- Continues to Build End-to-End Travel Platform
- Delivering on Commitment to Bring Magical Travel to Everyone
Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. To advance our mission, we are reimagining travel by building an end-to-end travel platform that combines where you stay, what you do, and how you get there, all in one place. Today, we are building on this work by signing an agreement to acquire HotelTonight. HotelTonight is a hotel-booking service focused on making last-minute trips easy and fun, offering guests seamless, on-demand booking for boutique and independent hotels.
A big part of building an end-to-end travel platform is serving every guest, whether they plan their trip a year or a day in advance.
Working with the incredible team at HotelTonight, we will offer guests an unparalleled last-minute travel experience that provides unique, memorable hospitality on every trip, on any schedule, at any time.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb Co-Founder, CEO and Head of Community
Airbnb has built an unrivaled global community of hosts and guests—we can connect travelers to more than 6 million places to stay and tens of thousands of incredible experiences around the world. Airbnb “is now the most searched-for accommodations brand” according to one Google executive, and guests are using Airbnb for every kind of trip, including business and last-minute travel. Today, more than 400,000 companies are using Airbnb to help manage their travel, and same-day bookings are now growing 2x year over year. Welcoming more boutique hotels to our platform will help us deliver on our commitment to make Airbnb for everyone, providing guests the authentic, local experience they have come to expect on every trip.
We started HotelTonight because we knew people wanted a better way to book an amazing hotel room on-demand, and we are excited to join forces with Airbnb to bring this service to guests around the world.
Together, HotelTonight and Airbnb can give guests more choices and the world’s best boutique and independent hotels a genuine partner to connect them with those guests.
Sam Shank, Co-founder & CEO of HotelTonight
The acquisition of HotelTonight:
1. Accelerates our work to build an end-to-end travel platform that serves everyone.
We are making it easier for people who use Airbnb to find last-minute places to stay when Home hosts are often already booked. The availability of boutique hotels—in addition to private rooms and entire homes that are instantly bookable—helps ensure authentic, high-quality stays are available on-demand, especially at the last minute.
The HotelTonight team has developed deep relationships with boutique hotels and expertise in seamless, last-minute booking. HotelTonight is rooted in the same kinds of hospitality properties we have welcomed to the Airbnb community, and these boutique and independent hotels contribute the majority of HotelTonight’s business.
2. Meets enormous demand from—and for—boutique hotels.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing number of hoteliers take inspiration from our Home hosts, making their boutique hotels more unique with custom touches. Last year, we announced our intent to make it easier for these boutique hotels to list on our platform. We’ve had an overwhelming response from hoteliers with strong ties to their local communities who want to offer truly personal hospitality: in 2018, we more than doubled the number of rooms available on Airbnb in properties that hosts categorized as boutique hotels, bed and breakfasts, and other hospitality venues like hostels and resorts.
We’ve also seen Airbnb guests respond enthusiastically to this increased supply, booking three times as many nights with boutique hotels in 2018 compared with 2017.
Together with HotelTonight, we can offer places to stay for every type of traveler on all kinds of trips and make it easier for small businesses and hoteliers who take pride in providing authentic, unique experiences to tap into Airbnb’s truly global network of hosts and guests.
3. Supports Home hosts.
As we have welcomed boutique hotels to Airbnb, we’ve been delighted to see the positive impact for our Home hosts. The acquisition of HotelTonight will accelerate that positive benefit. Boutique hotels are helping to bring new guests to Airbnb and making our community larger and stronger. Once these new guests come to Airbnb, they’re returning to book with our Home hosts: in fact, nearly 90 percent of guests who first used Airbnb to book a hotel room and returned to our platform for a second trip then booked a home.
We’re excited to continue our work to grow our community and make Airbnb for everyone. The HotelTonight app and website will continue to operate as they do today. Once the acquisition is complete, Sam Shank will report to Greg Greeley, Airbnb’s President of Homes, and lead our boutique hotel category.