The direct-booking success story hotels were told to copy is buying traffic again
Airbnb's quarterly brand and performance marketing has gone from $119 million to $512 million since 2021 while its 90% direct-traffic figure never moved — because brand-driven visits count as direct.
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Skift's Rafat Ali read every sales and marketing disclosure Airbnb has filed since 2020, quarter by quarter, and lined them up against what the company said out loud. The filings and the statements tell different stories. Both 2026 quarterly filings now credit the increase to "paid growth initiatives" and "higher paid growth marketing initiatives" — Airbnb's own words for the thing it spent five years saying it had outgrown.
What Airbnb told the rest of us. In 2020 it cut brand and performance marketing 58%, and the traffic came back anyway. Brian Chesky told investors more than 90% of it was direct or unpaid. His finance chief said the company would keep total marketing dollars below 2019. By September 2022 it had hardened into advice: Chesky argued publicly that the online travel agencies had the funnel wrong, spending on search ads to catch travelers who were already booking, while Airbnb reached people before they knew where they wanted to go.
Every conference stage in this industry has repeated some version of that since. Build the brand, own the guest, stop renting traffic.
What the filings say. Brand and performance marketing was $119 million in the first quarter of 2021. It was $512 million in the first quarter of 2026. In raw dollars it passed 2019 by 2023, which is the year the filings also began itemizing how much of the increase was search engine marketing — $21.9 million in one quarter, another $20 million in the next.
One disclosure says it more plainly than any earnings call did. In the first quarter of 2025, sales and marketing rose on "an increase in marketing activities driven by an increase in search engine marketing of $21 million," which was "partially offset by a reduction in marketing campaign spend of $29 million." Campaigns down, paid search up, in the same sentence. The headline number barely moved while the money underneath it changed sides.
The catch. As a share of revenue this spending is still well below where it was — roughly 13% in 2025 against 24% in 2019 — because revenue more than doubled while the spending grew 40%. Airbnb says it does not expect marketing to return to pre-pandemic levels as a share of revenue, and points to first-time booker growth of 11% in the second quarter, its best in four years, as evidence the mix is working. And Airbnb has never published how it decides which visits count as direct and which count as paid, so the 90% cannot be checked from outside. The claim here is narrow. The dollars came back. The ratio did not.
What it means for hotels. Here is the part that reaches your own report. Airbnb says direct traffic includes visits influenced by brand campaigns and partnerships. A traveler who sees one of its campaigns and types the address a month later arrives as direct. So the 90% can hold steady for six years while the marketing budget quadruples underneath it, and nobody has said anything untrue.
Your direct share is built the same way. The guest who found you on Booking in March and came to your site in June is a direct booking. So is the one who clicked the brand-term ad you bought because an OTA was bidding on your name. So is the one who saw you on metasearch and typed the URL instead. None of that is dishonest, and all of it is paid for somewhere upstream of the line you report to your owner.
The number you call direct is a counting decision. Airbnb's has not moved since 2021, and the marketing spending underneath it has quadrupled.
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