Airbnb could soon be launching an airline

Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky recently revealed his plans to one day launch an airline. (iStock)

Airbnb, which has recently ventured into trip-planning and expanded far beyond “home sharing,” is considering launching an airline, co-founder Brian Chesky revealed.

“We’ve seriously considered a lot of things around aviation and we’ve spent a lot of time exploring different concepts,” Chesky told The Sunday Times. “We definitely want to make sure, though, that we can get into the end-to-end trip business.”

Chesky compared Airbnb’s ambitions to those of Amazon. Much like how the online retailer has become a “one-stop shop for shopping,” Chesky wants to make Airbnb a “one-stop shop for travel.”

The homesharing service has been considering aviation for at least the past year, according to a report last month from The Information. A little over a year ago, Airbnb teased that it was working on a tool to book flights, but that project has yet to come to fruition. Instead, Chesky seems focused on building an entirely new aviation project.

In April, Chesky posted a tweet asking his followers what they thought the “perfect flying experience” would look like.

In the responding tweets, Chesky seemed to be focused on an experience that would make air travel faster (possibly supersonic), cheaper (possibly with electric aircraft), and more luxurious.

However, building an airline would take years or even decades. Because of Chesky’s obsession with creating entirely new products, technology would have to advance (think flying taxis or supersonic jets) before Airbnb ever launched a transportation product.