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Since its last major redesign in 2022, Airbnb has been all about the destination: staying in homes so unique or glamorousfrom McMansions with amazing pools to surrealist homes in a shoethat they might be worth a trip unto itself. But starting today, Airbnb is expanding its purview beyond homes . . . again. Its launching a new product called Airbnb Services, and redoubling on Airbnb Experiences (first launched in 2016). [Photo: Damien Maloney/courtesy Airbnb] What is Airbnb Services? Services considers everything that you might want to accompany that home youre renting. Photography. A manicure. A massage or spa treatment. A personal trainer. A private chef or fully catered experience. Its basically everything you could imagine around a wedding, weekend get-together with friends, or even a corporate retreat. Meanwhile, Experiences falls under the greater umbrella of stuff for tourists. These outings hosted by locals include walking tours of local landmarks, cooking classes, and shopping experiences. (They can also include something Airbnb is dubbing Airbnb Originals, which are higher-profile events like getting glammed up with Sabrina Carpenter for a day.) [Photo: Karla Ximena Ceron/courtesy Airbnb] Redesigning an app to do more stuff To offer these new features, Services and Experiences will both get their own tab right on top of the app, alongside Homes. For anyone who has booked a home on Airbnb, the biggest update will be a complete trip timeline that includes both your rental and anything else youve signed up to do. (Airbnb also intends to sell you on services and experiences after youve booked a place to stay.) Summarized, these updates might seem pretty smalland in line with Airbnbs own experimentation for the past decade. The company has hit a mature era of its business, growing 6% year over year. Rental prices have been flat for Airbnb recently, but a bright spot pushing those earnings has been Experiences. By pushing Experiences to a more front-and-center position in the app, and accompanying them with Services, Airbnb is pushing the pedal down on all the stuff they can make money on thats not housing. And in doing so, it becomes as much an event planner as a vacation tool, arguably capable of upping what it can charge by tenfold. Consider that the average vacation costs Americans about $2,800, but the average wedding costs Americans $33,000. Before this update, it would have been inconceivable to book a wedding (complete with hair, food, and entertainment) on Airbnb. After this update, it seems downright simple. Time will tell how deeply Airbnb can seep into our major events and, in turn, the deepest crevices of our wallets. But with a few tweaks to its existing formula, Airbnb is banking on being a lot more than another vacation app.
Category:
E-Commerce
Everyone has their individual bad memories of the pandemic, but one collective nightmare of the early days of that miserable period is the struggle to find toilet paper at your local store. Now, tariffs are bringing concerns about a toilet paper shortage back to the forefront. Suzano SA is the world’s largest exporter of pulp, the raw material used for making products like toilet paper. And the company tells Bloomberg it has seen shipments decline from Brazil to the U.S. due to tariffs, and worries that the shipping disruptions could get worse. It is, to be clear, much too early to know what the impact of pulp shipping disruptions will be. The company said shipments were down 20% in April and that stores, at present, are well stocked. But tariffs could result in higher prices for consumers, which could lead to a rush by some people to stock up. A similar scenario happened last October when a strike by dockworkers on the East Coast sent shoppers flocking to stores, emptying shelves of necessities, including toilet paper. Toilet paper and paper towels are largely produced in the U.S. (just 10% of the countrys toilet paper is imported). But the pulp used to make them is imported from countries like Brazil and Canada (which sends northern bleached softwood kraft pulp our way). It doesn’t take an actual shortage to empty store shelves. Just growing talk of one can cause short-term disruptions to the supply chain. Put another way: Theres a snowball effect. If a small number of people panic-shop, that drives others to do so as well. So if shoppers notice there is less toilet paper on the shelves than usual, they’re more likely to stock up just in case, due to recent talk of empty ports and looming product shortages. Suzano is still shipping products to the U.S.but not only is it shipping less; it’s charging more. The company says it is passing on the cost of tariffs to U.S. buyers, which could be part of the reason for the smaller orders. “Since customers are still struggling to forecast how tariffs can affect their production plants, either directly or indirectly, both pulp buyers and sellers are on a price discovery mode as we speak,” Leo Grimaldi, executive vice president at Suzano, said on a recent call with analysts. “There is not clarity yet of what is this price point needed for a full establishment of market confidence and dynamics.” Like the dockworkers’ strike last year, the trade war was something that was clearly telegraphed by the White House. That gave manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific time to stockpile pulp in order to keep retail prices level. Should a herd mentality lead to product shortages, however, that could lead to store managers putting buying limits on popular items. (The danger is that by limiting what you can buy, it could drive people who were not planning on buying any to join in on the hoarding.) Americans certainly love their toilet paper (which is somewhat ironic, as it didn’t become a household staple until the 1940s). At the start of the pandemic, when panic-buying was in full effect, Americans spent $1.4 billion on toilet paper over a four-week period in March and April of 2020, according to retail sales tracker IRI. That was a 102% increase from the same period a year before, which led to a widespread toilet paper shortage. We’re not alone. After the pandemic got underway, armed robbers in Hong Kong held up a supermarket. They weren’t interested in the cash registers. They did, however, take 600 rolls of toilet paper.
Category:
E-Commerce
On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is cutting less than 3% of its global workforce, including LinkedIn. The company which an estimated 228,000 employees as of last June, meaning the layoffs will affect approximately 6,000 employees. The tech giant, which makes popular software products Windows and Word, will make cuts across various locations, teams, and roles. We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace, a Microsoft spokesperson told Fast Company. The news comes less than two weeks after the Redmond, Washington-based company beat first quarter earnings expectations, driven by its Azure cloud business. It also issued strong guidance going forward, despite President’s Trump’s tariffs and overall economic uncertainty. Microsoft also said it invested heavily in AI infrastructure during the first quarter of 2025. Microsoft said that it regularly adjusts its workforce to meet the strategic demands of the business, and that by reducing layers with fewer managers, the company hopes to increase agility and enhance efficiency by minimizing redundancy and streamlining processes, procedures, and roles. It also said the cuts will let employees spend more time leveraging new technologies and capabilities. On Tuesday, a number of LinkedIn employees posted about the reported layoffs on LinkedIn. The layoffs would be the largest at the company since 2023, when Microsoft eliminated 10,000 jobs, and follows a small round of performance-based layoffs at the beginning of 2025. However, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC the upcoming layoffs are not performance based. CEO Satya Nadella previously said Microsoft planned to spend $80 billion on data centers for artificial intelligence workloads in 2025, which could be even more costly with tariffs. Microsoft isn’t the only tech company to make cuts since the beginning of this year. A number of high-profile technology giants have been trimming their ranks, including Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce. Facebook parent company Meta Platforms cut about 5% of its workforceroughly 3,600 employeesin February, and Amazon announced it was laying off dozens at the end of January.
Category:
E-Commerce
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