Airbnb Puts One Leader Over China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia

Airbnb has consolidated its Asian business under a single regional leader, promoting Zhiqiu Kong to regional director for Asia with responsibility for China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia.

Kong joined Airbnb more than ten years ago and has held leadership roles across product innovation, growth and business strategy. He was most recently head of Airbnb China. Reporting to him, Michael He becomes country manager for China. He has spent more than nine years at the company and was until now China's business and growth operations lead.

On paper this is a routine appointment. The structure underneath it is the part worth noticing. Airbnb has historically run China as a separate problem with its own leadership and its own rules, a legacy of the years when the domestic Airbnb app and the separate Chinese product were managed as different businesses. Putting China under the same person who owns Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia folds it back into one regional P&L, and it means the executive who spent the last stretch running the hardest market in the region now sets priorities for the easier ones.

For hosts and property managers in the region, the practical question is which markets get investment attention. Airbnb's growth story outside North America and Europe has leaned heavily on Japan, Korea and India in recent years, and the company has been adding payment and booking features aimed specifically at Asia-Pacific travellers, including pay-later bookings introduced earlier this year. A single regional owner makes it easier to push a feature across five markets at once. It also makes it easier to deprioritise a market quietly, without the visible signal of a country leader leaving.

The appointment sits alongside a broader pattern at Airbnb of promoting from within rather than hiring senior operators from the hotel or OTA world. Both Kong and He are long-tenured internal candidates. That tends to produce continuity rather than a change of direction, so operators expecting a strategic reset in Asia off the back of this should probably not.

Airbnb did not say whether the regional director role is new or whether it replaces a previous structure, and it gave no detail on how Asia is being weighted against other regions in its 2027 planning. Those are the numbers that would actually tell operators something. What to watch instead is whether Asia-first product launches start arriving faster than the Asia-second rollouts operators in the region have grown used to.