Airbnb Expands Hotels As Q4 2025 Results Show Early Traction

Airbnb, best known for short-term home rentals, said it will expand its hotel business through 2026 after seeing “promising” early results. The company disclosed the push in its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings, saying hotels help capture trips when a home rental isn’t available or isn’t the best fit. Airbnb said it began partnering directly with boutique and independent hotels in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Madrid, and plans to add more markets this year.

Tighter short-term rental rules and constrained city supply

Airbnb is starting with cities where short-term rental rules have tightened, and legal home-rental supply can be harder to scale. In New York City, Local Law 18 requires hosts to register and bars booking platforms from processing transactions for unregistered short-term rentals, thereby sharply limiting available listings. In San Francisco, rules include a permanent-residency requirement and an annual cap on un-hosted (entire-home) short-term rental nights.  Adding hotels helps Airbnb serve travelers in these high-demand markets even when homes are in short supply.

New threat to hotel-heavy OTAs?

Hotels also keep more shoppers in Airbnb’s app rather than sending them to hotel-first platforms. If Airbnb can show hotels and homes in one place, it can win trips that would have gone to an online travel agency, and then encourage repeat bookings across both lodging types.

The hotel partnerships are part of Airbnb’s broader growth strategy, alongside Services and Experiences introduced in May 2025, as the company works to expand beyond its core home-rental business.

Financial highlights: strong Q4, upbeat 2026 outlook, continued reinvestment

Airbnb said the fourth quarter delivered its strongest momentum in more than two years:

• revenue of $2.78 billion (up 12 percent),
• adjusted EBITDA was $786 million (up from $765 million),
• gross booking value of $20.4 billion (up 16 percent),
• nights booked up 10 percent year over year,
• net income of $341 million (compared to $461 million during the same period in 2024), as Airbnb continues to invest in growth initiatives.

For the full year 2025, Airbnb saw

• revenue of $12.2 billion, reflecting 10 percent annual growth,
• net profit of $2.5 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in 2024,
• adjusted EBITDA of $4.3 billion, up from $4 billion the year before,
• gross booking value of $91.3 billion, up 12 percent,
• bookings totaled 533 million nights and seats, an 8 percent increase from the prior year.

Looking ahead, Airbnb guided to first-quarter 2026 revenue of $2.59–$2.63 billion and said it expects at least low double-digit revenue growth in 2026, while continuing to reinvest in marketing, product, and technology—setting the stage for a bigger hotels rollout.

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