Online Travel Storytelling Spin Cycle Is Running at Full Speed

25.08.2023 - 14:09 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Peter Kern

It’s another earnings season so online travel companies such as Airbnb, Expedia and Tripadvisor occasionally present facts in a misleading — or at least in an exceedingly positive-sounding — way.

Airbnb Productivity

Airbnb officials mentioned twice in their discussion last week with financial analysts about 2022 earnings that their roster of 6,800 employees at the end of 2022 was 5 percent lower than during pre-pandemic 2019 yet Airbnb’s revenue has increased 75 percent to $8.4 billion.

That means significantly more revenue per employee these days.

What Airbnb execs didn’t mention, however, is that Airbnb at the end of 2022 “relied on a global network of approximately 11,000 third-party contingent workers to handle the vast majority of our community support contacts,” as noted in its annual financial filing.

As with the size of its full-time workforce, which Airbnb reduced by 25 percent in May 2020, the company likewise terminated many contract workers, and a bunch of them handled customer service, at that time. Airbnb hasn’t disclosed how many third-party contract workers it added in the interim, and how this may have impacted the productivity numbers the company boasts about.

Expedia U.S. Is a Thing

Expedia has often spoken about how it performed in the U.S., its biggest market, but it seldom talks about “Expedia U.S.,” as it did seven times in its fourth quarter earnings call earlier this month, as if Expedia U.S. were a new division or a separate brand.

Expedia Group sought to showcase the performance of the Expedia brand in the U.S. because it intentionally gave short shrift in marketing to some other geographies around the world and de-emphasized certain noncore brands, too.

Expedia U.S. saw its loyalty numbers jump 300 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the same period in 2019, and it has nearly 60 percent more engaged app users, the company said. 

No word on how the loyalty program and engaged app user numbers might have jumped or declined on a global basis, though.

Overall, some of that upside in the U.S. got deflated with under-performance abroad so Expedia was putting a pretty shine on the statistics it brought to the fore.

“Of course, when you look at our all-up B2C (business to consumer) numbers, the accelerating performance of Expedia U.S. has been largely offset by our intentional de-emphasis of some smaller noncore brands or pull back in certain geographies where we did not have the right model, and of course, our much-discussed technical migration, which required significant work and like all migrations resulted in some short-term friction,” Expedia Group Peter Kern said.

But Expedia faces challenges even in its U.S. home turf. A Skift Research survey of U.S. travelers