Airbnb highlights importance of brand for loyalty | WARC | The Feed

Airbnb highlights importance of brand for loyalty

Booking platform Airbnb has published its IPO prospectus – an opportunity to peer under the hood at its long-term strategy.

Why it matters: Loyalty among both hosts and guests is crucial, with revenue retention growing over the course of years, and the prospectus makes clear the importance of brand to the overall project.

• Attracting and keeping hosts is crucial to Airbnb’s strategy, which it does through word of mouth and organic channels, with the brand at the centre of this effort.
• For the year to September 2020, “approximately 91% of all traffic to Airbnb came organically through direct or unpaid channels, reflecting the strength of our brand”.
• Brand strength and community are central to driving revenue and loyalty. In 2019, 69% of revenue came from repeat guests.
• Longer stays are growing as “work-from-home becomes work-from-any-home … the lines between travel and living are blurring”.

The Total Available Market is estimated at $3.4 trillion, broken down as:

• $1.8 trillion for short-term stays
• $210 billion for long-term stays
• $1.4 trillion for experiences.

Airbnb has clawed back a Q3 profit, a bright spot in a filing whose fortunes will likely be read as a bellwether for the global travel industry. But achieving that profit has required laying off 25% of its staff and cutting nearly $400 million from its advertising budget – a potentially risky strategy for a platform business that needs to keep both hosts and punters interested.

Sourced from Airbnb, Fast Company, WARC