize and force them to. Location-based pay is wage theft. https://twitter.com/... Brian Chesky / @bchesky : 3. You have the flexibility to live and work in 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location @rafat : Very interesting: @airbnb has made the decision to effectively go permanently remote, new policies announced this evening by @bchesky. Good nuances in there, worth a read: https://news.airbnb.com/... https://twitter.com/... Scott Belsky / @scottbelsky : a policy that fosters empathy with employees and customers simultaneously is a great policy https://twitter.com/... Brian Chesky / @bchesky : Why did we come up with this design? The world has become more flexible. Our business wouldn't have recovered as quickly from the pandemic if it hadn't been for millions of people working from Airbnbs Andy Boxall / @andyboxall : Every company with an office and staff should see this as a wake up call. Hybrid working and giving employees *choice* is the future. Ignoring it will mean less satisfied employees and fewer new applicants. I love how mobile tech makes it possible to work and live like this too. https://twitter.com/... Lynn Nothegger / @lynn_nothegger : This is the future. Companies that insist on staff coming to the office every day will not be able to recruit the best people. https://twitter.com/... Michael Story / @mwstory : Been doing this broadly since 2015 and it works quite nicely. One difficulty is the meet-ups are expensive and it's easy to push them back to a too-infrequent schedule, which can cause a death spiral if big change is needed in the firm https://twitter.com/... Brian Chesky / @bchesky : 5. To pull this off, we'll operate off of a multi-year roadmap with two major product releases a year, which will keep us working in a highly coordinated way Allie K. Miller / @alliekmiller : Airbnb just announced its new remote work policy for its employees. As someone who has lived in airbnbs the last two years, here are the lines that stood out to me the most... 🧵 https://news.airbnb.com/... Kevin Naughton Jr / @kevinnaughtonjr : Really cool to see an announcement like this I'm excited to see what other companies follow suit https://news.airbnb.com/... @asianxjay : With the ability to hire talent anywhere, this is a fascinating move. It's always funny to see other folks bring this up at their own company but for a travel company, this makes sense to me https://news.airbnb.com/... Yashar Ali / @yashar : Thread by CEO of Airbnb @bchesky @elonmusk hasn't made any official statements on what Twitter's work from home policies will be should the sale close, but Twitter employees have been concerned that he will rescind the current policy. https://twitter.com/... Brian Chesky / @bchesky : 4. We'll meet up regularly for team gatherings. Most employees will connect in person every quarter for about a week at a time (some more frequently) @mikeisaac : predicting a lot of Twitter —> Airbnb recruitment https://twitter.com/... @antoniogm : Interesting new WFH policy from Airbnb. This hybrid model of ‘work anywhere’ with a weeklong team meetup in some practical (and attractive) locale every quarter will be ‘the way’ for lots of tech companies. Your longitude (i.e. timezone) will matter more than location. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Airbnb formalizes a location-flexibility model already visible at Spotify, which paired work-from-anywhere with co-working memberships for remote staff. Its policy combines location choice with scheduled in-person team gatherings and a slower, multi-year product-release cadence.
The stance matters because Airbnb was later grouped with Atlassian, Dropbox, and Twilio as companies that continued backing remote work while other large technology employers pressed staff to return to offices.
First-order effects
- Airbnb employees can choose home or office work and retain pay when relocating within their country; moves to another country trigger compensation adjustments.
- Airbnb must coordinate distributed teams around regular in-person gatherings and two major product releases each year.
Second-order effects
- Spotify and Reddit's earlier remote-work policies make location flexibility a comparable recruiting and retention term among technology employers, rather than a one-off Airbnb benefit.
- Co-working providers are positioned to serve employees who do not use a conventional office, following Spotify's decision to offer memberships to remote staff.
Third-order effects
- If employers preserve pay across domestic moves while retaining periodic in-person coordination, workplace policy shifts from office attendance toward a hybrid model of distributed work plus planned convening.
- The country-based pay exception keeps national compensation boundaries central even as employers make work location more flexible.
The trend: Technology employers are separating where employees live and work from how teams coordinate, while keeping compensation tied to country-level boundaries.