Airbnb Names Ex-Booking.com Executive Pepijn Rijvers Chief Business Officer

Airbnb's commercial organisation has a new head, and his CV says more about the company's direction than the job title does. Pepijn Rijvers, most recently chief business officer at Tripadvisor Group and a 12-year veteran of Booking.com, started as Airbnb's chief business officer on September 1.

He succeeds Dave Stephenson, who joined Airbnb as CFO in 2019 and became the company's first CBO in 2024. Airbnb said Stephenson "has decided to move on" after eight years, and that he will stay closely involved with the handover until he departs at the end of the year.

Rijvers takes responsibility for homes, hotels, enterprise operations and global markets. That scope is the part worth noting. Hotels and enterprise sit inside his remit, and those are the two areas where Airbnb has been building quietly while insisting it is not becoming an OTA.

CEO Brian Chesky announced the appointment in a company-wide email and leaned hard on the Booking.com years. "Pepijn was one of the strongest operators ever at Booking, and his experience there gave him a clear view of why Airbnb needs to follow a very different path," Chesky wrote. He went on to frame Booking.com as an intent platform, where people arrive already knowing where they are going, against an Airbnb that starts earlier by helping travellers decide where to go, where to stay and what to do.

A hiring pattern, not a one-off

The "very different path" framing sits awkwardly next to the hiring record. Rijvers is the third senior Booking.com alumnus to join Airbnb in recent months. In May the company brought in Andrea D'Amico, an 18-year Booking.com veteran who rose to VP and managing director for EMEA, as VP of hotels, alongside Lou Zameryka, who spent 17 years at the OTA, as global head of hotel enterprise. Chesky can describe the strategy as a departure from Booking.com, but the people being hired to execute it spent their careers building exactly that machine.

Rijvers also arrives with experiences credentials. He joined Tripadvisor Group in April 2025 as president of Viator before moving up to CBO. Speaking to PhocusWire in 2025, he described experiences as a fairly immature category in terms of how consumers search and book, and how little reservation technology providers use, calling the opportunity a "global marketplace for experiences, which is really an unclaimed space still."

That comment now reads differently. Earlier in August, Airbnb agreed a deal with Tripadvisor Group to sell a selection of Tripadvisor experiences on its platform, following Chesky's comments on the second-quarter earnings call about building out the experiences business incrementally. Weeks later, the executive who ran Viator is on the other side of that partnership.

Stephenson's remaining responsibilities are being split up. Fallon O'Connor, currently VP of communications, becomes head of communications and people and takes on the employee experience business. Partnerships move to Hiroki Asai. Corporate development and strategy move to CFO Ellie Mertz.

For property managers weighing Airbnb against the incumbent OTAs, the signal is in the pattern rather than the announcement. Airbnb keeps recruiting the people who built Booking.com's commercial operation, and now one of them owns hotels and enterprise.