Airbnb executives said the company's primary focus for growth in the near term will be luring more individual homeowners to list on the platform, while downplaying the role hotels and professionally managed apartments play in the Airbnb ecosystem.
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Speaking during the company’s fourth quarter and full-year 2020 earnings call, the first as a public company, CEO Brian Chesky said that while the company expects to scale back its overall marketing spend, it’s committing to making the traveling public as comfortable with hosting on the platform as they are booking stays on it.
“On Monday, we launched our first large-scale marketing campaign in five years, ‘Made Possible by Hosts,'” he said. “Even though the brand of Airbnb is mainstream, the idea of hosting is not yet. Our goal with this campaign is to make a long-term investment in educating the world about our hosts. This campaign will help our guests to understand the benefits of being hosted and how this is unique to Airbnb.”
Chesky said the company is betting big on those small-scale hosts as the primary driver of supply growth, noting the typical Airbnb host makes less than $10,000 a year on the platform. Part of those efforts include streamlining the process to become a host.
He stressed, though, that the company’s overall marketing investment would be more efficient than in the past because its brand is now so well established.
“Before we started resuming our marketing spend [in 2020], our traffic levels came back to 95% of the traffic levels of 2019 without any marketing spend,” he said. “And what this revealed is that our brand is inherently strong. It's a noun and verb in pop culture, and so we don't intend to ever again invest the the amount of money as a percentage of revenue on marketing in the future as we did in 2019.”
The company’s letter to shareholders reported travelers booked roughly 193,200,000 nights and experiences on the platform in 2020, down from pre-pandemic performance of 326,900,000 nights and experiences in 2019.
“Airbnb is a community of 4 million hosts,” he said. “Ninety percent are individuals, and they are who we prioritize because that's what our guests seek. Our guests want something that's one of a kind, and this is typically offered by our individual host.”
Asked how the company views the role of hotels and other managed properties, Chesky said he views them as a necessary complement to Airbnb's other supply but not the company’s bread and butter.
“We never want Airbnb guests to come to Airbnb and not be able to find something they're looking for, so we think that hotels, in addition to property managers, are really important for our strategy in filling in our network gaps,” he said. “Again, we don't want anyone to come to Airbnb and leave because they couldn't find a place to stay. So hotels are important.”
He said in the currently depressed demand environment due to COVID-19, Airbnb could be a valuable demand driver for some hotels.
“Most hotels around the world are below 50% occupancy, so we know they're in need of demand, and Airbnb certainly can provide that demand for them.
Chesky did note that pandemic-induced cost cutting led to scaling back on HotelTonight, which Airbnb acquired in early 2019.
“It's one of the most-loved hotel-booking apps in the world, and we were investing quite heavily in this product,” he said. “Now, when the crisis happened, we had to scale back certain investments, and one of the investments we scaled back was our investment in hotels. But we didn’t scale it back entirely. We still are investing in hotels, just not as much as before.”
Chesky also noted the company expects to see growth from people seeking its properties for remote work, who then may list their own homes on Airbnb while they are out of town.
Financial performance
Airbnb reported revenue of $3.4 billion in 2020, a drop of 29.7% from 2019. Comparatively, Marriott International reported a 50% drop in revenue to $10.6 billion in that time period, while Hilton and Expedia Group reported year-over-year drops of 54.4% and 57%, respectively.
Airbnb had $23.9 billion in gross bookings for the year and $5.9 billion in the fourth quarter and reported a net loss of $4.6 billion, which executives attributed in part to costs related to their initial public offering in December. The company had negative $251 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
As of press time, Airbnb’s stock was trading at $182.06 a share, up 24% year to date and still well over the $68 per share IPO price from early December. The Nasdaq Composite is up 4.7% since the start of 2020.