Airbnb vs Marriott: which is worth more? About $100 billion each
Airbnb and Marriott were worth about the same at the October 23, 2026 close, roughly $100 billion each: about $101 billion for Airbnb and about $102 billion for Marriott, by our calculation. The gap is about half a percent, too small to say that either one is worth more.
The two companies make money from travel stays in very different ways. Airbnb describes itself as a global marketplace connecting guests with stays, experiences and services, and the stays are offered by hosts, more than 5 million of them in over 220 countries and regions. Marriott had 9,805 properties in 145 countries and territories at the end of 2025. Yet it owns or leases less than one percent of its system. Other owners pay Marriott to run their properties or to use its brand names.
Market value here is a computed figure: the Nasdaq closing price on October 23, 2026 times the shares outstanding on each company's latest 10-Q cover. For Airbnb that is $172.01 times 589,585,682 Class A and Class B shares as of July 15, 2026. Its 9,200,000 Class H shares are left out, because they were held by Airbnb's own Host Endowment Fund subsidiary. For Marriott it is $390.71 times 260,766,288 shares as of July 27, 2026. The share counts are a few months old, which is one more reason a half percent gap does not settle anything.
Revenue tells a different story at first glance. Marriott reported $26.2 billion of revenue in 2025, more than twice Airbnb's $12.2 billion, both from the companies' 2025 annual reports. Airbnb's revenue consists of service fees, net of incentives and refunds, charged to its customers. That line counts the fees only, not the $91.3 billion of bookings guests made on the platform in 2025, so the two are not interchangeable.
The common misreading is to treat Marriott's larger revenue as a larger business in the same sense. Of its $26.2 billion, $19.2 billion, or 73.3 percent, was cost reimbursements: hotel owners paying Marriott back for costs it covers on their behalf. Its reimbursed expenses were $19.5 billion in 2025, slightly more than that revenue line, so Marriott made no profit on that money. Profit itself was close. Marriott's net income was $2.60 billion and Airbnb's was $2.51 billion, so Marriott was slightly higher. Net margin, computed as net income divided by total revenue, was 20.5 percent for Airbnb and 9.9 percent for Marriott. Part of that gap is the reimbursement accounting, which enlarges Marriott's revenue without adding profit.
As of the October 23, 2026 close, the market valued the two companies at about the same amount, even though one reports more than twice the revenue and the other keeps about twice as much of each revenue dollar as profit. These figures are dated. Prices change every trading day, and both companies report third quarter 2026 results in early November, with new share counts.
Revenue size depends partly on what a company books as revenue. When one business records pass-through reimbursements and another records only its fees, profit and margin show more about how each one earns than the top line does.
Watch the short video: YouTube