VRWS Leadership Interview of the Day

1. You recently moved from leading Southern Europe Key Accounts to headingthe entire EMEA Key Accounts and Regional API team. At this broader scale, howdoes your approach to partner relationships change, and what does managing API partnerships across EMEA require that pure commercial account management does not?

Great question! With this change I was entrusted to enlarge my and my team’s scope to focus on a much larger territory and pool of partners. This translates into the opportunity to learn about more places, more guest and host behaviors, more stories of success and areas of improvement. I now look forward to having my first (business or leisure?) trip to Cornwall or check-out the ramping Danish market!
Our team approach will be focused on partnering with our professional hosts to drive high quality stays at scale. We also want to further strengthen our B2B muscle and bring them a more upscale treatment that takes into consideration the nuances of working with larger inventories and leveraging technology.. This means joint strategic planning as in pure commercial account management, but also product design, UI reviews and go to market, clear escalation paths, structured QBRs and updates with the deepest insights ever available.

2. Airbnb’s CEO has publicly stated that AI is now writing 60% of the company’snew code, and that a significant focus is building better tools for API partners.From where you sit working directly with those partners across EMEA, what are the most concrete improvements that better tooling could unlock for professional property managers in the short term?

We are integrating AI in everything we do. Broadly speaking for Airbnb, it will translate into better experiences for hosts and guests as we highlight and share the most relevant information in a hyper personalised way.
For our professional property managers and API partners in particular, AI means:

• faster loops between product prototyping and launch both on airbnb and
  through the API
• faster and deeper access to data insights to capture every opportunity
  offered by the market.
• the ability to automate recurring tasks and dedicate more care to higher
  value activities

Eventually AI should and will be deployed by Airbnb to drive what our partners care the most: more and higher quality bookings.

3. EMEA is Airbnb’s second largest region by revenue and growing, yet the marketis extraordinarily fragmented, different regulations, different guest behaviours,different levels of host professionalism across countries. How do you prioritise where to focus commercially?

EMEA is an amazingly complex market. EMEA’s regulatory landscape can feel like a maze, but we’re right there with our Hosts—championing their value, advocating for smart improvements, and co-creating sustainable solutions every step of the way.
I’m a host myself and I know firsthand the energy this activity brings offsets any possible complexity.
In fact, EMEA is also exciting, with its diverse and amazing destinations giving great opportunities to test, learn and have a big impact.
Our focus is around matching supply and demand in the best way across the region, making sure the right supply is available at the right time and at the right price.
Thanks to our data and AI now we have an unprecedented opportunity to translate this general recipe at geo and sub-geo level.

4. You have spent your entire career at the intersection of platform ecosystems and commercial growth, from Vodafone to Expedia to Airbnb. What has working across such different platform businesses taught you about what separates the partnerships that genuinely scale from those that look good on paper but never quite deliver?

There’s a few learnings I brought with me across these experiences: First, things move fast in tech, and we cannot afford to stand still. We need to adapt quickly and know each other’s product and offering on the deepest level.
When we know each other’s products inside-out, we move together instead of in parallel. I’m always inspired by diving into our partners’ UIs and listings to see what makes them shine.
The second is the value of listening to partners and connecting on a deeper level.
Great partnerships grow from genuine curiosity. When both sides take the time to understand what success looks like—beyond the commercial terms—we turn simple contracts into lasting relationships.
At Airbnb, meaningful connection is the heartbeat of everything we do. Bringing that same spirit to every collaboration helps us build something bigger.
I look forward to meeting our partners and the industry at VRWS, it will be fun!