Airbnb's brand vs. Booking.com's performance marketing – is there a playbook for recovery?

2020 was certainly not "another-day-in-the-office" type of year for the travel industry. But Airbnb deserves a section on its own in the annals of that cataclysmic year.

Like the proverbial Phoenix, the home-sharing startup managed to raise from a near-death during COVID-19's first lockdown, followed by a triumphant IPO where its stock price quickly headed into the stratosphere, allowing it to reach the top rank of one of the most valuable companies in the travel industry.

A cornerstone of Airbnb's thunderous success has been its capability to become a lifestyle brand for a new generation of travellers.

Airbnb's IPO filing provided some precious marketing lessons on how the 13-year-old company challenged conventional wisdom by mostly shunning away from traditional performance marketing channels.

In stark contrast, Booking.com started to build its online empire years earlier, thanks to the flawless execution of a simple but extremely efficient formula: siphoning as much traffic as possible from performance channels and maximising conversion by A/B testing to death each pixel in the funnel.