OTA Earnings Analysis: What Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com’s Earnings Tell Us About STR Trends in 2026

Key Takeaways

• Latin America and Asia Pacific are driving strong booking growth and first-time travelers, signaling continued geographic diversification of demand. The Middle East crisis led to cancellations and the spillover effects slightly impacted Europe. 
• Friction-reduction features are reshaping pricing, lead-time, and cancellation dynamics for hosts. 
• Listings with complete, structured data and strong quality signals will be advantaged in an AI-driven distribution environment.

Every quarter, the world’s largest online travel agencies (OTAs) offer a summary of the past quarter and a preview of where the short-term rental (STR) industry is heading next.

For hosts, property managers, distribution partners, and STR investors, these earnings calls are packed with signals: shifts in traveler demand, new platform features, pricing changes, and strategic bets on technology.

However, the raw information can be scattered across shareholder letters, earnings transcripts, and product announcements. This makes it difficult to connect the dots in an OTA earnings analysis and understand what actually matters for your business.

That’s why we’ve distilled the key takeaways from the Q1 2026 earnings releases from Airbnb, Expedia (Vrbo), and Booking.com into one practical briefing for STR practitioners.

Across these platforms, a few themes are already emerging:

• Demand diversified globally as the Middle East crisis weighed disproportionately on EMEA and transit corridor between Europe and Asia, while the U.S. remained strong with resilient domestic demand.
• Product changes are increasingly focused on reducing listing and booking friction, from more automatic listing assistance to streamlined checkout experiences.
• AI is becoming foundational across search, personalization, and customer support, reshaping how listings surface and how travelers discover properties.

Each of these developments has practical implications, whether you're optimizing listings, managing revenue, building STR technology, or evaluating investment opportunities.

In this report, we break down what each OTA emphasized in their latest earnings cycle, highlight the operational changes that matter most for the STR ecosystem, and translate platform strategy from the OTA earnings analysis into actionable insights for hosts, operators, and industry stakeholders.

Airbnb

Supply-demand trend of platform

Q1 2026 marked another strong quarter for nights, with year-over-year growth at 9% in booked nights, 19% in booking value, and 18% in revenue. All growth mentioned below is year-over-year growth for Q1 2026.

• North America: Nights grew at high-single digit, mainly driven by strong domestic demand and trips with longer lead times. ADR increased 7%, mainly driven by growth in short-term stays (less than 28 nights) and entire homes, particularly with large properties (4+ bedrooms).
• EMEA: Nights grew at mid-single digit, reflecting broad improvement in both the core and expansion markets. The Olympic Games attracted nearly 200K guests to stay on Airbnb and supply grew 30% in the Milan region. The strong start of the quarter was slightly impacted by the cancellations in EMEA as a result of the conflict in the Middle East. ADR increased 15%, primarily driven by exchange rate change. Excluding exchange rate impact, the ADR growth was 4%.
• Latin America: Nights grew at high-teens. Brazil delivered its third consecutive quarter of 20%+ origin nights growth, with first-time bookers increasing 22%. Mexico also contributed with continued double-digit growth in origin nights. ADR increased 10%, primarily driven by exchange rate change. Excluding exchange rate impact, the ADR growth was 3%.
• Asia Pacific: Nights grew at high-teens. India was a standout, with origin nights booked growing approximately 50% year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter and first-time booker growth accelerating to over 75%. Japan continued to show strength in domestic travel demand. ADR increased 6%, primarily driven by exchange rate change. Excluding exchange rate impact, the ADR growth was 2%.

Airbnb highlighted accelerating first-time booker growth, particularly in newer expansion markets, alongside notable strength from Gen Z travelers. Hosts should factor these demographic shifts into their demand strategies. 

Events as a scalable supply and demand engine

Events received dedicated attention this quarter as a proven growth playbook rather than an opportunistic side strategy. The Winter Olympics in Milan in February served as proof of concept: nearly 200,000 guests stayed on Airbnb, supply in host markets grew approximately 30%, GBV more than tripled for the event period, and the marketing campaign generated around 1 billion impressions. 

The next chapter is the FIFA World Cup 2026, which Airbnb expects will be the largest event it has ever hosted. Since outreach began in October 2025, over 100,000 homes across the 16 host cities have listed on Airbnb for the first time.

Collaboration with Delta Air Lines and Future Vision

Airbnb is actively incorporating more partners into the platform, aiming at building a travel ecosystem beyond homes and experiences. The new partnership with Delta Air Lines enables travelers to earn Delta Miles on qualifying Airbnb homes and Experiences and Services.

In the long run, Airbnb is envisioned to become a platform for travel. They might invest in building a compelling and unique-to-Airbnb loyalty program and also expand to flights in the long run. 

Hotel Expansion

Airbnb is actively incorporating hotels into its platform as an expansion strategy. Current pilot markets include New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, and San Francisco, taking account of a single-digit percentage of nights. Boutiques and independents continue to be scaled to more mature markets around the world. 

The hotels will fill in the ecosystem in 3 aspects. One is the markets that lack sufficient supply due to regulatory reasons. Second is to fill in the travel nights for loyal guests who would like to go for a hotel with diversified needs from what an Airbnb home offers. Third is to get access to the global travelers who have not tried Airbnb yet. Roughly 55% of guests who booked a hotel on Airbnb returned to book a home, per the management team disclosed.

Single Service Fee Model Expansion

As a way to simplify the fee structure, property management software hosts were migrated from a split fee structure to a single service fee structure. Over a quarter of the active listings are now subject to the single service fee. The test has begun to expand the single service fee model to certain other countries. 

Reserve Now Pay Later

The Reserve Now Pay Later (“RNPL”) allows guests to reserve an eligible stay and pay $0 upfront and then pay in installments over time. The eligible stay needs to be a short stay (below 28 days) in a listing with flexible or moderate cancellation policies, reserved at least 14 days ahead of the check-in date. 

As a result, the bookings have shifted to longer lead times and larger, higher priced-homes, contributing to ADR increase as well.

RNPL already saw 70%+ adoption among eligible bookings in the U.S. in the 25Q4 earnings release. After rolling out globally in 26Q1, roughly 20% of global GBV came from RNPL. The U.S. is seeing the highest adoption while other markets are not far behind.

The RNPL net impact to bookings is positive in every region, though elevated cancellation rate was observed. Airbnb also noticed a difference in lift of RNPL by geo. 

Service for Hosts

Improvement of Current Flow

Airbnb redesigned host sign-up flow to make it easier for the hosts. Airbnb also started testing a new feature of host insights to give personalized recommendations to help hosts improve their listing and stay competitive. Also, the pricing tools are upgraded to help hosts set prices based on demand and seasonality.

AI Tools Outlook

For API hosts: Airbnb has been lagging behind third parties in tools for this professional category of partners. Meanwhile, the PMs are lagging behind in ratings versus individual hosts. Airbnb regards this as an opportunity to improve PMs performance and ratings with AI tools. No specific tools were revealed yet but it is something that Airbnb will actively invest in.

For individual hosts: Airbnb aims to provide a friction-free onboarding process for individual hosts. They described the future state of onboarding a listing to be frictionless where hosts only need to provide an address and AI will take in and assist with writing the description after scraping the information from the internet.

Expedia (Vrbo)

Supply-demand trend of platform

Q4 platform supply has grown 10% year-over-year. The Black Friday promotion became a meaningful driver-70% more properties participated than ever before.  Specifically on Vrbo, the promotion suite expanded supply. Supply quality and promotional participation together drove demand.

Demand growth (+9% 2025 Q4 vs. 2024 Q4) was led by international markets, where room nights expanded faster than in the U.S., indicating continued demand diversification beyond the domestic base. 

• United States: Room nights grew at high single digits, with revenue growing at 4%.
• EMEA: Room nights grew at low double digits.
• Rest of World: Room nights grew at low double digits.

Comparisons among segmentations show that the B2B (Business-to-Business) segment outpaced growth in B2C (Business-to-Consumer) (24% vs. 5%) in Q4, mainly contributed by rapid API. The B2B segment represents the distribution network through Expedia’s partners and sold to travelers indirectly, such as corporate travel platforms, loyalty programs and flight-inclusive bookings. The B2C segment represents the direct bookings made by individual travelers on Expedia’s own platforms, such as Expedia.com, vebo.com and Hotels.com. 

On the one hand, the fast growth of B2B distributions brings incremental and less price-sensitive demand; the corporate travel guests could even help fill the midweek and shoulder periods. On the other hand, the indirect channels make it harder to maintain price parity and monitoring realized ADR will be increasingly important.

The acquisition of Tiqets (for experiences) also signals ambitions to bundle hotel and STRs with activities in new booking packages.

Vrbo has returned to growth. Specifically on Vrbo, the focus is mainly around quality supply and faster speed in checkout process. 

Vrbo’s promotion suite

Promotion Suite is the smarter promotion or special deals feature Vrbo expanded in Aug 2025. Setting up promotions can help PMs secure bookings with designated lead time, length of stays, targeted trusted guests, and mobile booking prices. 

Acting like another layer of discount, what differentiates “promotions” from weekly or monthly discounts is that promotions also boost the listing in search results, provide targeted access, and provide more flexibility especially in multi-season strategies.

Meanwhile, Expedia is doubling down on loyalty as a defensive moat, which can be translated into member-exclusive rates and inventory perks. Therefore, properties willing to offer differentiated rates for loyalty members will see improved placement and conversion.

VrboCare

VrboCare is a free feature that serves to reassure guests that Vrbo safeguards in the event of host-initiated cancellations, check-in issues, fraud, and significant property misrepresentation. 

One of the top advertised benefits is that Vrbo agents can help rebook guests into comparable accommodations if they experience check-in issues or host-initiated cancellations. 

Expedia believes the VrboCare program gives travelers more trust and reduces checkout frictions as they are confident about being backed up when plans change.

AI-driven personalization

Expedia is actively building native integrations with agentic browsers and gen AI search platforms, making sure their inventory surfaces in AI-generated travel recommendations. For hosts/PMs, this means changing logic for visibility from that for traditional search engines. Listings with rich, structured data, such as accurate amenity tags, strong verified reviews, precise location attributes, will be favored by AI recommendation layers. Vrbo suggests PMs audit listing completeness now, before AI-driven traffic becomes mainstream.

Booking.com

Supply-demand trend of platform

Booking.com's Alternative Accommodations (AA) grew listings 9% YoY, totaling 8.8 million at the end of Q1 in 2026. Room nights grew roughly 5.5% in 2025 Q4— in line with total platform room night growth — with the mix expanding to 38% of total room nights (up from 37% in 2025 Q1). 

AA was impacted by the conflict in the Middle East, which BKNG estimates reduced total room night growth by ~2 percentage points; absent that impact, total room night growth would have been ~8%. The management team expected the conflict in the Middle East would exert impact (direct and indirect) through the end of June, followed by a recovery in bookings in the second half of the year.

Booking.com did not break out AA-specific room nights but give out platform-wide nights growth by booker region. The total room nights on booking.com platform shows Asia with strong growth (high single digits), Europe with mild growth (mid single digits) due to negative impact from the conflict that reduced European to Middle East and Asia. The rest of the world (including the Middle East) was down low single digits. U.S. accelerated to low teens growth, driven primarily by domestic demand.

In the U.S., the high-end segment remains strong, while the lower-end segment is improving with a stabilized booking window and flat ADR though the trip is slightly shorter. 

The Genius loyalty program continues to be leveraged as a retention and conversion mechanism across AA and traditional supply, with management flagging "an opportunity to further strengthen Genius this year." 

Agentic AI

Booking.com rolled out Smart Filters globally in accommodations and have helped with conversion rate. Beyond conversion, AI-driven products are showing early positive signals in faster search and shorter path from search to booking, and more engagement. Booking.com is testing enhanced natural language search and “inspiration-led discovery features”.

Agentic service flows for complaints and cancellations are being deployed to reduce friction in the post-booking AA/hotel experience. 

Sources for short-term rental industry analysis

1. Shareholder letter, Press Release, Earnings Transcript, 2026Q1. Airbnb.
2. Earnings Release, Earnings Presentation, Earnings Call Transcript, 2026Q1. Expedia.
3. Earnings Press Release, Quarterly Earnings Presentation, Earnings Transcript, Prepared Remarks, 2026Q1. Booking.com.