Analyzing Airbnb: Corporate Strategic Management, Issues & Actions

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of Airbnb's corporate strategic management, highlighting the company's key strategies and actions in response to various industry issues. It discusses Airbnb's attentiveness to communities, ensuring customer satisfaction, and data-driven testing a...Read More

Running Head: CORPORATE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
CORPORATE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1CORPORATE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Background of Airbnd............................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Significance of Strategies and Airbnb actions in Response to the Issues..............................3
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5
Reference....................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction
Corporate strategy is the strategy that takes the approach of the portfolio to the
strategic decisions making with the help of looking across all the businesses of the firm for
determining the way of creating value. It encompasses the corporate actions of the firm with
the aim of achieving the objectives of the company while achieving the competitive
advantages. The strategy of corporate entails the clearly defined, visions of long-term that are
set of organization, seeking for creating the value of corporate as well as motivating the
workforce for implementing proper actions to achieve the satisfactions of the customers
(Inc.Com. 2017). Hence, this assignment includes the discussion on the Airbnb issue of
corporate strategy, strategic significance of the firm and the industry sector as well as
evaluation of the actions of the firm or responding to the issue by firm.
Background of Airbnd
Airbnb is the online market for offering as well as arranging the lodging, especially
homestays and the experiences of tourism. This online market helps in connecting the people
who would like to rent their own homes with the person who needs accommodations in that
particular locally (GrowthManifesto 2019). It does not have any of its listings of real estate
nor it does hosts the events rather it acts as the broker by receiving the commissions from
each of the booking. Airbnb is California, United States. Further, the company is currently
covering 81,000 or more cities as well as 191 countries all over world. The name of Airbnb
comes from “air mattress B&B” (Colombelli 2015).
Discussion
Airbnb is one of the most well known name in travel industry and in current
scenarios; it is in the position of market leader. They not only have revolutionized the
industry of travel but they are first startup unicorns that has emerged in mid-2000s and

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emulated on each level, right from the model of business, their mapping, their search results
to the referral engines as well as their approaches as well as the outlook. Hence, with each
passing years they have grown and become the most recognizable member of sharing
economy. The company has grown at the impressive rate and it is recently valued at the
amount of $31 billion (Eisenhardt, Kathleen and Christopher 2017).
Significance of Strategies and Airbnb actions in Response to the Issues
Airbnb has taken various strategies of business, which helped them for making it the
most successful brand in the travel industry. Following are certain strategies adopted by the
Airbnb, which has contributed towards its growth and that can be learned by the other
emerging entrepreneurs in the industry:
 Attentively Monitoring of the Communities- The great reasons of Airbnb getting
this huge success is because of the higher rate of the satisfaction among those who are
residing at their own listed properties and those who are renting out. Airbnb has built
their community on the trust. They have the lists of the standards of the community as
well as expectations, which needs to read by all the members. Airbnb devotes the
large amount of their time as well as budget for monitoring as well as making sure
that everyone is playing their role in a good way. As per head of the global
hospitability as well as strategy of Airbnb, Chip Conley has said that thousands of the
hosts are having booted off each of the payments of company for not able to meet
these expectations and strategy. In this concern, Airbnb enforces their standards as
well as expectations of their community very seriously (Oskam, Jeroen and Albert
Boswijk 2016).
 Making Sure what Exactly Customers are getting- In the era of the commercial TV
as well as Internet, it has been realized that the expectations are not in reality. There
are various products or the services purchased earlier have left with disappointments.

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Airbnb in this context have taken various steps for evading the disappointments of the
consumer in any of the possible ways. Therefore, Airbnb has made an effort for
preventing the disappointments by showing buyers what actually they are getting. The
company rather than sticking with the blurry picture of phone, they decided for
investing in the travelling to those listings and photographing it professionally. This
has resulted into doubling of the weekly revenue of the company. Therefore, with the
help of improving the quality of the photo, buyers are able to see the attractive
property. This shows two things, importance of aesthetics as well as customers would
likely purchase the product if the page of the product does not look good (Teixeira
and Morgan Brown 2016).
 Test More and More- The data helps in providing the accurate predictor of the
results. However, new features as well as idea are required for putting it into the
action for truly seeing its effectiveness as well as scalability. Airbnb operates on the
approach where there are the implementations of the creative hypothesis with team
and then review is done on its impact. In case, if the return is meaningful on the ideas
or the features that was implemented on the smaller scale then more of the resources
are being brought in by the company (Colombelli 2015).
 Tackling Archaic Industry Head on- There is no secret that the industry of hotel is
not just the fond of Airbnb. The bold and the daring approach taken by Airbnb has
revolutionized the lodging as well as billion-dollar industries of hotel. This has
resulted into finding this industry appealing by many of the new entrepreneurs
entering the industry. Apart from the various costly affairs of the older industry,
Airbnb has set great example of sustaining in the industry with high popularity of
sharing economy (Bhattacharya et al. 2016).

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Conclusion
Therefore, the conclusion that can be drawn from the analysis is that the corporate
strategy helps in pertaining to the different aspects of the firm. It is the vision as well as
tactics of the company for performing its competition. The corporate strategy is the
continuous process, which must appropriately responds to the changing surroundings as well
as conditions that is market situations. Further, it has been analyzed that before Airbnb has
entered in the industry, it was high cost industry. However, after Airbnb has entered the travel
industry, firstly it faced certain challenges and issues but after they started making
competitive business strategies they has taken revolutionary steps for taking industry at new
heights. Every action taken by the firm in response of their action against the issues has led
towards their success and growth. Therefore, it can be said that all of their winning strategies
will be of great help for the success of any business.

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Reference
Bhattacharya, Arijit, Walid Cheffi, Prasanta Kumar Dey, Andrew Thomas, Paul Byard, Mark
Francis, Ron Fisher, and Gareth RT White. "Profiling the resiliency and sustainability of UK
manufacturing companies." Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (2016).
Colombelli, Alessandra. "Top management team characteristics and firm growth: Evidence
from a sample of listed companies." International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior &
Research 21, no. 1 (2015) 107-127.
Eisenhardt, Kathleen M., and Christopher B. Bingham. "Superior strategy in entrepreneurial
settings: Thinking, doing, and the logic of opportunity." Strategy Science 2, no. 4 (2017):
246-257.
Growth Manifesto. Airbnb’S Growth Strategy: How They Attract And Retain 150 Million
Users | Growth Manifesto. 2019. Accessed September 24 2019.
https://www.growthmanifesto.com/airbnb-growth-strategy.
Inc.Com. 4 Business Strategies To Steal From Airbnb. 2017. Accessed September 24 2019.
https://www.inc.com/kayla-matthews/you-should-steal-these-4-business-strategies-from-
airbnb.html.
O’Regan, Michael, and Jaeyeon Choe. "Airbnb and cultural capitalism: Enclosure and control
within the sharing economy." Anatolia 28, no. 2 (2017): 163-172.
Oskam, Jeroen, and Albert Boswijk. "Airbnb: the future of networked hospitality
businesses." Journal of Tourism Futures 2, no. 1 (2016): 22-42.
Teixeira, Thales S., and Morgan Brown. "Airbnb, Etsy, Uber: Acquiring the First Thousand
Customers." (2016).