Airbnb: The red-hot World Cup has ignited the hospitality and tourism industry.

Airbnb, the leading overseas homestay platform, released its Q2 2026 fiscal earnings report on the morning of August 7. Driven by the World Cup event, its performance is quite impressive: the growth rates of total booking value and overnight stays both outperformed expectations, and the guidance for the next quarter is also relatively optimistic, implying that the prosperity of the hotel and travel industry will remain fairly strong in the medium term:

1. Overnight stay growth accelerates, the recovery of hotel and travel industry prosperity is confirmed: Looking at the most critical operating indicator first, the nominal growth rate of Gross Booking Value (GBV) this quarter is 16%, which seems to have slowed down slightly. In fact, the growth rate after excluding exchange rate impact is 15%, 2 percentage points faster than the previous quarter.

Correspondingly, the more core volume indicator -- the number of booked overnight stays increased by nearly 11% year-on-year this quarter, which is 1.5 percentage points faster than the roughly 9% growth in the previous quarter. It is clear that the demand for hotel and travel services is recovering substantially, which is consistent with the trend conveyed in the earnings report of the last quarter.

As the favorable effect of exchange rate weakened this quarter, the nominal average unit rate growth narrowed from 9% in the last quarter to 5% this quarter. However, according to the company's disclosure, even after excluding the exchange rate impact, the average unit rate is still on an upward trend due to changes in product structure, which also provides support for GBV growth.

2. Driven by the World Cup, North America sees obvious growth acceleration: By region, the recovery of hotel and travel demand this quarter is comprehensive, and the overnight stay growth rates in the three major markets of North America, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East have all increased compared with the previous quarter, while the Asia-Pacific region remained relatively flat. Dolphin Research believes this is the result of the dual positive effects of the World Cup held across the US, Canada and Mexico, and the easing of conflicts in the Middle East.

From the revenue perspective (which reflects bookings made earlier and is a lagging indicator), the largest market North America has the most significant improvement in growth, with the cumulative revenue growth accelerating by more than 10 percentage points in the past two quarters, while the revenue growth of other markets has slowed down slightly.

3. Revenue growth slows down slightly, but monetization stops declining and rebounds: In terms of revenue, the total revenue of this quarter increased by about 16.5% year-on-year, which slowed down compared with the previous quarter, but outperformed market expectations. After excluding the exchange rate impact, the "real" growth rate is 13%, 2 percentage points lower than the previous quarter, which is contrary to the accelerating growth trend of GBV this quarter. However, since revenue corresponds to bookings made much earlier, the difference between the two growth rates is not very surprising.

In terms of monetization rate, based on the nominal caliber, it reached 13.2% this quarter, which finally stopped declining and rebounded after three consecutive quarters of year-on-year decline.

Similar to the situation in the last quarter, the main reason for the recovery is still the increase in the penetration rate of attached travel insurance sales, as well as the company's adjustment of charging methods, which integrates multiple original charging methods (such as commissions for landlords, commissions for tenants, and house cleaning fees) into a unified "all-inclusive price" charging model.

Benefiting from the rebound of monetization rate, the gross profit margin also increased slightly by 0.1 percentage points to 82.5% compared with the previous quarter, 0.2 percentage points slightly higher than expectations.

4. Marketing expense growth remains high but has started to fall back: While the business performance is strong, Airbnb's total expenses increased by 14.3% year-on-year this quarter, the growth rate has started to fall back, but the total expense is still about 100 million higher than market expectations, which shows that the company remains relatively active in investment.

Specifically, the largest influencing factor is still marketing expenses, which increased by about 27% year-on-year this quarter, still significantly higher than the revenue growth rate, but lower than the 33% growth in the previous quarter. This continues the company's strategic direction of trying to expand new businesses and new monetization models in multiple directions to drive growth through investment.

Overall, as the expense growth rate falls back and is lower than the gross profit growth rate, the profit margin continues to rise slightly. Based on the adjusted EBITDA caliber that the company focuses on, the profit margin reached 35% this quarter, up 1.3 percentage points year-on-year, further expanding from the 1 percentage point year-on-year increase in the previous quarter.

To a certain extent, the company has moved from the stage of heavy expense investment and profit pressure to the stage of accelerated growth and profit release.

5. Key Earnings Report Information at a Glance

Dolphin Research Views:

1. Both current quarter performance and guidance are strong

Overall, Airbnb's performance this quarter is quite good. The growth rates of the most critical booking volume and overnight stays outperform expectations and show an accelerating recovery trend. Meanwhile, with the combination of accelerated business growth and relatively decelerated expense investment, the profit margin pressure that has long suppressed the company's valuation logic has also begun to reverse. Though it is not a stunning performance, it indeed shows a steady and positive performance trend.

In terms of guidance, the revenue growth rate for the next quarter is between 15% and 17%, significantly higher than the market expectation of 12%. But the company stated that the guidance includes about 3 percentage points of favorable exchange rate boost, so the actual outperformance is not that exaggerated.

In terms of more critical operating indicator guidance, the company expects the booking value growth in the next quarter to reach around 15%, and the overnight stay growth to exceed 10%, both significantly higher than market expectations (the consensus sell-side expectation for overnight stay growth is 8%, and booking value growth is 10%). More importantly, from the trend perspective, the guidance given this quarter is comprehensively accelerated compared with the guidance of the last quarter, which implies that the hotel and travel industry prosperity observed by the company is still rising.

In addition, the full-year 2026 profit margin guidance has also been raised from 35% to 35.5% or higher, which verifies the judgment that the company's profit margin will enter an improvement cycle (though the improvement range may not be very large).

2. Investment Logic and Judgment

Overall, the recent stock price trend and performance trend of the company have basically verified the signs that Dolphin Research has observed in the last quarter's earnings report.

a. First, the overall hotel and travel industry prosperity in Europe and the United States is indeed improving. Not only Airbnb, but the performance and stock price of Booking, the largest player in the industry, also show the same trend.

b. Definite positive impact of the World Cup: Since the 2026 World Cup schedule has long been confirmed and it is held in North America, the event will bring positive impact to the European and American hotel and travel industry in the second and third quarters of the event, which is basically a definite event. Therefore, the strong performance and guidance of Airbnb this time is not very surprising to Dolphin Research.

c. The long-term goal of diversification remains unchanged: Apart from the definite mid-term positive impact of the World Cup, from the medium and long-term perspective, the company's strategic direction is still firm diversification. The management emphasized again this quarter that the platform will transform from a pure accommodation booking platform to a comprehensive platform that provides multiple businesses including food delivery, car rental/airport transfer, and travel activities.

In terms of accommodation supply, the company will further add hotel options (currently mainly independent hotels and boutique hotels).

3. In this regard, Dolphin Research's attitude remains consistent. Adding more businesses and more diversified accommodation supply will definitely bring certain incremental users and revenue in any case.

But from another perspective, when the company that used to only operate one core business enters multiple unrelated industries (car rental, food delivery, travel products, all of which are operation-heavy industries), it means that the company's management and operating efficiency will be dispersed and reduced. It also needs to compete with the existing leading players in these industries as a new challenger.

Therefore, Dolphin Research believes that diversification is more of an added bonus, and the change of the core hotel and travel industry prosperity is still the main variable that determines the company's investment value. Therefore, after the definite event-driven positive impact of the World Cup passes, we need to observe whether there are new positive factors to take over.

Overall, Dolphin Research's view on Airbnb is that it remains an investment option that focuses on trend and cyclical opportunities based on industry prosperity fluctuations.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Dolphin Research" (ID: haituntouyan), author: Dolphin Research, published with authorization from 36Kr.