Airbnb has finally filled one of the most watched vacant seats in marketing. In early June 2025, the company announced that Rebecca (Becca) Van Dyck will join as Chief Marketing Officer, leading Airbnb’s Marketing, Research and Creative teams and reporting to Hiroki Asai.

This is the first time Airbnb has had a CMO since 2018, when founding marketer Jonathan Mildenhall left the business. The top marketing remit was effectively split until Asai took over as global head of marketing in 2020. He now steps into a newly created Chief Experience Officer role, responsible for the end to end customer experience and overseeing Van Dyck.

The timing is not accidental. Airbnb is in what its leadership is calling a “major transformation”, pushing beyond pure vacation rentals into a broader travel services and experiences ecosystem, and rolling out a significant platform overhaul at the same time.

So who is taking the wheel on marketing during this shift?

Van Dyck brings more than thirty years of experience working on some of the most iconic brands in the world. She has been Chief Operating Officer of Meta’s Reality Labs, Chief Marketing Officer for AR and VR at Meta, Senior Director of Worldwide Marketing and Communications at Apple, Chief Marketing Officer at Levi’s, and global account director on Nike at Wieden and Kennedy, where she helped drive work on campaigns like Just Do It and global World Cup and Olympic efforts.

At Airbnb, her remit goes well beyond advertising. The company has said her team will be embedded in product development from the start, shaping new features and launches from the ground up rather than just communicating them afterwards.

From a loyalty and customer value perspective, this is where it gets interesting. Airbnb is trying to behave less like a listings site and more like a full travel companion. Putting a marketer with deep product, brand and experience credentials into the CMO chair, and pairing her with a Chief Experience Officer, is a pretty clear signal that they want marketing, product and experience to feel like a single system.

My take is that you will see fewer one off brand stunts and more joined up work that rewards people for using Airbnb across stays, experiences and, eventually, add on services. For anyone in loyalty and customer experience, this move is a live case study in how a platform brand rewires itself around the whole journey, not just the booking moment.