The professional host industry is expansive, comprising several sectors, including old-time businesses like property managers and hotels and newbies like host management companies and multifamily establishments. Since its inception, Airbnb has predominantly catered to hosts offering rooms in their homes or managing properties part-time. The platform, however, has grown exponentially over the years, becoming home to a dynamic community of over 2 million stays each night, and several of these hosts have become established professional businesses requiring different solutions than before.
To meet the changing needs of these professional hosts, Airbnb developed a brand new concept – Pro Host – to represent the complete ecosystem it has to offer, making it easier for businesses to increase their visibility and create delightful guest experiences on the platform.
To support this effort, we invested in demand generation. We created multiple narratives about professional hosts who have succeeded in listing their unique properties on Airbnb and experienced growth and spread them across various channels, such as the Pro Host website, social media, paid ads, emails, and blog articles.
We then went one step further and enabled automation by developing a dynamic platform that educates and provides insights to professional hosts through an integrated marketing campaign, showing them how to launch and build their businesses on the platform. To support this, we constructed detailed data profiles, allowing us to craft personalized interactions with each host, leading to enhanced engagement.
A year since the launch of Pro Host, the segment saw an increase of 1.48x year-on-year in gross booking value, amounting to a staggering $10.3 billion, and with over 87.4 million nights booked, it also became the most profitable host category with the highest contribution of growth margin at more than 50%.