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Airbnb claimed to have made marketshare gains against hotels in 2024, and to be doing likewise in its competition with Vrbo.
Chief Financial Officer Ellie Mertz told analysts during Airbnb’s fourth quarter earnings call Thursday that product improvements and brand marketing efforts “have really been attracting, frankly, classic hotel users to try our product and has allowed us to continue to gain market share.”
Mertz added that “we feel like we are doing quite well” in the competition against Vrbo, Expedia’s vacation rental platform.
In the fourth quarter, Expedia Group’s lodging bookings jumped 12%, as did Airbnb’s nights and experiences booked. Most of Expedia’s lodging growth came from hotel nights, which increased 14%. Still, Vrbo’s booked nights saw acceleration throughout the year, and it added 1 million properties, many of them in urban areas.
“Vrbo, obviously, had a very soft comp in terms of their business contracting in the U.S. or globally in Q4 of ’23,” Merz said. “And in the last quarter what se wee is that the markets that we tend to compete against them in, in particular, non-urban markets, it was actually one of our fastest-growing segments in the U.S.”
Airbnb Won’t Build the Future by Itself
In another earnings call highlight, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky noted how Airbnb is traditionally a closed system, building many of its products and features from scratch, but he sees that changing.
“Third-party integrations are incredibly compelling because why not?” Chesky said. “Like you allow the world to build in Airbnb. We don’t need to build the future by ourselves.”
He said local businesses, from cleaning services to grocery companies, might be the first areas where partnerships could come in. Chesky conceded, though, that Airbnb would lean into building its own products before opting for partnerships.
In other matters, Chesky reiterated that the relaunch of Airbnb Experiences is on tap for May. He said that tech stack changes starting six years ago will enable Airbnb to expand beyond short-term rentals into the entire travel experience and become an “extensible platform.”
Stays are just a small portion of the overall travel experience, he said.
Airbnb Financials
Chesky said revenue, nights and experiences booked, and gross booking value all accelerated in the fourth quarter compared with the third. He claimed that Airbnb’s growth outpaced that of the travel industry as a whole.
Airbnb’s net income was $461 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a $349 million loss in the same period a year earlier. Citing strong travel demand and product improvements, Airbnb reported that fourth quarter revenue jumped 12% to $2.5 billion.
Airbnb’s share price was up nearly 16% to around $163 in trading Friday morning.
