Airbnb will launch its own artificial intelligence travel agent in the first half of 2027, the company announced on Thursday, setting out its biggest bet yet on AI as it reported its fastest revenue growth in more than three years. The agent is designed to help guests plan and book entire trips inside Airbnb, rather than simply answering questions the way a general-purpose chatbot does.
The plan was set out in Airbnb's third-quarter shareholder letter and on the earnings call that followed, where chief executive Brian Chesky said the company was building an agent with a dedicated interface for travel. Instead of returning a block of text, the agent will build an interface around a traveller's question, bringing together maps, photographs, comparisons, calendars and booking tools in one place.
Chesky argued that travel planning needs more than a chatbot because a trip is a series of connected decisions: where to stay, when to go, what it costs and what happens if plans change. Airbnb's case is that it already owns the parts of that chain that outside AI tools cannot easily reach, including the reservation itself, payments, changes to a booking and customer support, along with the protections that come with a booking made through its platform.
The company also pointed to the depth of its own data as an advantage. Airbnb has close to twenty years of booking and listing history, and Chesky told analysts that understanding its own marketplace better than any outside agent is one of the three reasons it believes its agent can work. The other two are its control of the booking process and the travel-specific interface it is building.
No finished product has been shown yet, and Airbnb has not said which markets will receive the agent first. The rollout is planned for guests in the first half of next year, and the company also intends to open its platform to outside AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, a step that would let other assistants work with Airbnb listings and bookings as well.
The announcement came alongside strong third-quarter results. Revenue rose 19 percent from a year earlier to 4.87 billion dollars, beating the 4.75 billion dollars analysts had expected, according to LSEG data. Net income climbed 38 percent to 1.89 billion dollars, diluted earnings per share reached 3.16 dollars against 2.21 dollars a year earlier, and adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation rose 22 percent to 2.51 billion dollars.
Bookings grew sharply too. Gross booking value, the total value of bookings made through the platform, rose 21 percent to 27.7 billion dollars, while nights and seats booked increased 16 percent to 155 million. Bookings made through Airbnb's app grew 29 percent and now account for 66 percent of all nights booked, a shift the company has been encouraging for years.
Airbnb raised its outlook on the back of the quarter, lifting its forecast for full-year 2026 revenue growth to the high teens from at least the mid-teens, and guiding fourth-quarter revenue to between 3.22 billion and 3.28 billion dollars, growth of 16 to 18 percent. The board also authorised up to a further 12 billion dollars of share repurchases. Shares rose about 10 percent in extended trading after the results, having closed the regular session down 3.5 percent at 170.13 dollars on a day when the Nasdaq fell sharply.
AI is already doing heavy work inside the company. Its customer-service assistant now supports more than 50 languages and resolved about 40 percent of all customer-support issues in the quarter without a human agent, up from about a third in the second quarter. That helped push the cost of support per booking down by more than 17 percent from a year earlier, and the company said customer-service satisfaction scores were at a record high. The assistant is now being expanded to voice support in the United States.
The results also disclosed that Airbnb sold certain intellectual property in November to a privately held AI laboratory founded by Chesky for 7.1 million dollars in cash, a detail that underlines how closely the company's AI plans are tied to its founder. The company has been adding narrower AI features for some time, including natural-language search, listing summaries and side-by-side comparisons for guests, and AI-generated earnings insights and pricing recommendations for hosts.
The launch will land in a crowded field. General-purpose AI assistants from the big technology companies are increasingly trying to handle travel planning, and online travel rivals are adding their own AI tools. Airbnb's argument is that owning the booking, the payment and the support relationship gives it an edge that a standalone chatbot cannot match, though the company has yet to show whether guests will trust an agent to make and change real bookings on their behalf.
What happens next will be watched on two fronts. Travellers will judge the agent on whether it genuinely makes planning easier or simply adds another layer between them and a booking, while investors will watch whether the faster growth of the past quarter can be sustained into 2027. For now, Airbnb has put a date on its ambition: the first guests should be using its AI travel agent within the first six months of next year.
