Airbnb Q2 Revenue Rises 17% to $3.6 Billion, Raises 2026 Outlook

Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB ) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

Access the full call at Summary Airbnb, Inc. 2 billion. The company highlighted AI as a core driver of product development and efficiency, reducing concept-to-launch times by 60% and cutting customer support costs per booking by 16%. Airbnb expanded its services with groceries, car rentals, airport pickups, luggage storage, and introduced resort passes, noting strong momentum in bookings.

The company reported that 35% of first-time hotel guests return to Airbnb to book a home, indicating strong cross-category appeal. 5%. Management noted the strategic importance of AI in improving guest and host experiences, including AI-driven pricing models and AI-powered customer support. The company emphasized its focus on expanding its hotel offerings and experiences, with hotel nights growing three times faster than its homes business.

Airbnb expressed confidence in its growth momentum, citing improvements in user engagement and an increase in first-time bookers, particularly among Gen Z. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good afternoon and thank you for joining Airbnb's earnings conference call for the second quarter of 2026. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the Investor Relations section of Airbnb's website. Following this call, I will now hand the call over to Andrew Slavin, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead. Andrew Slavin, Vice President of Investor Relations Thank you so much. Good afternoon and welcome to Airbnb's second quarter of 2026 earnings call. Thank you for joining us today.

On the call with us we have Airbnb's co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky and our Chief Financial Officer Ellie Mertz. Earlier today we issued a shareholder letter with our financial results and commentary for 2Q26. These items are also posted on the Investor Relations section of Airbnb's website. During the call, we'll make brief opening remarks and then spend the remainder of time on Q&A.

Before I turn it over to Brian, I would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our shareholder letter and in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That being said, we urge you to consider these factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information contained in this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

You should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. Also during this call we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures. We provided reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in the shareholder letter posted to our investor relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results and with that, I'll pass the call over to Brian.

Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO All right, thanks Andrew. And good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining. Over the first half of 2026, we've delivered some of the strongest results in years.

In Q2, that momentum accelerated. We exceeded our outlook across every key metric. 2 billion. And Nights and Experiences Booked grew 10% year over year, accelerating from Q1.

We are seeing this momentum show up across the business. Nights booked on our app grew 23% year over year, and they now account for 64% of total nights booked, which is up from 59% last year. More new guests are trying Airbnb than we've seen in years. In fact, growth among our first-time bookers accelerated to 11%.

Now this is the highest growth rate we have seen in four years. And among first-time bookers, the Gen Z cohort is growing the fastest. Our expansion markets continue to outpace our core markets with Net Nights Booked growing about twice as fast. But what's especially encouraging is that we're not only seeing growth accelerate in our emerging markets, we are seeing growth accelerate in many of our core markets.

In fact, the US, France, UK and Australia all accelerated in growth in Q2. Now these results reflect something much bigger than a strong quarter. What they reflect is a fundamental shift in how we are building products. I think most people naturally want to point to one product or one initiative to explain a strong quarter, but that is not what's happening here.

This is a culmination of changes we've been making over the last several years. We rebuilt Airbnb from the ground up to be an AI-native company. We have more world-class talent than ever before and AI is transforming how we execute and build products. Said simply, AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb.

Today we're building, testing and iterating faster than we could just a year ago. Across some of our key initiatives, we've reduced the time from concept to launch by as much as 60%. And compared to the same six months last year, we've increased the number of features and improvements we shipped this year by nearly 80%. The acceleration from AI allowed us to make hundreds of improvements across Airbnb for hosts and guests, and I want to highlight a few examples that are helping drive the outperformance we're seeing.

So first I want to talk about how we've made it easier for guests to book. I've talked in past quarters about Project Hawaii, which is our innovation blueprint where hundreds of improvements compound over time. AI is accelerating this work across search, signup, checkout and payments. And by reducing friction across the guest journey, we are converting more traffic into booking and that's become one of the biggest drivers of our growth.

We improved search and discovery, making it easier for guests to find and book the right home, hotel, service or experience, and it's meaningfully improving conversion. We also introduced AI-generated listing highlights so guests can quickly understand the key details about a home. We also launched AI-powered review highlights, surfacing what guest reviews say about a home's location, amenities and more. Later this year we'll introduce AI home comparison, allowing guests to compare homes side by side before booking.

We simplified signup and login, making it easier for guests to get started on Airbnb. We streamlined checkout by making pricing and cancellation policy clear. And we also continue to expand Reserve Now, Pay Later to more listings, and we're making it more visible throughout the booking flow. AI is also making it easier to host.

Now we know that hosts are more successful when they have the right price, the right insights and the right tools. And AI is helping us improve all three. We made it easier for hosts to set competitive prices and get more bookings. We also gave hosts more actionable insights to help them improve their listings and increase their earning potential.

And we're rolling out AI tools that help new hosts get started faster and better understand their pricing and earning opportunities. AI is also transforming customer support. Our AI assistant is now available in more than 50 languages. Nearly 45% of issues that start with our AI assistant are now resolved without a human agent while delivering much faster resolution times.

Later this year we will begin introducing AI voice support, extending the experience to phone calls. Now, AI isn't just making the product better, it's also making Airbnb more efficient. In Q2 customer support costs per booking declined about 16% year over year, driven in part by improvements by our AI assistant. We expect those costs to continue to decline as our AI assistant resolves more and more issues and of course as we bring it to voice.

But improving the core experience is really only part of the story because we're also continuing to expand what Airbnb offers. In May, as you know, we expanded Airbnb services across grocery delivery, car rental, airport pickups and luggage storage. And recently we introduced resort passes, giving guests day access to amenities at some of the world's best hotels. Now, it's still early, but what we are seeing is really strong momentum in booking.

And every new service that we ship we can do faster than the service before, so we're getting much more efficient. For example, groceries took eight to nine months, and airport pickups took about six weeks to develop. So you can see how these things are compounding. And we're also seeing similar momentum with Airbnb Experiences.

We added thousands of new experiences across our most in-demand categories, increasing supply by nearly 80% year over year during Q2. While Experiences are still a small part of our business, bookings accelerated both year over year and actually sequentially from last quarter. And we also expanded our accommodations business, adding thousands of boutique and independent hotels across top destinations around the world. Featured hotels come with a price match guarantee and up to 15% credit that guests can use toward future bookings.

Roughly 35% of first-time hotel guests return to Airbnb to book a home. And what this shows is how hotels are introducing new guests to Airbnb. Many of those new guests don't just come back and book hotels, they come back and they book homes. So hotels are making homes stronger.

While hotels still represent a single-digit percentage of nights booked, hotel nights are growing approximately three times faster than our homes business. So there's a lot of growth ahead of us. Now finally, I want to share an update on our event strategy. Many major events help strengthen the Airbnb brand while driving both supply and demand.

I will remind you that Airbnb started to provide housing for events. So housing for events is in our DNA. Now these major events introduce millions of people to Airbnb, encouraging more people to become hosts, help cities welcome more visitors without building a new hotel. Now, while bookings from any single event may be temporary, the brand awareness, the trust and the new hosts these partnerships create benefit our business long after the event ends.

And the World Cup is one example of this strategy. As an official tournament partner, Airbnb hosted millions of people during the tournament, many first-time guests. Now more than 150,000 homes across host cities were listed on Airbnb for the first time, creating new economic opportunity for locals. And it didn't stop with just the World Cup because we are expanding this playbook to other events including the Olympics, the Tour de France, Basel, Lollapalooza, La Liga in Spain and most recently NASCAR.

Now when you put it all together, I think there's a bigger story this quarter. And the story is this. There was no single product, there's no single partnership or initiative that explains our results. It's a combination of stronger execution, a world-class team, and an innovation model that is accelerated by AI.

This is what's creating the momentum across our business. There is no silver bullet and we believe it's one of the reasons we're outperforming our largest peers in travel. It's also evidence that the changes we've made over the last several years are paying off. Because those changes are rooted in the way we build and operate the business.

We believe that momentum will continue through the coming quarters. It's giving us so much confidence in the second half of this year that that's why we're raising our guidance. And with that, I'll turn it over to Ellie to share more. Ellie Mertz, Chief Financial Officer Thanks, Brian.

And good afternoon everyone. I'll start with Q2 financial results, then cover our outlook for Q3 and the full year 2026. As Brian shared, Q2 was another great quarter for Airbnb with continued momentum across the business. Despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we continue to see strong underlying demand globally and the impact to our business from the conflict was less than we had anticipated.

2 billion, driven by strong growth in both nights and stays booked and ADR. ADR increased 5% year over year, or 4% excluding the impact of FX, with noticeable strength in North America and Europe. Nights and stays growth was strong across every region. We saw high single-digit growth in both North America and Europe, with Europe marking a steady recovery from the Middle East-related headwinds we saw in Q1, alongside approximately 20% growth in Latin America and high-teens growth in Asia Pacific.

As Brian mentioned, we've been able to deliver these results not from a single action, but the collective actions across our platform. For guests, these improvements have spanned search and discovery to payments and checkout, and for hosts we've made it easier to get started and improved pricing and insights to help them become more competitive. Now, of the many changes that have collectively contributed to our strong growth, we wanted to provide an update on two that we've spoken about in the past, in particular Reserve Now, Pay Later and our simplified fee structure. First, we continue to see Reserve Now, Pay Later benefit the business.

It drove more bookings, longer booking lead times, and contributed to the increase in ADR. Specifically in Q2, over 20% of our total GBV was booked using this flexible payment option. Given the strong results that it delivered in July, we expanded the types of bookings eligible for Reserve Now, Pay Later. Now, beyond the immediate uplift in nights booked, we believe this provides a longer-term competitive benefit, enabling hosts to lock in earlier calendar share and better aligning our payment options with guest preferences.

Second, the migration of API hosts to a single service fee helped our hosts price more competitively and provided greater price transparency. As a result of its success, we recently announced the broader rollout of the single fee to the majority of our remaining hosts, which we expect to be completed by year end. Approximately half of our active listings are now subject to the single service fee. Hello.

Now let me spend some time on our Q2 financial results. 6 billion, exceeding the high end of our outlook. 3 billion, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 35%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of over 100 basis points compared to last year was driven by strong revenue growth and cost efficiencies in operations and support and product development, partially offset by continued investment in sales and marketing.

Meanwhile, the year over year increase in net income was driven by higher operating income and a 77 million tax benefit recorded in the current period related to recently published tax guidance impacting prior year taxes. Next, our balance sheet and cash flow. 3 billion of free cash flow in Q2. 8 billion of free cash flow, representing a free cash flow margin of 37%.

Now, absent the impact of Reserve Now, Pay Later bookings, which defer guest payments from the time of booking closer to the date of stay, we expect that unearned fees would have grown year over year in Q2. 1 billion of our common stock, enabled by our strong balance sheet and significant cash flow generation. Returning capital to shareholders remains a core component of our capital allocation strategy. Now finally, let's shift to our Q3 and full year 2026 outlook.

We're encouraged by the momentum we've seen so far this year and are excited about our roadmap to drive growth in 26 and beyond. 77 billion, representing year over year growth of 15% to 17%. This includes an approximate 3 percentage point foreign exchange tailwind. After factoring in our hedging program, we expect year over year GBV growth to be in the mid-teens, driven by low double-digit growth in nights and stays booked and a moderate increase in ADR due to mix shift and price appreciation.

In Q3, we are not assuming any significant impact related to the conflict in the Middle East. On profitability, we expect adjusted EBITDA to increase year over year and for adjusted EBITDA margin to be down slightly compared to Q3 2025 due to the timing of investments this year. Now moving to the full year, we are raising our revenue and adjusted EBITDA outlook. We now expect year over year revenue growth to improve to at least mid-teens, up from the low- to mid-teens guidance we provided last quarter, supported by the accelerated pace of nights and stays booked we've observed across our business.

For the full year, we expect our implied take rate to be relatively flat compared to 2025, accounting for the timing of bookings versus check-in with Reserve Now, Pay Later, as well as higher customer incentives related to new businesses during 2026.