The Host Report

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky sees sponsored listings as a potential $1 billion revenue opportunity. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 8th, he called paid placement an “obvious” service Airbnb could sell to hosts and “a pretty easy straight shot to $1 billion incremental high-margin revenue,” based on other marketplaces. He didn’t announce any official product or timetable. For hosts, this would create a way to pay for visibility in Airbnb search.

Short-term rental bookings are running ahead of last year across every European country, according to a new PriceLabs analysis. September booked-night growth ranged from 14.1% in Sweden to 46.8% in Finland. Six of the seven countries recorded stronger growth in booked nights for September than in August, suggesting that Europe's summer travel season is extending beyond its traditional peak.

AirDNA has launched Adapt, a revenue management system that sets nightly rates and minimum stays for STRs. The September 1st launch follows the product’s spring preview and moves AirDNA from supplying market intelligence into making pricing decisions, putting it in direct competition with PriceLabs, Beyond, and Wheelhouse. The product is built around a common problem with automated pricing: hosts can see that a rate changed without knowing why.

Airbnb’s testing new "direct booking links" that let selected hosts bring guests to the platform in exchange for a lower service fee. When a guest starts a new reservation through the special link, the pilot invitation says the host fee falls to 6%. Today, most hosts using Airbnb's single-fee structure pay 15.5%, making it a 9.5% fee difference.

Expedia Group announced its largest-ever vacation rental product launch on September 1st, covering 12 products and functions across Vrbo and Escapia. The biggest change for Vrbo hosts is already live globally: Sponsored Listings now let operators pay for premium positions at the top of the search results. Sponsored Listings give hosts another way to increase visibility, but it also creates a paid tier that places listings above properties that were organically ranking high.

Every forecast this year says the same thing. Guests are booking later, the window is collapsing, and you need to reprice for a world of last-minute travel. We went looking for that in our own reservation data. What we found is that the trend everyone is describing is real, but it is not happening to everyone. It is happening to one kind of market, and the national average buries that completely.

A year after Airbnb put $200 million behind its Experiences relaunch, the company still hasn't shared attach rates, a gap we've been noting since the first results came in. A new report from Localbird fills in part of the picture with actual booking data, covering thousands of experience bookings arranged through its concierge service across the U.S., Mexico, and Costa Rica from July 2025 to June 2026.

I've been in the vacation rental industry for nearly 30 years. I started as a hot tub tech for my parents’ rental business in college, worked my way through almost every job a property management company has to offer, built a company to more than 500 homes and sold it, then eventually started another business. After that long in an industry, it would be easy to assume you've learned most of what you need to know.

Casago announced on August 20th that it has sold all of the markets it took over in its acquisition of Vacasa. The company says it will conclude the process of moving markets into local franchise ownership or new ownership structures in September, sixteen months after the deal closed on May 1st, 2025. The acquisition combined two very different companies. Vacasa ran the largest vacation rental management operation in North America from a centralized corporate structure.

Airbnb will start selling a selection of Tripadvisor's tours, activities, and attractions later this year. The inventory comes from Tripadvisor's experiences business, powered by Viator, which lists more than 425,000 things to do worldwide. Neither company said how many will make it onto Airbnb, and no financial terms were disclosed. The deal was announced on August 11th, and fills the biggest gap in Airbnb's year-old Experiences relaunch.