Airbnb Account Executive Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a deal where the standard pitch deck or sales process just wasn't cutting it. What did you change, and how did the prospect respond?

2.Have you ever sold into or partnered with a customer segment that was new to your company? How did you get them to trust you enough to move forward?

3.Tell me about a time you were closing a complex deal while your key stakeholders — internal or external — were spread across multiple time zones. How did you keep momentum without everything falling apart?

4.Walk me through a time you were selling a product or service and realized the deal was pulling in two directions — what was good for one stakeholder inside the account was bad for another. How did you navigate it?

5.Tell me about a time you pushed back on a deal structure or contract term because you believed it was going to create a bad experience for the customer down the line — even though it would have been easier to just close as-is.

6.Tell me about a time you were selling to a customer who'd had a bad experience with a previous vendor in your space — or with your own company. How did you rebuild enough trust to actually close?

7.Estimate how many new property management company accounts Airbnb could realistically add in the U.S. over the next 12 months. Walk me through how you'd size that opportunity.

8.A property management company you just signed tells you their first month's bookings on Airbnb were 30% lower than on their current OTA. How do you diagnose whether that's a platform problem, a listing problem, or an expectation problem?

9.Airbnb is expanding Experiences in a mid-sized U.S. city where Stays is already strong. You're asked to estimate the incremental revenue opportunity for Experiences there. How do you approach it?

10.Your top account — a PMC with 80 listings — just flagged that their average daily rate on Airbnb is running 12% below their rates on a competing OTA, and they're threatening to de-list unless you can explain why. How do you investigate this and what's your response to them?

11.Airbnb is piloting a new fee structure for property managers in your territory. Early data shows it increases host revenue by 8% on average, but about 20% of PMCs actually see lower net payouts due to how their portfolio is structured. How do you roll this out to your accounts?

12.You're building the business case to hire one additional AE on your team to cover a gap in the mid-Atlantic territory. The market has 400 uncontacted PMCs. How do you quantify the ROI of that hire to your manager?

13.Walk me through how you build and manage your pipeline. What does a healthy pipeline look like to you in terms of coverage ratio and stage distribution?

14.How do you typically approach pricing conversations with prospects? What's your process when a prospect says your price is too high?

15.You've just been handed a territory of 150 mid-market property management companies. How do you prioritize who to contact first, and what does your first 30 days look like?

16.How do you run a discovery call? Walk me through the questions you ask and what you're actually trying to learn.

17.A property management company you've been working for four months just told you they're going with a competitor — they cited better analytics and reporting tools. How do you respond in that conversation, and what do you do next?

18.You're three weeks from quarter end, sitting at 68% of quota. You have eight deals in late stages. How do you assess which ones to prioritize, and what specifically do you do to close the gap?

19.You're onboarding a new host with 12 short-term rental properties. Two weeks in, they call you frustrated — their first three bookings all had guest issues and they're questioning whether Airbnb is worth the switch. What do you do?

20.You've identified a boutique hotel group with 8 properties that's never listed on Airbnb. Your research suggests they're a strong fit, but their GM tells you on the first call that they see Airbnb as a 'party platform' and they're worried about the caliber of guests. How do you handle that call?

21.You're mid-negotiation with a property management company that manages 40 vacation rentals. Your champion inside the company just went on unexpected medical leave. The decision deadline is in two weeks and you've never spoken to the actual decision-maker. What's your move?

22.You're pitching a regional property management company. Three calls in, you realize their portfolio is mostly long-term rentals and they have very little short-term inventory — basically the opposite of what Airbnb's platform is optimized for. Do you keep pushing, and why or why not?

23.A host who manages 25 high-end properties tells you they'll expand their Airbnb portfolio by 15 more listings — but only if you can match a pricing guarantee a competitor is offering. Your manager says you don't have the flexibility to match it. What do you do?

24.You're finalizing a deal to bring a property management company with 60 listings onto Airbnb. Two days before signing, you learn from a colleague that this company had a serious trust and safety incident on another platform — multiple guest complaints and one potential fraud case. The deal would hit your quarterly number. What do you do?

25.Tell me about a time you needed something from another team — marketing, ops, product, whoever — and they had no obligation to help you. How did you get them to move?

26.Describe a time you had to get a senior leader — your manager's manager or a customer's exec — to change their position on something. What was your approach?

27.Tell me about a time when your internal champion was actively selling against you — downplaying your solution to their own leadership. How did you find out, and what did you do?

28.Walk me through a time you had to align two internal teams that had genuinely different views on how a customer deal should be structured. How did you get them to a shared position?

29.Tell me about a time you had a customer — or a major internal stakeholder — who wanted something that would have been genuinely bad for the broader relationship or the platform long-term. How did you handle saying no while keeping them engaged?

30.Tell me about the most politically complex internal deal you've had to navigate — where the right outcome for the customer depended on getting people inside your own company to do something they were reluctant to do. What made it hard, and how did you move it forward?