Worked there a few years ago. Should be double now since they've extended to and filled a new building.
The whole group with Expedia was something around 15k if I recall well. It includes more than a hundred independent brands and products, plus a few massive white labels, covering an order of magnitude more languages and currencies than AirBnb. So better not compare the whole conglomerate to AirBnb (except as an evidence it's bloated).
The last media reports put AirBnb at 12000 or 15000 employees, but the article is mentioning a total workforce of 7500, so either the media were very off or a whole bunch of employees are not factored in. Either way it's a lot, no doubt the business can run with half of that.
Wikipedia lists ~12K employees at AirBnB, so I agree that some additional clarity would be needed to understand the discrepancy.
If you compare the ratios of operating income vs headcount between the two, the companies are nearly identical based on the metrics available in Wikipedia today.
I don't see how you could do a comparison since neither of the company publish any metrics? They're not public and not required to publish any financial or operational information. Turns out it's not even possible to figure out how many employees they currently have. ^^
Just one tip. Don't do the mistake of taking Expedia in place of hotels.com. Expedia is a large conglomerate of many companies that is not representative of just that one. It's like confusing the mobile related business of Samsung versus Samsung as a whole.
The whole group with Expedia was something around 15k if I recall well. It includes more than a hundred independent brands and products, plus a few massive white labels, covering an order of magnitude more languages and currencies than AirBnb. So better not compare the whole conglomerate to AirBnb (except as an evidence it's bloated).
The last media reports put AirBnb at 12000 or 15000 employees, but the article is mentioning a total workforce of 7500, so either the media were very off or a whole bunch of employees are not factored in. Either way it's a lot, no doubt the business can run with half of that.