Skift Take
It’s shaping up to be Airbnb’s biggest new business. Hotel operators who’ve joined are liking the new customer pool so far. But how long can it stay exclusive?
One of Airbnb’s first taglines was “Forget hotels.” And CEO Brian Chesky once thought the company would never list one. He changed his mind because customers kept asking for them, he said at a Goldman Sachs conference this month. “At some point, I stopped being ideological,” Chesky said. “I started becoming practical.”
He now wants hotels to become one of Airbnb’s next “multi-billion-dollar businesses.” But Airbnb isn’t copying Booking.com or Expedia. At least for now, it’s curating supply, taking a lower cut, and betting that its audience, with over 1.6 billion devices accessing it every year, will deliver demand to hotels that they aren’t getting elsewhere.
Airbnb had 3,939 hotels using a new listing format across hundreds of markets as of September 4, according to AirDNA. Hotels are still “a single-digit percentage of nights booked,” Chesky said, referring to the second quarter. But Airbnb’s core business is approaching $100 billion in gross booking valu
Key Points
- Airbnb is pursuing hotels as a potential next multi-billion-dollar business via a curated, application-based model focused on independent and boutique properties, deliberately differentiating from the broad-net approach of Booking.com and Expedia.
- Early adopters report favorable dynamics: a reportedly lower ~13% take rate, guests who book further ahead (27 to 60+ days), stay slightly longer, and cancel less often—plus Airbnb funds a 15% future-booking credit to drive demand.
- The key open question is incrementality—whether Airbnb delivers genuinely new guests or cannibalizes existing OTA and repeat business—which is hard to verify because platforms don’t share guest email data.
Summary
Airbnb, once defined by its “Forget hotels” ethos, is now pursuing hotels as a potential next multi-billion-dollar business, with CEO Brian Chesky reframing the effort as pragmatic rather than ideological. Rather than mimicking Booking.com or Expedia’s broad-net approach, Airbnb is curating a limited supply of independent and boutique hotels (roughly 3,900 using a new hotel-specific listing template as of early September), vetting them for design, hospitality, and local feel, and placing three former Booking.com executives in leadership roles. The company is betting that its 1.6 billion annual users—skewing young, American, and affluent—will deliver incremental demand that hotels can’t reach elsewhere. Early adopters like Sage Hospitality, Staycity, a&o Hostels, and The Social Hub report encouraging signs: guests book further ahead (27 to 60+ days), stay slightly longer, cancel less, and pay a lower take rate (reportedly ~13% versus 15–20% at rivals). Still, the strategy is unproven—operators remain uncertain whether Airbnb is generating truly new business or simply shifting demand from other channels, a question complicated by the fact that OTAs don’t share guest data.
