How Hotels Are Evolving to Compete With Airbnb

by Scott Laird
Last updated: 8:00 AM ET, Fri April 3, 2026

Years ago, while boarding a flight to Portland, Oregon, I overheard the passengers behind me good-naturedly grumbling to a fellow passenger about the cost of the last-minute hotel they booked.

“Did you check Airbnb?” The stranger asked.

“Yes,” came the reply. “Every Airbnb in Portland is either a trailer or a treehouse.”

I had a good laugh to myself. Probably not exactly true, but true enough to be funny.

Fast forward a decade, give or take a few years, to last summer, when I was mindlessly marathoning episodes of Below Deck onboard a long flight and kept seeing the same ad pop up before each one. The ad, part of Hilton’s New Ways to Stay campaign, highlighted the more distinctive among Hilton’s brands: Auto Camp (a Hilton Partner), Graduate by Hilton, NoMad, and Small Luxury Hotels of the World.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the choice to highlight those four brands was no accident. In some way, each of the brands addressed a gap that global hospitality brands traditionally had compared to Airbnb—gaps that ultimately led to the increase in popularity of the company and vacation rental platforms like it. Hotels were missing residential-style accommodations, or they were missing extraordinary or distinctive accommodation types.

Simply put, there were too many box-standard hotels and not enough “trailers and treehouses”. In the past few years, the global hospitality brands have aggressively expanded their portfolios to include more hotel types they hadn’t previously dabbled in.

AutoCamp is literally glamping trailers. Graduate by Hilton in Evanston, Illinois, offers a “Home Alone Suite”, decorated like a McAllister family bedroom.

They also expanded the white-label brands, such as Hilton’s Curio Collection, Hyatt’s Unbound Collection, and Marriott’s Autograph and Luxury Collections. These brands gave hotel owners the latitude to offer more locally-focused, distinctive stays, which tended to draw customers to other platforms.

And now, the brands are adding residential-style accommodations. I stayed at The Ann, Savannah, Apartments by Marriott Bonvoy last year, which had all the convenience of a residential-style Airbnb stay (the unit is literally a one-bedroom apartment, complete with washer/dryer and kitchen), but with the added amenities of a Marriott hotel, like a morning coffee shop and evening bar with food service, meeting spaces, and an outdoor courtyard with grills for guest use.

The Ann, Savannah, Apartments by Marriott lobby

The best part was that the experience was a hotel experience. I booked the room like I would any other Marriott room, with standard cancellation and no onerous arrival instructions, because there was a front desk. No chores. No randomly cancelled reservations. No cleaning fees.

That’s part of Hilton’s messaging, too. The accommodation type is more like an AirBnB, but the hotel service and amenities are the point. It’s the whole point of Hilton’s For The Stay tagline—reminding travelers what they loved about hotels, while being reminded that the hotels are branching out, and making those amenities part of a wider range of stay “styles”.

“The addition of these new brands and partnerships, paired with Hilton’s unmatched portfolio of industry-leading brands, showcases how Hilton continues to meet guests and Hilton Honors members with more choices, more experiences, and more ways to experience the best of a Hilton stay,” a Hilton spokesperson told TravelPulse.

Meanwhile, Airbnb, which started off as an app largely designed to open spare rooms in private homes to travelers, has started offering hotel-like services, such as the local experiences and personally tailored VIP services that hotel concierges have been providing for years. It rolled out a new version of its app last spring with the additional Airbnb Services and Airbnb Experiences functionality built in for the first time.

Another operator in the space, WhimStay, which offers many vacation rental types that are also available on the AirBnB and VRBO platforms, has even entered a territory long exclusive to hotels and resorts—travel advisor commissions, opening up the platform to the realm of travelers who prefer to book via a professional travel counselor.

There’s a maxim in business to avoid scope creep—that a well-executed consumer product can’t be all things to all consumers. The hospitality business could ultimately be the exception to that rule, because it’s decentralized enough to work. Hilton’s brands are a mix of owned and operated properties, managed properties and franchised properties, plus some strategic Hilton Honors partnerships where the brands “come into the family,” but the operation and management of them is left up to the experts.

The bottom line is that the product is hospitality, whether it’s an airstream trailer, an apartment, or a boxy hotel room, and executing well on that—in whatever form the market demands it take—is what will keep guests coming back.

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