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How Airbnb is weathering softening travel demand

In This Article:

Airbnb (ABNB) may prove more resilient than other players in the travel industry even as macro pressures weigh on the sector.

D.A. Davidson senior research analyst Tom White explains why affordability gains and online bookings could help the company weather a potential slowdown. Catch Booking Holdings (BKNG) executive vice president and CFO Ewout Steenbergen explain to Yahoo Finance why global travel demand aided the booking site in offsetting weakness from US consumers.

The homestay booking app will report its first quarter earnings results after the closing bell later today.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Catalysts here.

00:00 Speaker A

Talk to me about why Airbnb in your view bucks this trend that we're starting to suss out this earning cycle of a little bit of macro weakness weighing on some travel and leisure names.

00:15 Tom White

Yeah, thanks. Uh look, I think that was the main question we got from investors uh when we upgraded the stock was just kind of around timing and you know, given a lot of the uncertainty around the impacts of tariffs. Uh look, I'd say uh what we like about Airbnb, uh a few things. One, um you know, we're not claiming that leisure travel is going to be immune to a pull back should we have kind of a protracted recession or or kind of a downturn. Uh we certainly saw a decline in leisure travel spending during the Great financial crisis, which is kind of a data set we looked at closely. Overall leisure travel spending in developed countries was down right around 10% um during that period. But uh if you look at the online travel companies, which is what we cover, uh those companies were quite resilient. Uh you know, at their back, they had uh uh share gains helping them perform better. Uh they had the migration of just bookings from offline channels to online travel channels. So, you know, during that period, you saw the big companies at that time like uh Priceline and and Expedia actually managed to grow each of the major years through the through the Great financial crisis. Uh in Airbnb's case, uh we think their business is going to is going to prove relatively resilient as well. Uh and alternative accommodations, uh you're still in the relatively earlier innings of this migration uh of of spending from offline channels to online. Uh and Airbnb's case, also over the last couple of years, uh they've made a lot of progress addressing affordability on the platform. So they've been able to hold prices on average generally flat to down slightly, whereas hotels have been up quite a bit. So we think both of those things will help the the company perform uh relatively better um, you know, kind of during this uncertain period.

05:27 Speaker A

And Tom, my guest host Mark has a question for you.

05:34 Mark Mahaney

Yeah, um, you know, we we like to watch carefully how sensitive consumers are to costs of travel and things like that. And I think we've learned a couple of things that we didn't expect in the past couple of years, which showed that uh consumers were sort of a little bit uh more resilient to to to increases in prices. But that looks like it's starting to change a little bit. You know, you're starting to hear from the airlines, you see the bookings are down and things like that. Um, you know, consumers seem like they're getting a little bit more sensitive to prices, especially when it comes to travel. Um, do you see that trend continuing? And uh if so, how long would something like that last? Assuming that we don't end up in a recession.

06:57 Tom White

Yeah, it's a it's an interesting question. Look, I think, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it was amazing to see uh how uh when people prioritized experiences, uh and discretionary spending on experiences over goods, uh how that really translated into very strong uh demand for for travel. Um, obviously that can't last forever if prices uh go up. Uh, but so far, we haven't seen, you know, much of a deterioration, at least in the spending trends again on these big online platforms. So I think they're just, you know, benefit benefiting from secular tailwinds around uh just how consumer behavior is changing. You mentioned some of the airline results and, you know, how some of the commentary there has been mixed. Uh, you know, with these online travel sites that we cover, we've heard from two so far this week, Booking Holdings uh a couple nights ago and then Trivago last night. Both, you know, had very strong quarters, a bit of upside and and talked about uh April trends being stable versus the first quarter. In Trivago's case, they even raised their full-year outlook, which um uh, you know, we're not banking on seeing a lot of beating raised type quarters out of our travel-based companies, but so far, uh, you know, we're not seeing much uh, you know, much alarm. That said, uh we and and a lot of other analysts on the street covering this space are are sort of proactively cutting estimates for the back half of this year and next year, uh just to be cautious.

09:39 Speaker A

All right, Tom, got to leave it there. Great to get your thoughts on the call. Thank you so much.