Airbnb's Best Summer Ever!

Ariel Ariel
10/27/23

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Ups and Downs. Check out the full article for more insights.


Airbnb's (ABNB) app downloads has been a very good proxy for understanding the impact of covid lockdowns on mobility and it's also a great for proxy for the recovery.

2022 was pretty much the year for that, and we saw Airbnb's massive rise in downloads in the US over the summer.

Now that 20203's summer is over I was curious to see if the recovery has expanded internationally.

The easy answer is yes!

Looking at Airbnb's downloads by month since 2019, we can see that Airbnb's downloads have more than full recovered, but that growth post-lockdowns is much stronger.

January, which is a higher-than-average month for Airbnb's downloads brought in 3.4M new downloads in 2019, 3.9M in 2020 (pre-lockdowns), 2.3M in 2021, 3.2M in 2022, and a whopping 5M new downloads in 2023.

That's a 44% increase from 2019 and 113% when compared to 2021.

And that wasn't Airbnb's highest month of downloads this year!

The summer is Airbnb's best time for new downloads. Specifically, the month of July. In 2020, July was still Airbnb's highest month of downloads - though fewer than before (or after).

This year, Airbnb's downloads rose to the highest they've ever been in July - 5.6M, according to our App Intelligence. That's 37% higher than 2019 and 107% higher than 2020.

Airbnb continues to face stiff competition in the US from Expedia's Vrbo, has been officially banned in my home town of New York City, and is facing internal challenges so the growth comes with some growing pains.

I think they'll survive.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.

All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #travel

Related Resources

It Finally Happened! The Highest-Earning Apps in the World in October
Insights
It Finally Happened! The Highest-Earning Apps in the World in October

I'm going to start this in reverse because the thing we've been waiting to happen has finally happened. If you've been f...

A Few New Faces! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in October
Insights
A Few New Faces! The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in October

October is behind us so we crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded mobile apps in the world. While I don't h...