Airbnb Courts Independent Hotels With a 13% Take Rate and Curated Supply

A curated hotel channel charging a reported 13% commission is taking shape inside Airbnb, and the independent operators who joined early say the guests it sends book further ahead and cancel less than the ones they get elsewhere.

Skift reported on 21 September that 3,939 hotels were using Airbnb's new hotel-specific listing format across hundreds of markets as of 4 September, citing data from AirDNA. Chief executive Brian Chesky has said he wants hotels to become one of Airbnb's next multi-billion-dollar businesses, though they still account for only a single-digit percentage of nights booked, a figure he gave for the second quarter. Airbnb's core business is approaching $100 billion in gross booking value.

The approach is not the one Booking.com and Expedia run. Rather than casting a wide net, Airbnb is taking applications and curating, favouring independent and boutique properties and vetting them on design, hospitality and local character. Three former Booking.com executives now hold leadership roles in the effort.

What Airbnb is selling operators is a different audience, not more of the same one. The platform counts over 1.6 billion devices accessing it each year, skewing young, American and affluent, and the pitch is that this demand is hard to reach through existing channels.

Early adopters including Sage Hospitality, Staycity, a&o Hostels and The Social Hub told Skift the early signals look favourable. Guests book 27 to 60 or more days ahead, stay slightly longer and cancel less often. The take rate is reportedly around 13%, against 15% to 20% at the larger OTAs, and Airbnb is funding a 15% credit towards a future booking to pull demand through.

"At some point, I stopped being ideological," Chesky said at a Goldman Sachs conference this month, explaining why a company whose early tagline was "Forget hotels" now sells them. "I started becoming practical."

The incrementality question

Whether any of this is new business is the question operators cannot easily answer. If Airbnb is winning bookings that would otherwise have arrived through Booking.com, Expedia or the hotel's own site, a lower commission is worth very little. Verifying it is hard because platforms do not share guest email addresses, which leaves operators comparing channel mix and guessing at the overlap.

Two other things deserve watching. Curation is what makes the channel attractive to the independents currently on it, and a curated channel stops being a differentiator the moment it opens up. A 13% take rate paired with a subsidised booking credit is also an acquisition price, not necessarily a standing one.

Operators signing up now would do well to treat both as introductory terms and model what the economics look like if they drift towards the market norm.