Airbnb: Inbound Headwinds, AI Moat Question, and a CTO Shakeup

The travel industry has received some not-so-encouraging news in the last couple of days. First, Skift reported that international travel to the US went down for eight consecutive months. Overall overseas visitation to the US fell 2.5% in 2025. With this year’s Football (Soccer) World Cup in sight, US inbound travel certainly has an easy comp, but the overall posture to international travelers to the US doesn’t quite seem very appealing for most travelers these days.

Any time these news flows gain traction, I have noticed some people seem to think the flailing inbound travel to the US must be quite damaging to Airbnb, especially given ~40% of their revenue comes from the US. While such inbound travel data is certainly far from ideal, it is largely immaterial for Airbnb. Airbnb management directly addressed this back in 1Q’25 call:

“U.S. travel is predominantly domestic. And as a result, that corridor of foreign travelers coming to the U.S. is approximately 2% to 3% of our overall business. So it’s frankly not quite material.

At the same time, what we’re seeing is within that corridor, guests who would have in a prior year come to the U.S. are simply choosing a different location. So I think Canada is the most obvious example where we see Canadians are traveling at a much lower rate to the U.S. but they’re traveling more domestically, they are traveling to Mexico, they are going to Brazil, they’re going to France, they’re going to Japan.”

Brian Chesky did multiple media appearances yesterday. I will discuss some notes from these behind the paywall.

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