Just days after Expedia Group touted record growth of its loyalty program and said it's a long-term driver of retaining high-value guests, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that type of points-based program isn't in the cards for his company.
During the company's fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings call, Chesky said he doesn't consider travel booking platforms Expedia and Booking.com as Airbnb's sole competition. Airbnb has "a lot of competitors in a lot of different categories," he said. On a fundamental level, he doesn't see the need for a loyalty arms race to drive bookings.
"We generally have a slightly different approach to distribution where we think just continually innovating our product is great," he said. "The best loyalty program is building a product people love so much they want to come back. We don't have to pay them to come back."
Airbnb's most recent earnings showed continued strong travel demand, with strong-enough performance to avoid the wave of layoffs and cuts that have hit almost all other major players in the tech industry. The company reported $1.9 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter and $8.4 billion for full-year 2022.
Chesky said Airbnb continues to improve its technology platform, particularly via artificial intelligence that will allow the company to more thoughtfully curate its 6.6 million listings. He added Airbnb has a unique challenge with more than 100 million reviews on its platform in 2022.
"To parse through all these reviews is very laborious, and I think AI is really going to benefit our long-tail of data," he said.
Airbnb executives said one of the biggest opportunities for their company is the realization of a dream long held by travel brands: Better funneling guest demand to where there is available supply — instead of having supply chase demand patterns.
Chief Financial Officer Dave Stephenson said the company has made leaps and bounds with its flexible bookings offering, which he said better allows the company to match guests and hosts.
"We have very strong adoption of that feature and think that it's a great way for us to distribute demand to where we have supply," he said. "That's a benefit for Airbnb because we have this more difficult problem ... of matching or trying to match the right guests to the right host. And flexible [booking] gives us the ability to do that."
One way Airbnb would like to be more like Expedia is by expanding its offering of hotel listings, Chesky said. He added growing that inventory will be key to realizing Airbnb's ambitions as a booking platform.
"Hotels are an important way to fill a network gap," he said. "People come to Airbnb because we have something unique that they can't get anywhere else. But we also have a huge amount of traffic, so we want to make sure people who come to Airbnb don't leave without finding something."