Airbnb: Platform Pivot

From “The Future Of Airbnb” (March 2025): “Airbnb learned important lessons about being spread too thin as they pursued non-core efforts in the years leading up to the pandemic, which I suspect will inform how they approach this next chapter. Chesky intends to run Airbnb for decades to come, and he has audacious goals. While long-term success is far from assured, particularly outside of the travel business, I think Airbnb belongs on a very short list of companies that you’d bet on making this vision a reality.”

As I contextualize the historic long-term trajectory of the leaders in online travel, I often return to the following graphic, which plots the annual gross booking value (GBV) reported by Airbnb and Booking Holdings over a decade, starting from a comparable size (beginning in FY16 for ABNB and in FY10 for BKNG, when both companies were at ~$14 billion in annual GBV).

Two things in particular stand out to me.