Airbnb, Inc. vs Expedia Group, Inc.: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Airbnb, Inc. on its own, evaluating Expedia Group, Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is $12.2B (FY2025) for Airbnb, Inc. and $14.7B (FY2025) for Expedia Group, Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at $94.9B and $32.5B. Both Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.

Airbnb, Inc.: Airbnb began when Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia hosted three guests in their San Francisco home in October 2007. The company formally launched in 2008, added Nathan Blecharczyk as a co-founder, expanded from rooms to whole homes and vacation rentals, and became publicly traded in December 2020. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Expedia Group, Inc.: Expedia Group, together with Booking Holdings, dominates global online travel agency bookings. It owns no planes or hotels; it earns margins, commissions and advertising fees for matching travelers with suppliers. Its brands include Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Wotif, ebookers, CarRentals.com and trivago, and its B2B arm powers booking for other companies' travel sites. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The massive global online travel agency was founded in Washington in 1996, originally starting as a tiny internal division at Microsoft before being spun off and growing into an absolute juggernaut of flight and hotel bookings by aggressively acquiring competitors like Orbitz and Travelocity.

Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc..

Airbnb, Inc. business model: Airbnb provides a marketplace on which hosts offer stays, experiences, and services and guests make reservations. The company recognizes service-fee revenue after a reservation occurs. Hosts provide the accommodations and other offerings, so gross booking value is the value of bookings on the platform, not Airbnb revenue.

Expedia Group, Inc. business model: Expedia makes money in three main ways. Under the merchant model it collects the traveler's payment, keeps a margin or fee, and pays the hotel or other supplier later. Under the agency model the traveler pays the supplier and Expedia earns a commission. It also sells advertising to hotels, destinations and travel brands, and runs trivago, its majority-owned hotel metasearch site. These revenue types flow through two businesses: B2C (Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo and smaller brands) and B2B, which supplies inventory and white-label booking technology to banks, airlines, loyalty programs, tour operators and travel agents. Lodging made up about 80% of 2025 revenue.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Airbnb, Inc. stack up against those of Expedia Group, Inc..

Airbnb, Inc. competitive advantage: Airbnb's marketplace had more than 9 million active listings and 5.5 million hosts as of May 2026. Its scale, reviews, payments, host tools, and brand help connect supply and demand, while Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and hotel companies remain significant competitors.

Expedia Group, Inc. competitive advantage: Expedia's edge is supply and distribution scale. Its marketplace aggregates millions of hotel and vacation-rental listings plus flights, cars and activities, and that same inventory is resold through thousands of B2B partners, which brings demand that does not depend on Google ads. All major brands now run on one technology platform, so product and AI features can ship once across Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo. The cross-brand One Key loyalty program ties repeat bookings together.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. each plan to expand from here.

Airbnb, Inc. growth strategy: Airbnb's stated growth priorities are improving its core marketplace, expanding outside its largest markets, adding offerings beyond homes, and integrating AI into the app. The May 2025 release added services, rebuilt experiences, and an updated app; the May 2026 release added more trip services and boutique hotels in selected markets.

Expedia Group, Inc. growth strategy: Under Ariane Gorin, Expedia is growing B2B distribution with new partners, adding hotel and rental supply, personalizing its consumer apps, building One Key membership for repeat bookings, and using AI both in trip planning and in internal engineering and service work. The single technology platform, finished under Peter Kern, lets each of these ship across all brands at once.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Airbnb, Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. rounds out the comparison.

Airbnb, Inc.: Airbnb revenue increased from $1.656 billion in 2016 to $12.241 billion in 2025. The company recorded losses from 2016 through 2021 and profits from 2022 through 2025. FY2025 gross booking value of $91.273 billion represented booking value processed on the platform and was not revenue.

Expedia Group, Inc.: Revenue fell to $5.2 billion in 2020 during the pandemic, then recovered to $11.7 billion in 2022, $12.8 billion in 2023, $13.7 billion in 2024 and $14.7 billion in 2025. Net income reached $1.29 billion in 2025. Growth picked up in 2026: Q2 revenue rose 14% to $4.32 billion, gross bookings rose 12% to $33.9 billion, adjusted EBITDA rose 23% to $1.12 billion, and GAAP net income reached $878 million. Expedia also pays a quarterly dividend ($0.48 per share) and buys back stock, repurchasing $200 million of shares in Q2 2026. Its merchant model gives it negative working capital, because travelers pay before suppliers are paid, so cash flow peaks in the first half of the year. Expedia Group, Inc. is a dominant global online travel shopping company, sustaining a market valuation typically exceeding $18 billion.