Airbnb Is Rebuilding Itself as a Travel Marketplace

Airbnb had 3,939 hotels using its new listing format across hundreds of markets as of September 4, according to AirDNA data reported by Skift. For a company whose early marketing told travelers to “Forget hotels,” that is quite the plot twist.

CEO Brian Chesky has also found an unexpected customer for Airbnb Experiences: people who already live in the destination. He told the Skift Global Forum that the experiences business had grown sixfold year over year after Airbnb concentrated on Paris, with locals booking activities in their own city.

Put those moves together and Airbnb starts looking broader than a vacation-rental company. My read is that it is assembling a marketplace for the whole trip, plus pieces of everyday leisure: homes, selected hotels and bookable activities for visitors or residents. The facts support that direction. They do not yet show that Airbnb can reproduce the Paris result across cities or build a hotel operation that seriously challenges established online travel agencies.

“Forget Hotels” Has Entered Its Practical Era

One of Airbnb’s first taglines was “Forget hotels,” and Chesky once thought the platform would never list one. Customers kept asking for hotels, he said at a Goldman Sachs conference in September, and the CEO eventually “stopped being ideological” and became practical.

That surrender to customer demand is the useful historical context. Airbnb built its identity around homes as an alternative to standardized accommodation. Hotels now give the platform inventory for travelers who still want a front desk, a shorter stay or simply another option when an apartment does not fit.

The hotel push remains small beside Airbnb’s core business. Hotels represented a single-digit percentage of nights booked in the second quarter, Chesky said, while the core business was approaching $100 billion in gross booking value. He wants hotels to become a multibillion-dollar business, but 3,939 participating properties and a CEO target describe an early expansion, not a conquered kingdom. Booking.com can keep the panic button behind glass for now.

Airbnb is also taking a curated approach rather than immediately recreating the giant inventories associated with Booking.com or Expedia. The company is betting that its audience, reported by Skift as more than 1.6 billion devices accessing Airbnb annually, can deliver customers that participating hotels are missing elsewhere.

That comparison has limits. The available figures do not reveal how many users are unique people, how hotel conversion compares with rival platforms or whether the selection will remain curated as Airbnb chases scale. Curation can make browsing less chaotic. It can also leave travelers with too little inventory to know whether a listed rate is competitive.

Experiences Has Already Had Several Lives

Airbnb’s activity business arrived more than a decade ago and went through several false starts. The company relaunched Experiences in 2025, endured a sluggish beginning and concentrated on getting Paris right before expanding the playbook.

Chesky said that focus produced sixfold year-over-year growth and credited residents booking Paris experiences. Airbnb plans to take the approach to New York and other cities. It has also relaxed its resistance to mainstream attractions such as Eiffel Tower tours.

The growth claim needs a seat belt. Airbnb has not provided the underlying booking total in the available reporting, so sixfold growth could reflect rapid expansion from a small base. Paris is one city, and Chesky acknowledged that the model was still far from operating in 1,000 cities. Paris can prove that local demand exists on Airbnb. It cannot prove that residents of hundreds of cities will open a travel app whenever Saturday looks boring.

Still, locals change the economics of the idea. Major experiences platforms generally market to travelers, according to Skift. Visitors arrive in waves tied to seasons and flight schedules. Residents create a potential audience throughout the year. If Airbnb can repeatedly put local customers into unsold classes, tours and activities, an operator gains another demand channel and Airbnb gains transactions between its users’ trips.

That reasoning depends on three assumptions: locals return often enough to justify marketing costs, operators can offer activities residents consider fresh, and Paris was more than a launch anomaly. We do not yet have retention, repeat-booking or city-by-city data to test them.

The “Local” Pitch Has Flipped Direction

Travel media has long sold Airbnb as a portal into local life. A September Condé Nast Traveler guide to Madrid described an Airbnb as a more affordable way to experience the city as locals do, then vetted listings using factors including ratings, location, reviews, Superhost status and Guest Favorite status.

That is an editorial recommendation, not a citywide price study. It still captures the familiar promise: rent a home and borrow the texture of somebody else’s neighborhood. Airbnb Experiences now points the same language back at residents. Parisians booking Paris activities are locals purchasing a packaged version of their own city. The tourist gaze has come home for the weekend.

Homes also retain use cases that hotels can struggle to match. In a first-person Halifax stay, writer Hannah Chubb needed space for six people near the city’s attractions. She found most downtown listings were smaller one- or two-bedroom apartments before booking a three-bedroom heritage home two blocks from the water.

One successful group stay cannot describe Airbnb’s overall inventory or value. It does show why adding hotels does not erase the home category. A three-bedroom house with common space solves a different problem from two or three hotel rooms. The emerging marketplace can place both options in the same search environment, then add an activity after checkout. Convenient, yes. Also a very efficient way to keep your entire trip inside one company’s funnel.

How Travelers Should Read the New Airbnb

Airbnb’s expansion gives travelers more choices inside one app, but the platform’s categories should be evaluated separately.

Compare the final accommodation offer. A hotel appearing on Airbnb has earned distribution, not automatic bargain status. Check the total price, cancellation terms, room details and the hotel’s direct channel before paying.

Treat homes as a group-size calculation. The Halifax example shows the practical appeal: bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and shared space can suit a group. Divide the complete cost by the number of travelers and compare it with the number of hotel rooms the group would actually require.

Read sixfold growth as momentum, not scale. Without the starting booking count, the figure says that Paris expanded rapidly. It says little about how large the business has become or what availability will look like in another city.

Search local experiences with local skepticism. A resident knows whether an activity offers access or expertise they cannot arrange independently. The platform label should not turn an ordinary reservation into cultural enlightenment by osmosis.

Airbnb’s hotel listings and local experiences share one strategic logic: bring more supply into the marketplace, then give the existing audience more reasons to transact before, during and between trips. Hotels fill accommodation gaps. Local bookings could smooth the travel seasonality of activities. Neither bet has reached the scale required to declare Airbnb a full-service rival to the largest booking platforms.

The old slogan asked travelers to forget hotels. The 2026 version asks them to forget the category boundaries and keep searching inside Airbnb.