European Commission publishes first statistics on short-stay accommodation
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 data was gathered in 2018 and 2019 for more than 200 European cities and all regions, and also analyses the country of origin of the guest and the seasonality of the number of bookings and guest nights. HOTREC hopes that data gathering can be enhanced to improve insights based on non-aggregated data.
In 2019, guests spent more than 554 million nights in an accommodation booked via the four major platforms. 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), Barcelona (11.3 m), Rome (10.4 m), Lisbon (10.5 m), and Madrid (8.3 m). 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.
