Airbnb is adding independent hotels to its platform, as the company synonymous with short-term lets turns to traditional accommodation to revive growth. A pilot now lets users in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Madrid pick from a range of boutique hotels alongside private homes. The San Francisco-based group is undercutting the fees charged by Booking.com and Expedia, with Jesse Stein — appointed Airbnb's first head of hotels in January — saying the company is offering a "very competitive commission structure ... relative to the other players in the space".

Two pressures sit behind the move. First, Airbnb wants business travellers, who prefer the predictability of hotels: global business travel spending reached $1.6tn in 2025 according to the Global Business Travel Association. Second, regulation is biting: New York's 2023 rules curtailed short-term tourist rentals, and Airbnb said in its November earnings call that it had been unable to convert millions of New York searches into sales. The growth picture is the trigger — revenues rose just 10 per cent in 2025, the slowest pace since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the share price is up only 2 per cent since the December 2020 listing of the $85bn business. CEO Brian Chesky said in September he was "not happy" with growth and planned "to layer on many businesses" to expand faster.

Competition will be hard. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke flagged the difficulty of breaking into the hotel reservations market dominated by Booking.com and Expedia. Hilton, Marriott and InterContinental Hotels Group are themselves running "soft" and "conversion-friendly" partnerships to add independent hotels to their networks without the cost of new builds. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Stephanie Stacey.