Airbnb - statistics & facts
In 2007, two hosts welcomed three guests to their home in San Francisco, laying the foundation for a new company offering short-term stays. Roughly twenty years later, Airbnb has become one of the giants of the online travel market, with around five million hosts listing their properties on the platform and over 2.5 billion guest arrivals as of 2025. After taking the global accommodation market by storm, Airbnb is now eyeing other business segments within the global travel and tourism sector, showing that the company’s ambition does not stop at vacation rentals.
What are Airbnb’s biggest markets?
When looking at the number of nights and experiences booked on Airbnb in 2025, countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa – the EMEA region – surpassed all other markets in which the platform operates, with roughly 215 million bookings that year. That said, a regional breakdown of Airbnb’s revenue shows that North America accounted for the company’s highest earnings in 2025, though EMEA is gradually narrowing the gap.
What are Airbnb’s biggest competitors?
In 2025, Airbnb’s global revenue exceeded 12 billion U.S. dollars, marking an all-time high for the company. Despite the impressive figure, two key players in the global online travel agency (OTA) market, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, outpaced Airbnb, highlighting the fierce competition among online travel platforms. In 2025, the global revenue of Booking Holdings, which owns brands like Booking.com, Priceline, and Agoda, reached a staggering 27 billion U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, the total revenue of Expedia Group, the parent company of Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, peaked at almost 15 billion U.S. dollars.
Although Airbnb ranked behind its two major competitors based on revenue, the platform is known to have one of the lowest marketing-to-revenue ratios among leading online travel agencies worldwide. This indicates a lower dependency on marketing to generate sales than other leading travel companies. In this respect, Airbnb’s strong brand and large volume of direct website traffic might help mitigate the risk of a potential decline in the OTAs’ dominant position driven by growing adoption of artificial intelligence in travel and tourism.
Airbnb’s bet: expanding beyond short-term rentals
Airbnb’s success has not come without controversy. In recent years, tourism hotspots like New York and Barcelona have passed regulations aimed at restricting short-term rentals, arguing that the boom in such accommodation types has had an impact on issues like housing affordability and overtourism.
As new rules on short-term accommodation services might cause some headaches for the company in the future, Airbnb’s intention to diversify its business across multiple verticals in the travel and tourism sector looks even more important to its long-term strategy. After expanding into the experiential travel market, following the relaunch of its experiences segment in 2025, the platform now aims to widen its hotel offerings significantly and has started to test airport pickups. Unlike the typical accommodation options listed on Airbnb, the company’s vision for remaining relevant in the highly competitive online travel market is anything but short-term.
