Airbnb reported second-quarter revenue of $3.61 billion on Thursday evening, up 16.5% from a year ago and ahead of the roughly $3.58 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings of $1.37 a share beat the $1.25 consensus by 10%. Gross booking value rose 16% to $27.2 billion, nights and experiences booked reached 148 million — 14 million more than last year — and net income was $816 million.
Then the company did the thing that is currently hard to do. It told investors AI spending is going up, and raised its margin guidance in the same breath.
CEO Brian Chesky said Airbnb will spend “a lot more” on AI tokens this year than it had forecast, on the grounds that the cost of inference “pales in comparison” to what comes back. The updated full-year outlook assumes that higher spend and still lifts the adjusted EBITDA margin floor from 35% to at least 35.5%, with revenue growth now expected to land at least in the mid-teens rather than low-to-mid. Shares closed Friday up about 15%.
The line that makes both statements true
Guidance raises built on “AI efficiency” usually arrive with no number attached. This one arrived with three.
Airbnb’s AI customer service assistant now runs in more than 50 languages and resolves close to 45% of inquiries without a human. Customer support cost per booking fell roughly 16% year over year. And CFO Ellie Mertz put the trade-off in a single sentence on the call: “We are expanding margins while absorbing increased costs.”
On the build side, Chesky said AI has cut the time from concept to launch by as much as 60%, and that Airbnb shipped nearly 80% more product improvements in the first half than in the same stretch last year. Operating margin came in at 21%, up from 19.8%.
Those are the offsets. Support automation pays the token bill directly. Faster shipping pays it indirectly, by turning engineering time into features instead of headcount. Nothing in the disclosure breaks the token line out of cost of revenue, so the netting is Airbnb’s arithmetic rather than an audited one — but the company put falsifiable figures next to the claim, which is more than most.
Our take: This week Rippling was explaining how it cut its AI bill to 37% of April’s while burning the same 600 billion tokens. Airbnb just did the opposite and got the same reception. That is the tell. The market in August 2026 is not paying for low AI spend or high AI spend — it is paying for a named offset line. Rippling’s was engineering cost per token. Airbnb’s is support cost per booking. Companies that can point at one get credit for the spending. Companies that say “AI investment” and stop get asked about margins.
What the growth is made of
The quarter was not a one-lever story. Reserve Now, Pay Later accounted for more than 20% of gross booking value, pulling in bookings with longer lead times and higher average daily rates. Hotel nights are growing about three times faster than the core homes business off a small base, after Airbnb added thousands of boutique and independent properties. First-time booker growth hit its highest level in four years. The services push now spans grocery delivery, airport pickups, luggage storage and car rentals, most of it carried by partners, so the revenue arrives without much incremental cost.
Worth keeping in proportion: nights grew 10% while revenue grew 16.5%. A meaningful share of the beat is price and mix rather than volume, and the quarter included World Cup demand that does not repeat.
What to watch
- Whether support cost per booking keeps falling. The 45% AI resolution rate is the ceiling on that lever until it moves. If the offset flattens while token spend keeps climbing, the margin floor is what gives.
- Headcount. Management said it no longer needs to grow headcount at prior rates. Technology has announced 149,023 job cuts in the U.S. this year, up 67%. Airbnb just described the mechanism from the inside, in a quarter it called a good one.
- The dynamic host pricing rollout. Chesky called pricing “one of the single biggest levers” the company has. It is also the cleanest test of whether AI here is producing revenue or just producing features.
- The Q3 comp. No World Cup, and a full-year guide with less slack in it than the one it replaced.