‘AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb’: Chesky raises the forecast again

The short-term rental company reported second-quarter results on Thursday, and the numbers were strong. Revenue rose 17% to $3.6bn. Net income was $816m, or $1.37 a share, up from $1.03 a year earlier.

Gross booking value reached $27.2bn, and guests booked 148.3 million nights and seats, up 10%. All of it came in ahead of Wall Street.

The stock jumped about 10% in after-hours trading. Airbnb also raised its full-year outlook for a second time in 2026. It now expects revenue growth of “at least mid teens”, up from “low to mid teens”. Growth sped up not only in newer markets but in core ones, the US, France, the UK and Australia.

The AI pitch

What set the letter apart was its framing. It said Airbnb had rebuilt itself “from the ground up to be an AI-native company”. On the earnings call, chief executive Brian Chesky went further. He told analysts that “AI is the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb”.

The specifics behind that claim are about speed. Airbnb says AI has cut the time from concept to delivery by as much as 60%. It also shipped nearly 80% more features than a year earlier. Its support assistant now works in more than 50 languages. It resolves nearly 45% of issues without a human, and has cut support cost per booking by about 16%.

More is planned. Later this year Airbnb will test an AI search that takes plain-language requests and replies conversationally. It is also building AI home comparisons and a voice assistant for phone support. Chesky said the new search would be “hopefully less chatty”. He warned it could take “months and months to retrain the customer”.

What the AI story leaves out

The quarter had other engines. Airbnb was an official supporter of the FIFA World Cup. That put over 150,000 host-city homes on the platform for the first time, and drew a wave of new users. A weaker dollar helped too. Strip out currency swings and that 17% revenue rise becomes 13%, with about three points of next quarter’s growth down to foreign exchange.

The services Airbnb keeps citing as proof of reinvention are still small. Grocery delivery, car rentals, luggage storage and boutique hotels are early. Hotels grew about three times faster than the core homes business, yet remain a single-digit share of nights booked. Airbnb also guided margins to slip a little next quarter.

None of this makes the AI claims wrong, and rivals are pushing the same way. Hotels are moving into chatbots, Google is turning maps into an agentic travel booker, and startups are rebuilding the travel agent around AI. The open question is the one every firm now faces. Does AI that makes a company faster also make it bigger?