Tell an AI travel agent to find you a cheap hotel in Paris. It will. Tell it to beat the price on a one-of-a-kind cabin in the Catskills, and it has nowhere else to look. That cabin may be listed on Airbnb and nowhere else. David Wainer's Heard on the Street column in Tuesday's Journal says that difference is the whole story for the stock.
The scare came last month. Meta Platforms (META) launched Muse, its AI agent, and travel stocks fell sharply. Booking Holdings, Expedia and Airbnb (ABNB) were among them. Travel sites earn their keep two ways. They make the search easy, and they take a cut of each booking. A bot that does the search itself cuts into both.
Not every site is equally exposed. Booking and Expedia mostly sell hotel rooms. The same room is usually on the hotel's own site and on rival sites too. A bot that sees it in several places has no reason to pick theirs. Both also sell paid placement. Wells Fargo puts those sponsored listings at about 8% of Expedia's revenue next year, and a far bigger share of its profit. Airbnb is built differently. More than half of its listings can't be found anywhere else. More than 90% of its visitors arrive at its app or site on their own. And the contact doesn't stop at checkout. Bernstein's Richard Clarke notes that 90% of guests message their hosts after booking, about keys, arrival times or local taxes. Airbnb stays in the middle of that conversation.
The catch is the price
Airbnb went public in 2020. The stock has carried a rich price ever since, about 25 to 30 times the next year's expected earnings. For a long stretch it didn't move. Investors saw a grown-up business priced like a fast grower. That changed in August. The company raised its full-year revenue-growth guidance, and the stock jumped. Wells Fargo's Ken Gawrelski credits a run of product fixes, like reserve now and pay later, hotels on the platform and a redesigned app. Here's the irony. The next steps, more hotels, car rentals and ads, push Airbnb toward the business Booking and Expedia run. That's the business the bots threaten most. Expedia signed on as a Muse partner. Airbnb hasn't. CEO Brian Chesky quipped that chatbots might work for buying paper towels, but people enjoy planning trips.
Wainer's fix is loyalty. A road warrior keeps booking Hilton or Marriott because the nights add up to perks. Airbnb has millions of listings and plenty of repeat guests, but no broad rewards program. Gawrelski says rewards, plus deals with the companies that build the agents, could eat into Airbnb's take rate over time. That's the roughly 13% cut it keeps from each booking. The column's closing line says Airbnb has homes “the bots can't easily replace.” The job now is giving guests a reason to book them there and nowhere else. ABNB closed at $163.50 on Monday, Oct. 12, down $2.37, and at $165.58 on Tuesday.
Our read
This is an Investments/Risk · IN04 piece, and the lesson isn't about travel. A platform shift doesn't sink a company that owns something unique. It can still squeeze the margins. Wainer points back to the move from desktop to phones. Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) holders worried then too, and both companies came out ahead. We don't hold Airbnb. Meta is held at weight in 20 books, Amazon in 19 and Alphabet in 28; nothing added. The thing to watch at Airbnb is repeat behavior, not the growth guide.
Here's where it touches your own plan. Open the fact sheet for the growth fund in your 401(k) and read its top ten holdings. Sort them into two piles. One pile sells something nobody else has. The other pile is a middleman selling what you could buy somewhere else. The AI-agent story lands hardest on the second pile, and many growth funds hold more of it than their owners realize. That's a fifteen-minute check, and it's worth doing before the next Muse-style headline instead of after it. If the second pile turns out to be most of the fund, bring the list to your next review. Better to look at the roof on a dry day.