Thought I misread that the first time through. What did those 7,500 do?
With that said, Hotels.com is owned by a multi-billion dollar conglomerate called Expedia, which employees ~24K people across multiple brands. AirBnB is operating on their own.
The whole group with Expedia was something around 15k if I recall well. It includes more than a hundred independent brands and products, plus a few massive white labels, covering an order of magnitude more languages and currencies than AirBnb. So better not compare the whole conglomerate to AirBnb (except as an evidence it's bloated).
The last media reports put AirBnb at 12000 or 15000 employees, but the article is mentioning a total workforce of 7500, so either the media were very off or a whole bunch of employees are not factored in. Either way it's a lot, no doubt the business can run with half of that.
The support can often sort our issues better than what you could do yourself. They're in a better position to pressure the hotel or rebook you somewhere else nearby.
AirBnB is a relatively high-touch business, so I imagine a huge number of those people were in customer support/customer relations, both for travelers and for property owners. AirBnB also operates in a huge number of countries, and each of those countries need (a) marketers, (b) people with regulatory knowledge (often at a level much more granular than the country level - and to head off any 'but AirBnB ignores the regulations!' comments, while that may be true, I guarantee they still have people that know what they are), (c) again, customer service people knowledgeable with the local language and customs.
If everything was so easy to build we should all quit our jobs and do our own single developer startup.
I am sure there are horror stories where people didn't like their AirBnB, but I am also sure they didn't pay for that AirBnB.
Uber was similarly accused of being bloated and it definitely was on just the engineering team - several thousands of engineers for what is definitely a complex app but not that complex really.
Obviously diversification occurs with these large companies, I just hadn't realized how much they had branched out.
AirBNB is a big company, and big companies have lots of employees.
