You have to wonder what the higher-ups at Booking Holdings think about one of their former hotel guys, Pepijn Rijvers, becoming Airbnb’s chief business officer. I’ll ask Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel about it at Skift Global Forum later this month.
If there is a secret sauce at Booking.com to building a boutique and independent hotel business, Rijvers probably knows the recipe.
Tripadvisor execs must be curious about Airbnb’s new-hire, as well, because Rijvers gave up his chief business officer role there to grab the same title at Airbnb. He’ll be in charge of homes and hotels at Airbnb, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him weighing in on Airbnb’s experiences strategy, too, given his tenure at Tripadvisor.
This all take place as Airbnb and Tripadvisor have an experiences partnership in the pipeline
And to the entrepreneur/investor who wrote to me saying that Airbnb hotels is now “powered by Booking.com,” I can only say that would be a slight exaggeration.
ACCOR GROUP + SKIFT
For this year’s State of Travel report, we created a new travel intelligence framework: the travel stack. Rather than breaking travel down into subsectors, we identified four universal layers that apply to the entire $11 trillion travel industry. Each of these layers also interacts with our earlier Skift Intelligence permission to exist framework.
EDITOR’S PICKS
Airbnb Names Ex-Booking.com Hotel Boss and Tripadvisor Exec as Chief Business Officer
September 1, 2026
If Airbnb needs people connections and know-how to scale its boutique hotels business, it found someone with deep experience in Pepijn Rijvers. He also has marketing and tours and activities experience at Booking.com and Viator, respectively.
Booking Holdings vs. Expedia in B2B: Bombshell Estimate Says Booking Leads in Room Nights
August 28, 2026
No matter how you parse the numbers, Booking Holdings' B2B business appears to be a lot larger than the travel industry previously understood. Its in-process reorganization could have significant implications for OTA competition.
Skift Global Forum
The CEOs of Hilton, Booking Holdings, Expedia, Uber, Accor, and Airbnb are pressure-testing their assumptions on one stage this September, and the room decides what travel's next chapter looks like.
North Javits Center, September 22-24, with OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor and 940 leaders from 590 companies, 76% at director level or above. Pricing increases tomorrow.
SKIFT PODCAST NETWORK
StayTerra is building a platform of premier vacation rental brands backed by Garnett Station Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, but new CEO Amy Kothari has a clear philosophy about how to get there.
In this clip from Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, she joins Brandreth Canaley and Michael Goldin to break down why scale has to follow quality and not the other way around, why chasing unit growth before brand strength leads to churn, and how StayTerra is thinking about market density over flag planting.
SKIFT TRAVEL 200
How are public travel tech companies performing around the world? The Skift Travel 200 pulls the data you need to know to understand the market. Paid subscribers get full access here.
