Two-and-a-half years ago, we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks. People were predicting we were going to go out of business.

The pandemic gave us an opportunity to completely rethink our product. In May 2022, we reorganized our 5 million homes into 55 categories that highlighted the creativity, uniqueness and joy of Airbnb.

Our darkest moment became a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show people what it felt like to travel the Airbnb way.

While Categories was live, we delivered our most successful quarter, then our most profitable year, in the organization’s entire 15-year history.

Before the pandemic, we had 11% penetration in our 8 key markets where it ran (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States). After this campaign, we achieved nearly 30% penetration in those same locations.

This was the fastest rate of new people trying Airbnb—ever.

Travel advertising has been dominated by clichés and monotony – photos of two chairs & daiquiris on the beach. But there is one thing we knew people didn’t want after two years of a pandemic – monotony.

We built our campaign on memorable, diverse experiences - each enabled by a unique Airbnb category. With great effort, we never duplicated a billboard in a city – producing 96 different boards in the process. So as people explored their city they were constantly met with fresh creative.

With Categories, we re-shaped millions of people’s travel preferences towards the more unique, more memorable, and more fun type of travel that is so distinctly Airbnb.