Full Video: Airbnb CEO at Skift Global Forum 2022

An enthusiastic Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky took to the stage at Skift Global Forum in New York City on September 21 and made his case for why we are entering a "golden age of travel" during a wide ranging conversation with Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali.

The talk with Chesky was a fitting final session for this year's forum, as he pulled together many of the themes discussed over the previous days, including new remote work trends, corporate travel and the value of experiential travel.

Watch the full video of the conversation, as well as read a transcript of it, below, to hear Chesky, including his thoughts on the blending between between travel and living, between work and leisure, and why travel is being redistributed outside the major cities.

Rafat Ali: All right, folks, you guys are ready for this? Everybody ready? Thank you, Brian, for being here.

Brian Chesky Thank you for having me here.

Ali: It's become our annual tradition.

Chesky: I know. Now two is a tradition.

Ali: Two is a tradition. You opened last year's conference, now you're closing this year's conference. I guess, next year, you'll be in the middle somewhere. Well, thank you for being here. Obviously, anything you say is of high interest, so I'm so glad you're here. So, you have been the biggest proponent of how the world has changed.

Chesky: Yes.

Ali: … and what that means for travel. You've said travel will never come back to what it was pre-pandemic.

Chesky: Right.

Ali: All the remarks you said last year at Skift Global Forum, in many ways they continue to play out. Is there any pullback you're seeing in terms of things going back to normal in terms of length of stays, are they shortening back to what it was pre-pandemic, et cetera, et cetera?

Chesky: Not yet. I mean, so before the pandemic, Airbnb was a primarily cross-border business, where you'll go to another country and stay in the city. And 80 percent of our business was either urban or cross-border. Then the pandemic happened, people couldn't go to cities, they weren't crossing borders. So, what they did is two big phenomenons happened. They would get in a car and they'd travel not by plane, but by car, like 200 miles away, which is basically the length of a tank of gas. And they would stay not necessarily in big cities, but in these