Airbnb Hires Pepijn Rijvers as Chief Business Officer

Last spring I was searching Airbnb for a week in Marrakech, a medina riad ideally, the kind of place with a courtyard and a family cooking breakfast in the kitchen below you. Somewhere around the third scroll I hit something unexpected: hotel listings. A 4-star property near Gueliz. A boutique spot in the new city with a rooftop bar and a checkout form that looked lifted straight from Booking.com. I booked a riad, obviously, but I kept thinking about those hotel cards. They felt out of register with everything around them, like someone had spliced footage from two different films.

On September 1, Airbnb explained what it's actually building toward. The company announced the appointment of Pepijn Rijvers as Chief Business Officer, according to a press release at airbnb.com. He started that same day and will oversee Homes, Hotels, Global Markets, and Enterprise Operations. He's succeeding Dave Stephenson, who is preparing to leave, as Travel and Tour World and Bloomberg both confirmed.

The scope of the role is the first thing to register. Rijvers isn't running a hotels division inside Airbnb. He's running hotels plus short-term rentals plus global markets plus enterprise. According to briefs.co, those units were previously Stephenson's territory. Handing all of them to someone whose career ran through Booking Holdings and Tripadvisor is a signal about where CEO Brian Chesky thinks the center of gravity is shifting.

Who Rijvers Actually Is

The résumé here is unusually targeted for what Airbnb is attempting. Skift describes Rijvers as the former head of hotels at Booking.com and former president of Viator, the tours and experiences platform owned by Tripadvisor. Booking.com built its hotel business into one of the dominant online travel agencies in the world. Viator processes millions of activity bookings annually across thousands of operators globally. Rijvers ran parts of both.

The more interesting stop on that resume, to me, is Viator. In a 2025 interview cited by PhocusWire, Rijvers described the experiences category as "a fairly immature category in terms of how consumers search and book experiences, as well as the amount of reservations technology that providers use." I've tried to book experiences through Viator, and I've tried through GetYourGuide, and honestly, his diagnosis is accurate in a way that feels almost clinical. You search for a hiking guide in the Dolomites and you get three listings with identical stock photos, one of which has a phone number that goes to voicemail, and another that wants you to email to confirm availability. The technology layer between an interested traveler and a local operator is surprisingly thin, even now. Half the time the "instant book" button isn't actually instant. Rijvers watched that from the inside at Viator and chose to describe it plainly rather than spin it. That kind of assessment is either a mark of honesty or strategic positioning for what he was planning to build next. Either way, it's the clearest window into how he thinks about product gaps.

What Airbnb Is Trying to Solve

Go back to those hotel cards I saw in Marrakech. The friction I felt wasn't aesthetic. It was functional. When I book a home on Airbnb, the platform's particular logic applies: host response rates, review culture, the messaging thread where you ask about parking and get a reply in 20 minutes because the host lives downstairs. When I look at a hotel on Airbnb, I'm not sure what I'm buying into. Is the review system the same? Is the cancellation policy governed by the same rules? Does Airbnb's customer support team know how to adjudicate a dispute with a 40-room property the way it knows how to handle a single host?

Those aren't product design questions. They're operations questions, and operations questions at scale are exactly what someone with Rijvers' background is trained to answer. Booking.com didn't become dominant by having a nicer interface. It became dominant by solving the connectivity problem between hotels and travelers at a level of reliability that made alternatives feel unreliable by comparison.

Airbnb's hotels push has been building. The sourced materials don't give a specific launch date I can pin to a year with confidence, so I won't pretend otherwise. What the sources do confirm is that hotels now appear as a named business unit reporting to the new CBO, sitting alongside Homes in the org chart according to the airbnb.com announcement. That structural fact matters more than any launch date. Homes and Hotels are being managed as parallel lines of business by the same person, which means the tension between them, who gets promoted in search, whose reviews carry more weight, how pricing logic works across both categories, has to be resolved by one executive rather than negotiated between two.

The Competitive Pressure

Booking.com and Expedia have spent decades building hotel inventory and customer trust simultaneously, iterating on everything from price transparency to loyalty programs to dispute resolution. Airbnb is entering that terrain with a brand that travelers primarily associate with private homes and the occasional horror story about a host canceling 48 hours before arrival.

Rijvers knows that terrain from multiple directions. He was inside Booking.com when it was scaling its hotel supply relationships. He watched the experiences category struggle with its technology deficit while at Viator. Airbnb is now asking him to bring both kinds of pattern recognition to a platform that has its own very specific brand commitments and a user base that chose it, at some point, because it was not a hotel booking site.

That's the real tension in this hire. Rijvers' expertise is most applicable to the parts of Airbnb's ambition that push it toward Booking.com territory. But the travelers who fill Airbnb's core business chose it to avoid that territory. Chesky has, by all accounts, been trying to expand the platform without diluting the thing that made it matter. Giving the hotels push to someone who has operated at the scale of Booking.com is either the most efficient path to making hotel listings credible on Airbnb, or it's the first step toward building something that looks increasingly indistinguishable from what already exists.

I don't think Chesky is naive about that risk. The Airbnb announcement quoted him expressing excitement, the standard register for a CEO introducing a new executive. The structural decision, putting hotels under the same CBO as homes rather than separating them, is the more revealing data point. He's betting that Rijvers can thread the needle: build hotel-grade reliability into the platform without erasing the texture that made the platform worth using.

My read, after watching Airbnb add those hotel cards to my Marrakech search: the interface already feels like the needle is moving. Whether Rijvers makes that feel intentional, rather than like a feature that wandered in from a competitor's product roadmap, is the question his first year will answer.

Kael Maddox is BuzzRAG's Adventure and Solo Travel Correspondent.