Commission (Eurostat) publishes first statistics on short-stay accommodation booked via collaborative economy platforms

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, has published key data on short-stay accommodation booked via four private platforms active in the tourism sector. This is a result of the March 2020 agreement between the Commission and Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group and Tripadvisor, which began collaboration between these platforms and Eurostat.

The full release package, which is available here , includes a detailed article on Eurostat's " Statistics Explained " platform and tables covering data gathered in 2018 and 2019 for more than 200 European cities and all regions, but also analyses the country of origin of the guest and the seasonality of the number of bookings and of guest nights.

The data will be regularly updated by Eurostat. In particular, they cover national, regional and city-level data on the number of stays booked and the number of nights spent in accommodation booked via these four platforms. According to the Commission, such information will (i) contribute to more complete statistics on tourism accommodation in Europe, (ii) allow public authorities to better understand the development of the collaborative economy (in particular, short-term accommodation rentals services) and (iii) support evidence-based policies.

Key findings

• In 2019 (the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, which strongly hit the tourism sector), guests spent more than 554 million nights in an accommodation booked via Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group or Tripadvisor in the EU. This means that, on an average day, around 1.5 million guests slept in a bed booked through one of these four platforms. The number of nights spent in short-term accommodation booked via the four platforms grew by 14 % between 2018 and 2019.
• The top city destinations for bookings through one of the four platforms were: (i) the urban areas of Paris (15.1 million guest nights); (ii) Barcelona (11.3 million); (iii) Rome (10.4 million); (iv) Lisbon (10.5 million); and, (v) Madrid (8.3 million).
• The five most popular destination countries for stays booked via the four private platforms were: (i) Spain (112 million guest nights); (ii) France (109 million); (iii) Italy (83 million guest nights); (iv) Germany (40 million); and (v) Portugal (33 million).The 20 most popular regions in the EU account for nearly half (48%) of the total number of guest nights booked via the four platforms. Most of these top 20 regions are located in Spain (six regions), France or Italy (five respectively), while two regions are in Portugal, one in Croatia and one in Hungary. In the three most popular regions, guests booked more than 20 million nights in 2019: Andalusia (26 million), Adriatic Croatia (25 million) and Catalonia (21 million). In 2019, these three regions accounted for 13% of the total guest nights spent in the EU that were booked via the four platforms. The regional breakdown can be found in the map below.