Booking Now Sells Over a Third of Its Nights in Apartments

Booking was built to offer hotels. Last quarter, of every three nights it sold, more than one was in an apartment or a house.

And its chief executive thinks that is too few.

In Spain we still call Booking "the hotel site", and Airbnb the one for holiday apartments. There are still managers who are not on Booking, or who keep it as a filler for whatever Airbnb does not fill… Booking.com's latest numbers say that split is out of date.

Booking's numbers in one quarter

Booking Holdings reported its second quarter of 2026 on 4 August. The part that touches those of us who manage apartments:

Booking does not publish the figure in nights. A rough calculation gives more than 100 million nights in apartments in a single quarter. Airbnb sold 148 million nights in the same quarter, counting homes, hotels and the seats on its experiences too.

Why does Booking think it is too few?

Glenn Fogel, the chief executive, said it on the results call: he wants apartment nights to grow "a lot higher", and above all in the United States. And he admitted it sounds "like a broken record", because he has been saying the same thing for years: they lack apartments there, and they lack American travellers knowing they have them, associating Booking with apartments at all.

Booking's supply problem with apartments is not in Europe. It is in the United States. Europe is where Booking sells most, it grew at a pace similar to the group's, and domestic travel grew fastest of all.

In other words: the European who books an apartment on Booking, and the Spaniard travelling within Spain, Booking already has.

Airbnb is going the other way

While Booking bets on apartments, Airbnb bets on hotels. Its second-quarter letter to shareholders said hotel nights grew three times faster than home nights, and that it now offers boutique hotels in more than twenty cities, Madrid among them. And on 1 September it hired Pepijn Rijvers to run the whole homes and hotels business. Rijvers spent thirteen years at Booking.com, where he built, among other things, the apartments and homes business.

Each one selling the other's product is not new. What is new is that they now do it with the same model. From 13 October Airbnb charges a single host-only commission in Spain, to everyone, including hosts who do not use a channel manager, which is how Booking has always charged (I explained it in July). Two shop windows with the same commission scheme, and on both the traveller sees apartments and hotels in the same search results.

For the traveller, there is less and less difference between the two platforms. The same goes for the manager: they look more alike every day, and whoever is on only one of them is losing exposure, demand, and therefore revenue.

"But Booking is more work"

True. Payments, cancellations, and a channel manager to configure and watch so bookings do not collide.

But the commission is not the excuse. Booking's is around 15% and Airbnb's is 15.5%, so the two now sit side by side. What really costs is the daily management, and that costs what it always did. What has changed is the prize.

The prize is the biggest shop window in Europe. In cities, from what we see in our clients, Airbnb and Booking together take more than 90% of a holiday apartment's bookings. Being on only one means giving up a share of demand you cannot win back by lowering the price on the other: the traveller searching on Booking does not see you, and is not going to go to Airbnb to look for you.

It is what I tell any client who is only on Airbnb: Booking, and the sooner the better.

What a revenue manager does with a second channel

Opening Booking is not copying what you have on Airbnb and hitting publish. What we do at ListingOK with every client:

• The same price on both channels, or nearly. If you want to favour one channel over the other, for whatever reason, you can set different prices, but we advise keeping them as close as possible.
• No Booking promotion or discount, Genius included. All switched off. Visibility has to be earned by the dynamic price, not by a fixed discount that eats the margin (paying to rank higher is a different matter, I covered it here).
• The strictest cancellation policy Booking allows. Why? We explain it in this article.

What comes next

Booking wants more apartments and repeats it at every results presentation. Airbnb wants more hotels, and has hired the person who built the apartments business at Booking to get them.

My bet: in the 2027 results, apartments and houses pass 40% of Booking.com's nights.

What this means for a manager with twenty apartments

That being on Booking can no longer wait, and that opening it well is daily management work: a channel manager, the same price on both channels, promotions switched off, the cancellation policy set right (the strictest possible), and someone watching what happens on each channel all the time. That is the part we run at ListingOK for our clients: we set up and watch the channels, the PMS and the channel manager, and we configure the calendars on each one. If you manage six or more apartments and Booking is still your unfinished business, ask us for a demo and we will look at it on your own apartments.

Booking sells apartments. Lots of them. Maybe yours are the ones missing.

Sources

• Booking Holdings, second quarter 2026 earnings release (4 August 2026): 325 million room nights, up 5%. Alternative accommodation room nights at Booking.com, up 4%.
• Booking Holdings, second quarter 2026 earnings call (4 August 2026, transcript): the 37% share, Glenn Fogel's remarks, Europe as the region where it sells most.
• Rental Scale-Up, Booking.com first quarter 2026 results (30 April 2026): 8.8 million alternative accommodation listings, up 9%.
• Airbnb, second quarter 2026 shareholder letter (6 August 2026): 148.3 million nights and seats booked, boutique hotels in more than twenty cities, hotel nights growing three times faster than homes.
• Airbnb Newsroom, Pepijn Rijvers appointed Chief Business Officer (1 September 2026).