BLOG | by Sara Eddleston

Airbnb hopes Olympic deal will break its deadlock with sports fans

As you may have seen, the IOC announced Airbnb as one of its TOP sponsors this week. The deal is the brand’s first foray into sports sponsorship and it will hope that the reported $500m investment will support a trajectory which has so far been pretty stratospheric.

You can see from the chart below how the number of those using Airbnb in the host countries of each of the next four Olympic Games (following Japan) has grown over the past two years.

While executives will hope that the deal will support Airbnb’s activity more widely than just in these Olympic host countries, they are specifically targeting sports fans with this deal. So what’s the benchmark they’ll be working from?

Well, this varies somewhat from country to country but as things stand, Olympic-watchers’ perceptions of the brand in the US and China closely mirror those of the general public. For example, for our Impression metric, fans of Olympic sports score the brand almost exactly the same as the general population do (see chart below).

That shouldn’t be a surprise given Airbnb’s absence from sports marketing so far. But at the end of their deal (2028), the brand will be looking to have moved the needle substantially among this group.

We’ll be tracking how they do every day of the week.