Airbnb’s New Design Is Really a Bet on the AI Era

On Monday’s Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, Wil Slickers, Michael Goldin, Brandreth Canaley, and Jamie Lane break down what Airbnb’s latest product and earnings commentary reveal about the future of travel platforms.

The conversation centers on Brian Chesky’s push toward blending hotels, homes, services, and experiences into a more adaptive marketplace, signaling how Airbnb is positioning itself for an AI-driven future of travel discovery and planning.

The team also unpacks Airbnb’s expanded partnership with Delta Air Lines, which now includes Experiences and Services alongside stays, while also touching on what earnings season is revealing about AI adoption and infrastructure across the broader travel industry.

This episode is presented by ⁠⁠Plusgrade⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠Bilt⁠⁠. Visit plusgrade.com to learn more.

And for hotels with restaurants and restaurant owners, Bilt Hospitality is finally here. Go to ⁠⁠joinbilt.com/gmh⁠⁠ to learn more.

Watch This Episode

Good morning.

Hello, welcome back, Jamie. You were in Denver just a week late, later than everybody else. So we missed you.

Welcome.

I missed you guys too. I did make it to Michigan, though, for the first time since June 28th, 1994. Any guesses what I was there 22 years ago for?

Imagining is some sort of family vacation to the lakes or something of that nature.

You would have been approximately 10 years old.

A youth hockey tournament.

The 1994 World Cup, Brazil versus Sweden.

No way. That’s awesome. That’s really fun.

Sort of a fun tie in.

I should have. Brazil. Brazil ended up winning the whole thing.

The game was actually a tie. But to get to see Brazil got first, Sweden got third in the overall and to get them see them playing group stage. Pretty incredible.

It’s your turn to be in a lounge this week.

On my way out to the Verma Executive Summit.

So I’ll be in LA today through Wednesday.

Very nice. I’m so thrilled. I am home.

I’m home. I mean, I’m also going to be leaving this weekend. I’m making a commitment right now.

I’m not making plans in June. I really need you to hold me accountable to that. But I need to stay home.

We’ll see how that goes.

Well, every other week, Brandi, don’t get rid of your entire identity.

I know. Well, and the work stuff, I can’t really control. That’s just kind of a given.

But I was in Hilton Head last weekend or last week for work. Shout out to Kate and her team at Vacation Homes of Hilton Head. We stayed in this incredible house.

It was literally right on the beach. A lot of those homes are like you have to walk on a boardwalk to get to the beach and this was right there. It was beautiful.

I had never been down there before. I don’t hate that that’s where I have to go when I’m traveling for work.

It’s our old stomping grounds, Jamie. Everybody from Atlanta goes to Hilton Head, Fripp Island, Tybee Islands, the low country as they call it.

Yeah, I used to go there to camp. We couldn’t afford running vacations, but yes.

Yeah, this place is like, these were really nice. And this is not where I went on vacation growing up either. But did you guys do anything special for your wives for Mother’s Day?

I certainly hope so.

Well, before Mother’s Day was my son’s birthday. So we had a fun birthday party on Saturday, subsequently followed up by Mother’s Day on Sunday. So I am excited.

The work week is here and the weekend activities, while super fun, are over.

I hosted four mothers. We had 15 for dinner last night. My mom, my wife, my sister, and my mother-in-law.

So we did it right.

Yeah, that’s awesome. I had my mom and my stepdad in Boston for the weekend. We did this like huge seafood, shellfish lunch at Select Oyster in Boston, which was incredible.

And so happy mothers, belated Mother’s Day to all the moms that listened to the show. Hope you guys were treated to a nice weekend as well.

Extravaganza, I love it. I can just picture this tower.

Yeah, exactly. Lobster rolls, also expensive. I now know that going into the summer.

But today, we have some exciting, well, some people think they’re exciting, but earnings reports.

5:26

Expedia Earnings Review

Woo, Jamie’s favorite time of year. But before we hop into that, we want to just shout out our sponsor, Plusgrade.

Plusgrade helps travel companies unlock new revenue through upgrades, premium experiences, and personalized offers across the traveler journey.

From airlines to hotels, Plusgrade empowers a lot of the behind-the-scenes monetization you’re seeing across travel today. So you can all learn more at plusgrade.com. So let’s start with Expedia.

So Jamie, do you want to give us just like a little TLDR? What is the main takeaway from the Expedia earnings report?

Yeah, I’ll give a quick summary. In Expedia, it had a really strong margin beat. Profits were strong.

Knights Book came in a little lower than expectations, 6%. They called out that 2% of that was, and the impact was because of the Middle East and because of Mexico. We talked about that.

Warren Iran, the cartel violence in February in the Puerto Vallarta area.

Then after earnings, the stock did take a bit of a hit, and that was primarily because, one, the Q2 earnings, their expectations they sort of guided for was like 3% to 5%, and 3% to 5% growth is not what investors were hoping for.

Then also with the big profit beat for Q1, they didn’t raise their full year outlook for margin. So you got this great Q1, and then they’re like, rest of the year is going to be sort of in line with what we’ve been saying.

So people were really hoping that they’re going to call out that the rest of the year is going to be good. Management did say that they’re being conservative. So maybe that gives them a chance to continually beat expectations the rest of the year.

But overall, I think investors were a little disappointed on growth outlook for the rest of the year.

But those in the short-term rental space, it keeps getting better and better for Verbo. They had their best first quarter in four years.

And they’re on track for the billion-dollar milestone, getting a billion dollars of revenue, not just through the Verbo channel, but for short-term rentals under the Expedia umbrella. So promising growth there for the short-term rental sector.

Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of vindication from those years of dealing with all their technical debt and as an industry, us being all like, this is terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they’re now the fruits of their labor being doing, handling all of that technical debt and being kind of resilient is paying off. So that’s great to see.

Tim Rosoglio, the shining star of our industry.

I was really interesting. There was a couple points throughout the report where they keep talking about the resiliency of the American consumer and they made a point to call out their more price-sensitive consumers.

And to me, that just, I don’t know, that does not jive with like everything else that we’re reading.

So it may, you know, investors might want more growth, obviously, but it’s like there’s, there’s, you can’t just, I feel like you can’t just bury your head in the sand and be like, everything’s going to be great for the rest of the year when you’re

And I think it’s important to note that of all the hotel companies that reported the workforce corridor, like they were all really strong.

So we essentially had a year of really bad hotel bookings, like low-end consumer and economy hotels, mid-scale hotels were really challenged in 2025, rep bar declined for the first year, non-recessionary year in 2025.

So at least for the hotel side of the business in the US, they’ve got a really easy comp, like they’re growing off of a terrible year. So that is that is going to be a tailwind throughout the entire year for Expedia and booking.

But an incredible, I mean, they did call out on the Verbo side that they’ve now outpaced Airbnb’s growth for Verbo for three consecutive quarters. So I think they’re they’re riding some momentum there going into 2026.

And okay, we’re at the nine minute mark. And so now it’s time to mention AI. So, it’s way too early.

But there, so obviously there’s an enormous section of this, of the report is about AI. And I just thought it was interesting because they said, well, traffic remains quote small.

They are seeing, you know, new types of customers or different types of engagement.

But I think it’s also, you know, everybody’s talking a lot about in our industry, like how should operators, how should companies within our space be using AI and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.

But know that one of the biggest companies in our industry publicly traded is still only seeing small traffic. So it’s not, you know, we’re all still trying to figure out how this is gonna work out.

Yeah. And they’re one of the official partners with ChatGVT. Yeah.

I mean, if they can’t pipeline that.

And I mean, it’s, but I mean, yeah.

I was gonna say you could hear an audible sigh of relief when they got asked about the question of OpenAI, ChatGVT pulling back on their plans to do direct conversion with consumers. They’re like, yeah, this is hard.

Like the whole service side of this industry, like they do not want to be picking up. And like, yeah, that it did not surprise them that they’re rethinking their plans to do direct transactions.

But enabling ads is a total… It’s another place to spend money. So they’re still gonna make money off of travel and two out of the top five spenders on Google over the past decade have been Expedia and booking.com.

So, they will spend and this could be recollected incorrectly, but I believe Airbnb was one of the top spenders on GPT right out of the gate. So, they’re testing it. They’re pushing it hard.

They’ve made some big bets on AI. We’re still kind of waiting to see how some of those play out. But, Skift had a great article this past week on Airbnb’s earnings and some of the AI discussions.

Brandi, do you want to highlight any of that?

Yeah, but before we do, we also, they had the callout about the Uber add-ons.

12:32

Uber Add-ons Bilt

That was a big highlight. And so, I just, again, a shout out to Will and his predictions for the oncoming Uber super app that will take over travel. You’re one step closer.

And before we get to Airbnb, oh, sorry, go ahead, Jamie.

Yeah, can I just make one comment? Because my buddy Naveed Khan at B. Riley Securities asked the question on the earnings call to Ariana.

Like, how does this work? Like, he’s like, I get that with the airlines, like people sort of connect, like, booking their travel and booking their hotels, booking their short terminals when they book flights.

But you’ve got a, I mean, consumer landing in a market, calling their Uber, like, where is the connection here between booking a hotel and booking an Uber? And rightly so, they called out, like, that’s a question for Dara, not for them.

They’re like, we’re just powering it. And it’s their business model that they’re actually gonna convert it.

We’re not, we don’t have to deal with the Ubers, like, that is…

Give them the B2B inventory.

Yeah, exactly. Well, before we get into Airbnb, we’re gonna give another shout out to our sponsor, Bilt. They’re helping restaurants and hotel F&B teams better understand their guests and create more personalized experiences that drive repeat visits.

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So the other big boy in the industry, Airbnb.

15:11

Airbnb Earnings Analysis

All right, Jamie, give us the rundown.

Yeah, so after hours, Airbnb actually slightly dipped in terms of their stock, but then I’m really powered forward the next couple of days in terms of their stock.

So they reported Knight’s Book of 9 percent, would have been 10 percent if it wasn’t for the Middle East, revenue up 18 percent, gross bookie value up 19 percent. Those are really healthy values.

They haven’t seen that growth in revenue in a long time.

And I think importantly, what I think investors really picked up on is that they did rate, even though they slightly missed profit guidance for the quarter, they actually raised for full year and they increased their revenue outlook for the full

year. So as we think about and what’s going to happen in the future, and Airbnb is saying like things are firing all cylinders and that and they’re willing to raise guidance.

And they and really called out some core things in their product that are driving growth. So we’ve talked extensively about reserve now pay later. They rolled out that out globally and they’re seeing incremental growth from that.

Hostly fee simplification, we’ve talked a lot about that one, right? And that now they’re going to be and there’s testing, rolling that out to not just PMS connected hosts to more in certain countries.

AI search growing, they’re going to talk about that at the product release next week. And then hotels and growing more than twice their core business. And I think that’s going to be really big for them going forward.

And I think investors, and I’ve talked with a lot of them, they are really excited about the potential of the hotel business, even though it’s in low single digits now, to be able to compete with Expedia on booking for that, and gives them a lot of

How long until they start signing up the major flags?

I think it’s still a year or two.

They can ride the commitment of independent hotels for another year or two, until growth starts dipping and then boom, we signed Maria.

Yeah, it is a harder way to go about growth, right?

And the independents are the harder ones to get. You got to go to each of them one at a time, and you can’t just go to a few reach and get all their hotels that are going to be distributing because all the reach have branded properties.

So it is not putting it on there at full rack rate either. So you’re going to have to cut margins a little bit.

Yeah. When that happens, when Marriott signs up, I’m just going to go back and set my undergrad thesis on fire.

For those of you who haven’t heard, I did it on the changes of consumer behavior towards the sharing economy and used Airbnb as an example of how, you know, this is going to change the sharing.

I mean, it changed a lot, but signing Marriott Hotels will just be like the final nail in the coffin, disproving pretty much everything I wrote about, so.

Okay. The world’s changed a lot, Brandy, in the two years since you graduated.

Oh, yes, exactly. Only two years ago.

Then the other thing I’ll call out is, it does feel like they’ve quietly rolled out the best loyalty program in the industry, even though they don’t call it a loyalty program for hotels.

Like, and how they had the 10% cash back for Hotel Tonight bookings. Now, if you go and book a hotel on Airbnb, you’re getting that same 10% cash back to be able to then use on a short-term rental booking.

And they’ve called out that 55% of the hotel brokers are returning to then book a home.

So, and Expedium Booking have had great success of taking a hotel booker and then converting them to a short-term rental booker that’s driven a lot of their booking and Expedia’s incremental growth.

And Michael, you called it out, a billion dollars in bookings for Verbo properties through Expedia. That is a major vector to growth.

So, I think a huge question is, can they do the same but having to go create the hotel inventory first to then get the incremental growth on their short-term rentals?

Yeah, and the incremental growth of net new guests to short-term rentals over the past few years is largely plateaued and flatlined. So, hopefully this is a vector of growth for the whole industry.

And the repeat booking after a guest has stayed in a short-term rental is very strong. So, I like this approach, I like it. The direction it can be for the industry.

I don’t know how long this promotion is going to go on. They’re clearly not making a lot of money.

I was just about to say that.

Like, how long do you think 10% is going to stay there?

Not a whole lot longer. But in terms of booking corporate travel for the next few trips and then converting that to a family vacation, 10 out of 10. Great approach.

Yeah.

Another interesting component that we had chatted about offline but is their AI agents.

Because, I mean, obviously, they had to talk about all of their AI efforts and how their engineers are able to do twice as much work as everybody else because of all of their blah, blah, blah AI efforts.

Which I love that they say compared to the industry standard of like, how would you know, how do you know how fast your competitors are coding? But I don’t know if somebody else can answer that for me.

But Airbnb’s AI agents are resolving 40% or handling 40% of all of those communications. Interestingly, Expedia’s is 30% so it’s catching up.

I was wondering if maybe some of like the complexities of like flights might be reducing their ability to handle some of that.

And while that’s really interesting and I know there’s a ton of people in our space that are playing with AI agents, like Conduit is a great example of that.

I at our meeting last week and Hilton had one of the operators, she was saying, well, you know, there’s the automatic refund, like up to 15% that Airbnb will give a guess. And right now that’s happening with some real agents, right?

Just like real people that are like, yep, fine, we’ll refund you and you as a host don’t get to really challenge that.

And so I don’t know if we have any information on, probably not, how much that’s happening with the AI agents, because I can see that being part of the decision tree, right?

Just like people like us that start telling it out there that they’ll automatically refund you 15%. You know, next time you stay in an Airbnb, there you go. You got 15% off.

Just wait till after you stay and complain and the AI agents will give it to you automatically.

Yeah, I mean, hopefully not. But like, that’s crazy, right? Like I can, I think there’s the other side of this like operators are going to start building like their own AI agents to like build the defense to get the money back.

I mean, I don’t know. It’s just going to be a bunch of bots talking to each other at some point. 15% just flying around.

From the Airbnb article, mostly revolving around AI, two things jumped out to me.

One is 60% of the code that they produced was aided by AI. I, as an outsider, am kind of shocked it’s not higher, but I also know that your traditional engineers are very cautious of their code.

So I do suspect that will be a number that continues to rise for everybody. I think it was Anthropic or one of them said 90% of their own code they put out is AI-aided.

So the industry is heading that way and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’ll leave it to you to decide.

The other thing that jumped out and Jamie mentioned it about the reserve now pay later, but that was 20% of Airbnb’s gross bookings last quarter.

That’s a lot of money.

That’s a lot of people saying I’ll pay for this later. We talked about it a little bit pre-show, but that has to lead to more cancellations. Jamie, do you have any specific numbers on it?

Besides, it definitely leads to more cancellations.

Yeah. I don’t have a specific number, but they have called out that cancellations have materially increased for guests that are using reserve now pay later, but that the incremental gain in bookings way outpaces the increase in cancellations.

You’re still getting more bookings on net, and you’re going to have to deal with a slightly higher assumption around cancellation rates.

Yeah. I mean, if you’re booking a $6,000 vacation, it is nice to be able to break that up and not just slap it all on your card. For something like Airbnb, this makes a lot of sense.

I think it gets crazy when you’re like, oh, people are doing buy now, pay later for burritos and stuff like that. There’s different levels. Booking a vacation, this makes a lot of sense.

Getting the guests that are more likely to be like, oh, if I can stretch this out and keeping those guests within the pipeline. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see having a full year of their data on the cancellations.

It doesn’t really, I guess, impact hosts. You do have your calendar blocked up, unfortunately, but it’s not affecting your cash flow necessarily if you can rebook it because you wouldn’t get that anyways.

One of the other partnerships, I totally missed this the first time it went around, but their Delta partnership. I feel like I didn’t, did I miss that when they, how long have they had a Delta partnership for? I know they’ve added to it now.

It’s been in the app a while.

Okay.

Okay. I was like, is this, I don’t know, too many things happening.

Well, on Airbnb and another one of Will’s predictions, I got invited to join, by Airbnb directly to join my local host group on their platform.

Oh, my God.

I have not done it because I have not hosted in about seven years, so still blown away that I’m on their list of hosts. I don’t even own the house anymore.

You hosted one time.

I hosted four or five times, but it’s been seven years and I don’t even own the home anymore. But it’s cool that I still get some e-mail comms from them and get plugged into updates like trying to launch their local host community.

One more comment on Airbnb before close out on that one is because it’s earnings time, I think Brian’s been going on a bunch of different podcasts.

26:31

AI Future Travel

So he was on the TBPN one, I think two days ago.

26:43

He’s on Invest Like the Best last week. It is a good listen to get a sense of where his mind at is around AI. One of the things he called out is that at Airbnb, more than likely people managers are gone.

Like if you’re not, if you’re just managing people in the age of AI, like your job’s over. And even him is using Claude and vibe coding ideas on a day-to-day basis. And that, and you get designers access to these tools.

And like, and it’s, things are moving fast. Like they think they, and with their throughput, with 60% of code being written, that there’s just not going to be the need for managing people.

He said he’s not going to move to all 7,000 reporting just to him, but the levels within the organization are going to be-

Everybody reports to Brian.

I don’t think that, so there’s, there have been these articles about companies that have tried to like rely solely on that, but then the cost of the tokens is so expensive that then they’re like, oh, we’re going to hire people to do the basic code

again. Like, that’s what your employees were doing before you fired them, was like some of that basic coding. I don’t think, I think managing people, that’s the interesting part, like that’s the part that like AI cannot do.

The soft skills, the people skills, you still need effective managers and leaders to run your like workforce, you know?

Yeah, it’s going to be tough to remove people when there’s management. So who’s going to, is it, is a robot or is AI going to fire you?

This is a dystopian hellscape future I don’t want to think about.

A robot has a bad day and everybody’s fired? I mean, come on, it could happen, it could happen. I want to know if this can happen.

As we look at more buy now pay later promotions and it becomes a fifth of Airbnb’s reservations, why not offer some sort of club or membership where you pay X amount a month and then they get to use those credits with some sweetheart discount

attached to it towards their next trip. Is a club model or a subscription model possible, Brandy, Jamie?

I don’t think so. I mean, it could be another, I couldn’t be shocked if that’s something that they did, but I don’t know if that’s something that people are going to want to pay for.

The oversubscription of our lives, I do think that there’s a breaking point where people are, I don’t want to pay monthly for something, I just want to pay when I use your service.

But if the idea is that then you use more of their experiences and services when you’re not traveling and that hooks you in, I mean, I can definitely see that being something that they would be into.

But it took them a long time to do loyalty or even some version of loyalty. I don’t know if subscriptions are going to be.

I would even call it loyalty. I’d call what they’re doing right now an incentive. It’s a conversion incentive.

A bribe?

A bribe.

We will give you 5% that Expedia and booking.com will not give you.

So give us your bookings. Jamie, subs?

Yeah. I don’t think subs is going to be the way they do it. Sort of credits, things like that.

And they’re clearly going to launch something. But subs, like the Inspirato type model, I think you’re sort of into that. Yeah, I don’t see that scaling on the platform.

Yeah.

All right.

30:36

Host Upcoming Plans

Well, I think Jamie probably has the most exciting week ahead of us.

What are you looking forward to the most about the Verma Executive Summit?

Ooh, I’m doing a presentation tomorrow with Jason from Keydata. And we’re gonna-

Oh, wow.

You just announced his retirement. Congrats.

Just announced his retirement. Yeah, this is gonna be his last presentation. Yeah.

So we’re talking about how AI is gonna be impacting the demand side of short-term rentals over the next five, 10 years. So we’re all talking about how we’re using it to run our businesses better.

But is it actually gonna end, it lead to a net benefit and more people traveling? And sort of taking a look back at historical gains and productivity, and what that means and how this time could be different.

Really, I think it’s gonna be a fun topic.

I want to see that deck. Yeah. I’m not going, but I need a coffee, Jamie.

How about you, Michael?

What’s on your agenda this week?

Good question. Same-all, same-all. And I’m excited about it.

It is. We’ve got two more weeks of school with little man and then off to the beach for a week. And then the summer chaos sets in.

So for all those parents, you guys get it.

Well, I have almost an entire straight week at home. So that’s great. I have to drive down to New York.

A friend of mine from Ireland is flying into New York. So I’m meeting her there. So, but I get like four straight weekdays.

That’s not a week at home.

I hate to break it to you. New York is not your home.

I know. I know. I know.

That’s true.

You’re coping over here.

I’m coping. I’m coping. All right, everyone.

Well, thank you for tuning in. Our live listeners, as always, Paul, Steve, thank you for chatting with us and for all of those listening later. Thank you for checking us out and we’ll see you guys all next week.