Airbnb Hires Ex-Booking.com and Viator Exec as Chief Business Officer

What happened

Airbnb has appointed Pepijn Rijvers as its new Chief Business Officer, tapping an executive with a track record across hotels, marketing and tours-and-activities. Rijvers previously ran the hotels business at Booking.com and held a senior marketing role there, and most recently served as president of Viator, the tours-and-activities arm of Tripadvisor.

According to Skift, the hire is aimed at giving Airbnb the industry relationships and operational know-how needed to scale its boutique hotels offering, an area where the platform has been pushing to grow beyond its core home-sharing business.

Why it matters

The appointment signals Airbnb's intent to compete more seriously in categories long dominated by traditional online travel agencies. Rijvers brings first-hand experience of how Booking.com built out its hotel supply and marketing engine, plus insight from Viator into packaging experiences alongside accommodation — both capabilities Airbnb will need if it wants boutique hotels and activities to become durable revenue lines rather than side experiments.

For leaders watching the travel and hospitality sector, the move is a reminder that expanding a platform's service portfolio is as much about people and relationships — hotelier networks, activity operators, marketing partnerships — as it is about product features. Executive hires of this kind often precede visible shifts in how a platform curates supply and presents itself to travellers.

The Renascence take

Airbnb's identity has always rested on the peer-to-peer stay, so folding in hotels and activities is a delicate exercise in brand and experience architecture, not just supply expansion.

Hiring an operator who scaled hotel supply at Booking.com and packaged experiences at Viator suggests Airbnb is less interested in reinventing hospitality and more interested in matching category-leading execution. The risk isn't capability — it's coherence: if boutique hotels and activities feel bolted on rather than designed around the trust and personalisation that built Airbnb's brand, guests will notice the seams. The real test for Rijvers will be whether Airbnb can borrow OTA-grade supply discipline without diluting the host-guest relationship that differentiates it in the first place.