Rebecca Van Dyck joins the business while top marketer Hiroki Asai moves into a new chief experience officer role.
Airbnb has appointed Rebecca Van Dyck as its chief marketing officer as its current top marketer, global head of marketing Hiroki Asai, moves into a newly created chief experience officer role.
The CMO job at Airbnb has been vacant since 2018, when its first CMO Jonathan Mildenhall departed after four years. Asai joined the business in 2020 to lead marketing.
As CMO, Van Dyck will report to Asai and will lead Airbnb’s marketing, research and creative teams while working closely with product development.
Asai’s move into the chief experience officer role will “better reflect” his work overseeing the end-to-end customer experience, Airbnb says. He will continue to oversee the marketing, design, product and community teams.
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Van Dyck’s appointment is a long time coming, suggested CEO Brian Chesky, who wrote to staff: “I’ve actually been trying to get Becca to join Airbnb since I first met her in 2012. This 13-year journey has been the longest recruiting process of my career.”
She previously held senior roles at Meta, Apple and Wieden + Kennedy.
Changes at Airbnb’s top table come as the business refreshed its proposition to be “more than just stays” last month. Chesky wants the business to evolve into a travel and lifestyle platform, rather than just an accommodation destination.
“We’re in the midst of a major transformation as a company—Airbnb is now more than a place to stay. As we launch two new businesses, we need people around the world to understand this shift, and Becca brings exactly the kind of leadership we need for this moment,” added Chesky.
The step to reshuffle and appoint a CMO comes after Airbnb spent the last few years making changes to its teams. “We had to rebuild our operating model to bring Experiences and Services into the app and into the market,” Asai told Marketing Week last month.
A key part of that reset has been Airbnb’s move to bring capabilities like media and creative in-house, as well as shifting its marketing investment away from purely performance. This was a shift Asai championed when he joined in 2020. Strategy, creative, design and execution now all happen under one roof and in parallel, the company says. Asai told Marketing Week that all these teams now “work from the same brief”.
