Brian Chesky: All right, Stephen. Well, that was, you are absolutely not overreaching on Icons. So let me give you a sense. You can think of a company as going through a few phases, especially to start a company. You have an idea, you get product market fit, that’s phase one. Phase two is you try to go into hyper growth. We’ve done that. Phase three, you become a real company, you go public, you generate a return for shareholders. And then the fourth frontier, and very few companies have ever done this, is you reinvent yourself and you go from offering one thing to many things. And a lot of the big tech companies have done this. But one of the companies that I think is a really interesting one to look at is Nike. In the late 70s and early 80s, my recollection, I was born in 81, but my recollection is, I remember, Nike was mostly a running shoe company.
And then the 80s, they became more popular with basketball and other things. But at the time, people didn’t really think of Nike as a serious basketball shoe. And so they had to not only create a great product for basketball, but they had to actually stretch the brand and open up in people’s minds what Nike stands for. And a lot of brands have had to do this. I mean Apple had to do this with the iPod. And I think Airbnb, one of the strengths of our brand also is something that we have to manage which is Airbnb is a noun and a verb. It’s synonymous with a category, kind of like Kleenex or Xerox. People say, I’m going to get an Airbnb. I’m going to Airbnb my place. Literally, the name Airbnb has the name B&B in it. So one of the challenges is that people open our app to expect to see stays.
And so what we want to do in addition to bringing back experiences, you are totally right, is we wanted to expand Airbnb’s brand positioning to include more than just a place to stay. And one of the things you’ll notice is when we launched Icons, we said these are extraordinary experiences. We didn’t say these are extraordinary stays. We positioned them as experiences. And so you can almost imagine Icons is like we are a car company, but we are starting with a Formula 1 car. And very few people can experience a Formula 1 car, but it captures the magic. It captures the demand. It really expands the brand and increases our permission to be able to go into experiences. And then you kind of move down market. And one of our goals is going to be to bring the magic of Icons to everyone.
So I can’t probably say too much more about experiences, but absolutely it’s not a leap or a stretch whatsoever. Icons is primarily a brand positioning and a brand investment. It obviously wasn’t a business. There’s only about 4,000 tickets. But we are seeing some really encouraging signs in the last week, a big bump in traffic. It’s a lot more top of mind. A lot more people are opening our app. And I just think we are being positioned as more aspirational. And I think people are now starting to think of us for experiences. So I think we’ve really paved the way for next year. Ellie, do you want to take the Olympics in your own?
Ellie Mertz: Yes, certainly. So if you look at our history, I would say that special events have always been kind of a good moment for Airbnb to shine and have been overall additive in terms of both our brand perception as well as supply growth. I think what we’ve seen from prior events, and I’m talking about pre-COVID Olympics, World Cup, Super Bowl, those type of events, what we see is that it should bring a ton of supply onto the platform. And while not all of that supply will persist, a good portion of it does. And so it’s a nice supply acquisition moment for us. I would also say it’s really additive in terms of signaling to cities how helpful and additive Airbnb can be to those cities to ramp up supply in a very organic and easy way without adding incremental hotel infrastructure that will not be necessarily needed long-term.
And I think you see that in particular in Paris right now. We’re going to be hugely additive in terms of hosting travelers for the games, whereas the existing infrastructure would not be able to manage such a large inflow.
Stephen Ju: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question will come from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Hey, this is Dave [ph] on for Doug. Thanks for taking the questions. One for you, Ellie. Can you talk about how you’re thinking about the investment levers that provide flexibility and shape your 35% plus EBITDA margin guide for the full year? And can we expect to see these levers get pulled more through the year?
Ellie Mertz: Yes, so I couldn’t hear entirely, but a question about our guide for full year EBITDA margins, a floor of 35%. Let me just talk a little bit. Yes, the investment level.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes, and how you’re thinking about investment levers.
Ellie Mertz: Yes, of course. So let me just step back and provide a little bit more color in terms of why the 35%. If you look at our performance since the IPO, pre-IPO, we had a negative 5% EBITDA margin. And behold, three years after the IPO, we delivered nearly 37% EBITDA margins last year. I think we have repeatedly demonstrated the increased strength of this business model in terms of very strong profitability, inclusive of GAAP, net income profitability, as well as free cash flow. And at the same time, where we sit today, we see a huge opportunity in driving incremental growth. And so as we kicked off the year last quarter and looked at our opportunity set, we’ve identified a handful of areas where we’d like the flexibility to lean in and drive incremental growth beyond what we’re seeing today.
So where would you see those investment levers on the P&L? It’s really two areas. So first, not surprisingly, is marketing. In marketing, we’ve been very disciplined over the last couple of years. We continue to have a much lower level of marketing intensity than really anyone else in travel. And at the same time, at the margin, we have seen some incremental opportunities to lean in on channels where we’re seeing higher ROIs. In Q1, we saw nice, very high ROIs in performance marketing. To the extent that that continues, we would lean in modestly over the course of the year. Additionally, and probably more importantly, Brian talked a little bit about our opportunity set in international markets. And that’s also an area where, to the extent that our full funnel marketing investments are working, we would look to top off those investments and to therefore accelerate growth.
So marketing is one line item. You will potentially see some margin compression in order to drive growth. The second area, Brian talked about prioritizing our resources and identified that, in many cases, our product development team is our kind of scarcest resource. And I think when you hear us talk about our roadmap, you can obviously infer that we have a very robust list of initiatives that we would like to tackle. And so there’s an opportunity to, at the margin, add more personnel over the course of the year to allow us to accelerate that roadmap. And you would see that in particular on the product development line item. So grand scheme of things, no material pivot in terms of our overall financial discipline, but instead a bit of lean into those areas where we believe we can accelerate growth.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you for the detailed response.
Operator: Your next question will come from the line of Kevin Kopelman with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Kevin Kopelman: Great, thanks a lot. I had a question on the May release. You added a couple of small new features to the user profiles, I think on the photos and the travel stamps. Can we see that as a first step towards some of the profile enhancements and community features that you’ve talked about being interested in in the past and where does kind of building out potentially new community features stand in your priority list? Thanks.
Brian Chesky: Yes, hey Kevin. We spoke in this call mostly about Icons, but I mean, I am equally excited for the results that we’ve seen for group travel. I’m not going to go through all the metrics, but the metrics have been all really, really positive for group travel features. And in particular, one of the things we’ve seen is, when people book an Airbnb, the average number of guests is two. So that means that typically for every booking, there’s another guest. But typically the other guest hasn’t connected their account to Airbnb. So if you travel with a partner or a friend, maybe if you book, the other person doesn’t actually have an account or they haven’t connected their account. So as we’ve, and it’s strategic for us to get more accounts, that would make sense, right?
