Airbnb embraces home working with location-blind equal pay model

The new model will apply to staff in the US, but also those in the UK and other countries. To make it work, the company said it would focus in-person collaboration on roughly quarterly get-togethers and aim to bundle work together into two product releases a year, its chief executive and co-founder, Brian Chesky, said.

Other companies that have embraced remote work have been less generous. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft all ask employees to take a pay cut if they move somewhere with a substantially lower cost of living.

Airbnb is recovering from a difficult pandemic. The company, whose bookings plummeted as international travel fell away, laid off a quarter of its headcount in May 2020, scaling back its investments in hotels and ultra-luxury apartments and pausing plans to move into transportation and content creation.

It went public in December 2020, an uncomfortable period for a travel-focused company, but has maintained a market cap of around $100bn in the 18 months since.