At first Tushar Bhatia thought everyone was overreacting. The 37-year-old business strategist, who lives in Seattle with his wife and their young child, saw no reason to take his spare room off Airbnb, despite the worrying headlines. Yet one day in late February, in the middle of a spate of sudden cancellations, he found himself hesitating when a new guest offered to shake his hand.

Out of politeness, he gave in – then rushed to the bathroom to thoroughly scrub his hands. That was when he realised everything was about to change.

That experience, at the site of America’s first big coronavirus outbreak, has since spread to Airbnb hosts across the world. The income they have counted on for 11 years has been wiped out almost overnight by a global travel shutdown which has brought one of the world’s brightest tech start-ups to its knees.

From being one of 2020s most anticipated public floats, Airbnb is now in what Rob Seigel, a business professor at Stanford University, calls an “existential” crisis. According to reports, having already lost $322m (£260m) in the first nine months of last year, it has bled another few hundred million since Jan 1 and told investors to expect full-year revenue to be less than half of what it was in 2019.

Hiring and marketing are frozen; hosts are in revolt; and analysis by Business Insider suggests that it barely has enough cash to cover its operating expenses for the rest of the year.

In theory, the company got a vote of confidence last week when two major Silicon Valley investors threw it a $1bn lifeline. But the deal reportedly comes with a steep 10pc interest rate, valuing the company at only $18bn (compared to $31bn in 2017).

Either way, that joyous public float is definitely off, at least in the short term – meaning that early employees could see their valuable stock options expire before they can cash in.

“The impact is massive. It’s never been seen before,” says Scott Shatford, chief executive of the Airbnb analytics company AirDNA. “Cancellation rates have gone through the roof. Rates that were typically 3pc in good times are now, this week, 90pc for reservations made before March 10.”