Airbnb SEC filing shows a $1.4 trillion total addressable market for experiences

Tours, activities and experiences the very thing that Toristy has for the past year been building up their supply of, has according to Airbnb got a total addressable market value of $1.4 trillion. This is based on Airbnb's pre-pandemic sales figures and their estimation of the market size for what they call "experiences".

Experiences

In the SEC filing Airbnb describes experiences as making handmade pasta in Rome to studying music history in Havana. This requires of course the technology to sell a wide range of different types of service (rentals, subscriptions, short term tours/activities, charters, ticket sales etc), something Airbnb don't have yet, but are clearly intending to move into.

Indeed their SEC filing says;

"Design new products and offerings. We will design new opportunities for connection. As the world continues to change, we will continue to bring together new technologies with our design expertise to expand possibilities for our hosts and offer new experiences for our guests."

They also say their serviceable market is $239bn which leaves a healthy amount for the rest of us mere mortals if what they say is true.

Previously we'd looked at our own addressable market as around $5bn globally based on research we did into the enterprise market in transport, hotels, travel media and consumer website traffic. This was also based on previous research into the market size which was $180bn according to Arival (dated a couple of years back). I'm starting to wonder whether that figure is under calculated for in destination experiences because Airbnb charge 20% which is in line with what other OTAs charge and they have extrapolated their quantitative sales data.

In Destination

What I like about Airbnb is it's in destination by default. You can buy an experience in their app, prior to arriving or when you're in the host city, so it's a channel I'm extremely interested to tap into with our own experience portfolio of 10s of thousands of experiences.

We also offer enterprises their own in destination marketplaces pre-filled with hundreds if not thousands of services if you're interested.

I'm sure in the coming weeks and months there will be a lot of discussion into these numbers, but this is the first big company that seems to be making a seriously strong move into the experiences market in the 2020s with over half of their IPO value proposition tied towards it.

Watching this space carefully.