Airbnb Inc ($ABNB) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

All right. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining. Airbnb had a strong start to 2026. Last quarter, we talked about the path we've been on to rebuild our foundation, innovate faster, and accelerate growth. In Q1, that continued to pay off. Revenue grew 18% year-over-year to $2.7 billion, which exceeded the high end of our guidance. Now, gross booking value grew 19% year-over-year, driven by strong demand and continued pricing strength, and nights and seats booked grew 9% after accounting for an approximate 100 basis point headwind from the conflict in the Middle East. We're seeing this momentum show up across the business. Nights booked on our app grew 22% year-over-year, and they now account for 63% of total nights booked, which is up from 58% a year ago. Growth in first-time bookers also accelerated 10%. Now, this is the highest growth rate since 2022 with the strong acceleration in Brazil, Japan, and India. And nights and seats for expansion markets grew at roughly twice the rate of our core markets. This is Project Hawaii at work, the blueprint that I talked about last quarter where we create small elite teams and give them a clear mandate. We start with simple improvements, ship, learn quickly, and double down on what works. And eventually, we tackle bigger, more ambitious bets. And last year it drove up hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And this quarter you can see it really showing up more broadly across our business. So I want to give you a few examples. First, new features for guests and hosts. Now we shipped a ton of improvements for guests in Q1. Reserve now pay later is obviously one of them. We introduced it last year to give guests a more flexible way to pay and the response has been incredible. In Q1, we expanded to more markets around the world and as a result, roughly 20% of global GBV came from reserve now pay later bookings. This increased flexibility is changing how guests book. We're seeing longer lead times as well as a mix shift towards larger, higher priced homes. Now, in addition to reserve now pay later, we're also improving search. Guests now see more relevant listings and it's having a positive impact on booking. On the host side, we're building more of what hosts have been asking for. We redesigned host signup flow to make it easier to start hosting. And we're testing host insights, which are personalized recommendations that help hosts improve their listing and stay competitive. And finally, we're upgrading our pricing tools to make it easier for hosts to set prices based on demand and seasonality.

Second, we're expanding what Airbnb offers. In Q1, we continued piloting new Airbnb services to make every part of the trip better. Now, you'll hear more about what's new at our May 20th launch in two weeks. We also continued scaling experiences, and early results show that's becoming a demand flywheel. Almost a quarter of new guests who book an experience go on to book a stay or a service. And about one in three people who book an experience book a stay within 90 days. So services and experiences are about more than just standalone products. They're a great way to introduce new guests to everything Airbnb has to offer. We're also expanding our partnership with Delta Airlines so that travelers can earn Delta miles on qualifying Airbnb experiences and services in addition to homes. And to capture even more trips, we're scaling our boutique and independent hotel pilot to more mature markets around the world. Early results are strong, especially in cities where supply of homes isn't meeting demand or where supply is constrained because of regulation. Now, bringing more hotels onto the platform helps us serve guests when a hotel might be the right choice. It also introduces more new guests to Airbnb. And roughly 55% of guests who book a hotel on Airbnb come back and they book a home.

Third, we're using big events to drive business. Now big events are how Airbnb got its start and we've spent years refining our strategy around them. They do a few big things for the business. First, they help us bring on thousands of new hosts at scale. Many hosts who do join for a big event are renting out their home for the first time and they may continue hosting long after the crowd leaves. Events also strengthen their relationship with cities and governments that need new ways to host millions of visitors. And of course, they give Airbnb a global stage to do what we do best, which is bring people together from all over the world. We saw this playbook in action this February during the Winter Olympics in Italy. As an official Olympics partner, almost 200,000 guests stayed on Airbnb with supply and host markets growing about 30% and GBV more than tripling. Our marketing campaigns generated around 1 billion impressions, and we met with dozens of government officials and community leaders during the games, strengthening our relationships across Italy. The World Cup is the next chapter in our event strategy, and we expect to host more guests than any event in Airbnb's history. Since we started outreach in October, over 100,000 homes have listed on Airbnb for the first time. Now, it's also worth noting that this isn't just a strategy for big global events because we have a playbook that works at every scale so we can be targeted about where and when we grow supply.

Finally, AI. It's changing how we build and innovate. Nearly 60% of the code our engineers produce is now written by AI, which we estimate is about twice the industry average. That means our teams are shipping more features and iterating more quickly. But it's not just about speed. It's about delivering a better experience for our guests and hosts. And customer support is a really great example of this. You see, when guests contact us through our AI assistant, over 40% of issues are now resolved without a human agent. And this is up from about a third in Q4 with significantly faster resolution times. We've seen the cost per booking decrease about 10% year-over-year in Q1. And we expect to see more of this as we improve AI customer support this year. So you can see why we're really excited about the year ahead and our guidance reflects that. We're raising our guidance for 2026 and now expect year-over-year revenue growth to accelerate to low to mid teens and we anticipate our adjusted EBITDA margin to be at least 35%. And all of this is happening against a backdrop of macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. And moments like this show just how resilient Airbnb's model is. Because when travel patterns shift, Airbnb adapts with them. When tariff uncertainty led to fewer people traveling to the US last year, they came to Airbnb and found somewhere else to go. And we're seeing a similar dynamic now. We have millions of homes everywhere in the world at nearly every price point. And that's something most travel companies can't replicate and is a core reason we're able to deliver consistent results even in challenging environments. Now, while we can't predict each quarter with precision, we can control the speed of our innovation. And in the long run, that's what leads to more growth. Lastly, I just want to remind everyone that our 2026 summer release is coming up two weeks from Wednesday on May 20th. I'm really proud of what the team is building and I'm really excited for you to see it. So, I hope you all tune in. With that, I'll turn it over to Ellie.

Hey Ron. Yes. On the app room nights growth, one of the general trends we're seeing is that more and more people are gravitating to using our mobile application. Obviously has been happening for practically over a decade. And there's a couple reasons for this. Number one, we've been more aggressive over the last year, year and a half in pushing people that open Airbnb on a mobile website to download the app. So, we just been a bit more aggressive about that, just really letting them know we have a much better experience. Increasingly also we have more and more people opting into notifications. Notifications pull people back into the app. We also, you know, the way we do emails, we try to really create a lot of hooks for people to use the application. And also, we're just seeing a lot of momentum on downloads in the app store. I think that, you know, every year our top rank in the app store within, you know, the global 50 apps keeps going up year-over-year. So I think a lot of it's just general improvements and optimization. I don't think there's a silver bullet here. With regard to the broader comment on how teams are being restructured for AI, here's what I would say. I think it's really, really early and I think we're at the very, very beginning of how AI is going to change how we all do our jobs. I will say though that one of my principles is that Airbnb has to move at the speed of AI. AI I think we should think of as an accelerant to everything and we can think of it as a disruptive technology. I actually think of it more as an accelerating technology. I think the number one characteristic of AI is speed. It just speeds every single thing up. I also think it requires everyone to be more hands-on and requires everyone to be more nimble and more adaptive to change. I think one of the benefits of the way Airbnb is run is that, you know, and I think there was a term that was coined, Paul Graham coined the founder mode based on a talk I gave, but it's really this notion that leaders should be hands-on. I do not think there's going to be as much of a role for pure people managers, said differently, 30,000 feet hands-off managers. I think everyone's going to have to be much more hands-on, much more in the details of the company and all the data. I think now data inside a company is completely democratized. You don't need to inquire with a data scientist to get data. We all have self-serve dashboards. I'm seeing like many of our design managers and engineering managers going back to coding or using Claude Code. We have 60% of our code being authored by AI. This is significantly higher than our peers and our benchmarks. And so these are some of the things we're seeing. And so I think generally it's just about moving faster and being more hands-on. What the implications are about how we structure our teams in the future, it is way too early to say.

And with regards to flights and loyalty, they're absolutely both on the table. And with loyalty, what I would say is I've always believed the best loyalty program is people loving your product and coming back. That is the best loyalty program. That being said, it's pretty remarkable how successful Airbnb has become given we're probably the only large travel brand in the world that does not have a loyalty program. I've always said that we're looking at something, but if we do, we wouldn't do an out-of-the-box points program. We are looking at our version of a really compelling program. I don't have anything to announce today but I can assure you that when we do something it will be truly differentiated and unique to Airbnb. And with regards to flights, you know, our vision is to really build a global community where you can travel and live anywhere. How you get there is part of that vision. So again, we don't have any announcements to say on flights but I think it's certainly on the table as part of our future vision.

Yeah. And maybe the only other thing I would just add is we're going to have some updates to our hotel product and strategy on May 20.

All right. Yeah, thanks Ken. On hotels, I think our experience is going to be quite different than other OTAs. I think everybody, first of all, is we care a lot about conversion but the first and foremost we really, really care about doing something in a differentiated way and doing it in a design-forward way. With regards to inventory being commingled versus tabs, I'll say two points. Number one, if you were to search right now in New York City, it is commingled. But we are testing a variety of user interface components like a carousel. So a carousel is obviously a left to right where it's got a title and there's a left to right swipe. So it allows a distinct type of inventory to fit within a search results page. This works really, really well. So that's one thing we're doing. The second thing is with regards to hotel tabs. Not to take away too much of our product strategy, but we are, you know, probably going to have more tabs in the future for people that want to find something very, very specific. But the more important and broader answer is neither of those. The more important answer is personalization. There are people that only want to book hotels, they should only see hotels. There are people that only want to book homes, they should only see homes. There are people that would book homes or hotels and depends on the trip type. So, if you're going to search last minute for one night in a business trip and we know all that and we know you sometimes book hotels, we're probably going to show you hotels. If you're looking for a family vacation, you're traveling with four other guests, you're going to stay for a week in Italy, in Tuscany, a hotel's probably not right. We're probably going to show you an Airbnb, a home. And so, I think the ultimate paradigm is not this tab versus commingled inventory. I believe that's a pre-AI paradigm. I think a post-AI paradigm that we're moving towards and this relates in a second to AI search is deep personalization understanding every user, every member and I just want to remind everyone listening that 100% of people who book have an account and they have to have a verified ID. So you cannot book as a guest, you have to have an account, you have to be a member of the community. Therefore we know something about you. We can infer a lot not only about what you're clicking on the site but all of your past booking activity. So the best answer to all of this and the best answer is not necessarily tabs. Although I do think we want tabs as navigation for people to find things, but I think in an age of AI, we know about you. We know your intent and we give you exactly what you're looking for. I think this is what most all e-commerce sites will look like in the age of AI. And that is point number one. Okay. So now let's talk about AI search. What we've learned. So, I'm going to talk about Airbnb's strategy and I'm going to also talk for a moment about where I see AI search going for travel and e-commerce more generally. So, let me talk first about AI search. Okay, so our strategy with AI is actually quite different than our competitors because many of our competitors decided to start top of funnel. Where should I travel? We decided to start bottom of the funnel. The reason we decided to start with this is we wanted to focus on the hardest problem in AI which we thought was customer service. The reason why is the stakes are high. You cannot hallucinate. You have to answer things very, very quickly because they're calling and they have problems. You have to be multilingual often in the same conversation because sometimes guests and hosts don't speak the same language. You have to adjudicate very difficult things. You have to escalate to human accurately especially if it's timely or there's a trust and safety incident. And you have to deal with personally identifiable information. That means that you have to be able to protect people's data. You have to be able to...

We read and train based on nearly 100 policies, tens of thousands of conversations, and look at millions of data points of how a prior case was adjudicated to be able to answer correctly. This is very, very hard. In fact, entire startups like Sierra have a $15 billion market cap just to solve this problem. So it's a very, very difficult problem. I'm proud to say that we've made a lot of progress and over 40% of people who connect with our AI assistant self-solve, and I believe it's by far the best AI self-solve in all of travel. I'm pretty confident of that.

So from bottom of the funnel, then we move midfunnel. And midfunnel would be things like people going on the Airbnb listing page. We have hundreds of millions of reviews on Airbnb. And one of the things our guests told us is when they get to an Airbnb, it's great when they see like 100 reviews, it's awesome, but they don't have time to read all 100 reviews. So, we now have AI summaries. And the AI summaries are really great. We have filters, we have AI summaries. We're now using AI for matching. AI is really helping our search ranking and our relevance. So, these are and we and on May 20th, again, to plug it more time, we're going to see a bunch more AI features in the midfunnel. So, that's midfunnel.

Finally, is top of funnel, which you would call AI search. This is top of funnel and this is what we're currently testing. And I think the first point I want to make is, you know, AI feels like magic but of course it's not magic, nothing is really magic, it just feels like it. And when you break AI under the hood you realize that in order to be good at AI you need to be really good at technology foundational in infra, you need to be really good at data and infrastructure. So what we have been doing over the last few years is really getting our data warehouse really, really clean because your AI is only as good as your data. We've done that.

Of course, as I mentioned in our last earnings call, we hired Ahmed, our CTO, who was the leader of the Metal Llama model. So, we are probably one of the only technology companies in the world, certainly only in travel that has an AI native person running the entire technology stack. And we are essentially piloting a variety of different ways to use AI whether it's in the search box, whether it's once you search, interrupting on the search, it's the filter panel, once you book a trip. So we're trying a lot of different things, we're really in the exploration research development mode.

And I think this goes to my final point which is I don't think anyone's figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet. Let me use an example. ChatGPT last year announced the creation enablement of third party apps and then this past March they shut that project down. And one of the things we noticed is that while ChatGPT traffic converts higher than Google traffic when it's sent to Airbnb, we think the design of a chatbot fundamentally as is currently constructed today does not work for travel or e-commerce. There's essentially four problems.

The first problem with a chatbot is there's too much text. Chatbots are LLMs, large language models. They're language. And most of e-commerce is not language forward, it's photo forward. That's the first problem. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You can't touch anything. You have to type everything. And that's great for Apple conversation, but if you want to like move the price slider, that's much easier than typing 'show me x, y, and z.' The third problem is comparison. If you go to Airbnb in Paris, there's tens of thousands of homes. I think over 100,000 homes. Imagine trying to compare 100,000 homes in a chatbot. You get lost. And so it wants to show you just three options. You want to see more than three and pretty soon you get confused in a thread.

And the fourth problem is that almost all bookings have multiple guests. What we call multiplayer. Chatbots are primarily single player. This doesn't account for the fact that 85% of people booking send a message, 100% have an account. And also chatbots are not map native. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why I don't think travel or e-commerce for AI has been figured out. That's why I think while AI is a risk to us and everyone, if it's a risk to us, it's a risk to everyone. It's a risk to everyone. It's an opportunity for us. And so I believe that over the next year, you're going to see a lot of innovation around AI search, AI native interfaces. And I think not only can we solve this for home sharing, I think we can solve it for all parts of travel and maybe even parts of living.

Yeah. Hey Eric. I think you can think about our core accommodations business of homes as a few different categories. So you have essentially hosts that connect via an API. So we might call that host API partners. These are primarily property managers. That's one category. Then we have primary homes. Homes that people live in primarily so typically more than 180 days a year. Then you have vacation homes. Then you have things like private rooms. So you have to think about each and I would break them into two. The API and the primary homes or vacation homes. These are the two buckets.

I think with the host API partners, I think it's more about AI enabling us to build more tools. I think we've been a little bit lagging behind third parties in building great tools for host API partners and as a segment the host API hosts are growing really, really fast and we see a really big opportunity to better serve them. One of the things we found is that the more properties you manage on Airbnb, the lower your rating is. So said differently, our customers have higher satisfaction with individual hosts over property managers. Now, on the one hand, that's encouraging because that inventory is more unique, exclusive to Airbnb. Other hand, we see that as opportunity. One of the things host API partners say is, well, we want to be better hosts, but we need better tools.

So, AI is a like, you know, maybe here's an analogy. In the old world, you might need a team of 20 engineers. In the new world, an engineer can spin up 10 agents, and those agents can work 24/7. I mean, I'm kind of exaggerating a little bit. You have to be there to prompt them. And the amount of work they can do without supervision isn't overnight typically for most tasks, but you can see a huge amount of leverage. So, the fact that we're adopting AI tools is a way for us to get a lot more leverage around the software for host API partners. And just to give you a really finer point, originally we didn't have the resources to do all the host API work we wanted to do. And now with AI, we're re-evaluating how much productivity we have and we're able to accelerate the development of this work. So that one's more about not acquiring properties, but about enabling them to be successful and expanding.

AI especially though can help the sourcing, discovery, and the listing of primary homes. So without again giving away some of the things we'll show on M20 May 20th, we do find that AI can make it much easier to list your property. So right now you have to type everything in. You type in your address. You type in your title. You have to type in your listing description. Eventually I imagine a world where you know you can just say like list my place. You put in your address. It can scrape information off the internet. You can take photos. It can even write your description based on computer visioning of the photos. So it's very, very difficult for a regular person to list their property. A business has no problem. It's their job. They'll have an employee list a property on Airbnb. So removing friction is not as important for host API partners. Let's say partners want power tools. We'll build those. Regular people want things to be easy. Hence AI makes things easy.

So it can help find properties to help us target what properties we need in which neighborhoods. It can help us understand what the bounty is, how much we'll pay in this neighborhood versus that neighborhood and then make it easier to list. So yes, AI is one of the best things ever happened to Airbnb and these are some of the reasons why.

Yeah. And not to keep plugging May 20th, but I think part of your answer will be answered in two weeks on why they book on Airbnb. But what I would say is, you know, we want to be able to have a lowest price guarantee. We want to have best-in-class merchandising. If you for example search say New York, you'll see I think we already have probably the best merchandising of hotels of any of the major travel sites and that's our V1 with a new business we barely entered. So I think that you're going to see that there's a lot more improvements, a lot more iterations, a lot more customization. There's a lot of reasons people will book hotels on Airbnb, but I think I don't want to pass over this one point. We have billions of visits already on Airbnb. So hotels could be a multi-billion dollar revenue business without anyone intending to ever come to Airbnb to book a hotel.

I think we have so much traffic and our conversion rate is significantly lower than say Booking.com. And so I think there's a massive increase in conversion rate by just converting the travelers already in our site. And so think about it as they're already in our store. They've told us in their store they're looking for a place to stay. If they don't find a home, they're probably going to another store and booking a product we don't have. We have a product on another aisle. Then a whole bunch of people are going to book. We think there is enough upside that without attracting people to Airbnb for hotels, you could still build a giant business. Now, of course, we wanted people to come to Airbnb to book hotels as well. And I think that really requires us to disclose a bit of a product roadmap, but I can say that we are envisioning a differentiated strategy where we have the lowest prices, the best quality hotels, and the most differentiated product offer.

And then with regard to payments, obviously Reserve Now Pay Later, we're still actually in early innings. So, for example, we're doing a global roll out. We're bringing it to desktop and also we don't really merchandise that much. So, one of the things we can do is we can merchandise it top of funnel. But that's just the beginning. There's a lot of other things. We have payment installments. This has been huge in Brazil. You know, there's a lot to do in many different countries. A lot of countries have unique payment methods they want to be able to use. Having more updated flexible cancellation policies. We got rid of the very strict cancellation policy. A lot of them move to flexible or medium level flexible policies which has helped a lot. We have an entire roadmap around payments and pricing and I think the payments and pricing roadmap will deliver has the opportunity to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. So there's an entire team, it's essentially the project Y model, we have an entire team on pricing and there's going to be a lot to do. You know, I think, you know, Reserve Now Pay Later is a uniquely large bullet, but there are dozens of different projects that can deliver growth.

Okay. Well, let me start with the second question. Is that too big? No, definitely not. We are thinking very, very expansively. And you've rattled off a number of things. You know, I maybe just to like zoom out for a second. I do see Amazon as a pretty good inspiration for us. Obviously there's many things that are different about everything than Amazon. We're a much more capital A business. Design is kind of very central to how we approach things. But I do think that the model that they had where they went from books to kind of everything for retail is a really good model for us. And they considered all these businesses actually categories, category expansion. And so we think there's a lot of category expansion and some will be first party and some will be third party.

So for example, we've already announced groceries. That's a third party. We're working with Instacart. We've realized, you know, they've been doing this for over a decade. We don't need to learn how to do grocery delivery. And then some of the first party services we do like photography. There's really, we didn't see any site that was doing that really, really incredibly well. And we felt like that was very much unique to Airbnb and hosts. So that's an example of that. I think the way to think about this is that we're seeing ourselves building an ecosystem. And I think that today people think of the home as the sole sun of the solar system of Airbnb. If you really ask yourself, if you could paint a picture of Airbnb, what would the image be? A home. I think in the future it will be a member, a guest. And what we really want to see is a constellation of services, of ancillary offerings. I think a home, a hotel, service experiences are literally just the beginning.

Even within services I think there's a huge endless opportunity and then the natural question comes out well if you're doing all these things are you going to get distracted? Well the answer to this again we learned from Amazon is that every subsequent offering we offer is less work than the prior offering because once you solve one service the next service is only 20% different, once you solve that service the next service is only 10% different so every new service gets more and more efficient. And what we find is that each new service, each new experience, each new offering brings in a different type of guest and sometimes people come in not to book a home but maybe to book a service, to book an experience, book a hotel and they might book a home later. So we are really seeing this as an ecosystem and we do imagine offering just about everything that a traveler needs or just about anything someone needs to live somewhere especially for less than a year. This is where really Airbnb shines, sight unseen bookings in the real world.

With regards to the biggest hurdles for hotels, I don't there's no like really large hurdle. It's really about relentless optimization execution. It's really just about speed and I think we have a MVP, a minimum viable product that's excellent, but it is the minimum and it's not the maximum. We're going to make it excellent. And we wanted to do is we really want to crack a few cities and a lot of it's just about supply and demand. It's really about like making sure we have the right prices of the right hotels in the right markets. We want to have the best prices online. We want them to be the best hotels, the best prices, the best merchandising and the most features and we want to make sure that people can discover and find them. So, a lot of this is just about optimization and it's just going to be a little bit of time. I think we can do it very, very quickly.

We're hiring some great people, some people are internal, some people come from the hotel industry and I'm very, very optimistic. One thing I'll just say about hotels is hotels want to be on Airbnb. I think this is a really, really important point. We're not coming kicking and screaming on this side. They're very enthusiastic and one of the things we heard from them is they want another channel especially boutiques and independents that typically pay higher commissions than the chains on the OTAs. And many of the independents have told us that they're feeling pressure to franchise and not all of them want to join a franchise. And one of the reasons why is because they don't have a membership or loyalty program and again they can't negotiate the lower commission rates with the OTAs. So I think Airbnb can become a very appealing channel for them. So it's going to be a lot of relentless optimization and execution.

All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today. Again I'm incredibly proud of what our team continues to deliver. Revenue grew 18%. We beat and raised guidance and the momentum is showing up across every part of the business. And I'll have more to share at our summer release on May 20th. Thank you for joining.