Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, August 29. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
25.08.2023 - 13:43 / skift.com / Srividya Kalyanaraman / Melanie Brown
We’re down one quarter this year so far, and demand for short-term rentals keeps inching up.
According to data from various sources tracking the sector, short-term rental has grown, and occupancies are longer despite to rising nightly rates.
Experts warned us that changing consumer preferences towards short-term rentals will cause the blending and merging of different players in the accommodation industry.
Consolidation in the sector is the proof: Accor acquired luxury rental brand onefinestay in 2017, and Marriott launched Homes and Villas in 2019. There have been lots of other mergers.
“If you look at hotel owners and operators, you see a lot of investment in hotel residences and service apartments,” Merilee Karr, CEO at UnderTheDoormat Group said at Skift’s Future of Lodging Forum in March. “There is now a muddled middle, where operators born in the short-term rental space as well as hotels are coming to the middle ground.”
Remember at the beginning of the year, we said this would be the year blended travel comes of age?
Data confirms this: Analysis by Key Data indicates a strong year for the industry if the momentum built up in the first quarter of 2023 can be sustained. Nightly rates so far have remained flat in the UK and the U.S., and occupancy rates are higher, leading to higher revenue per room.
Globally, average daily rates were up 3.4 percent annually, and occupancy climbed 17.6 percent, while revenue per available room is 21.6 percent ahead of last year, analysis from KeyData found.
Demand for short-term rentals jumped 16 percent annually, while supply — measured by the number of available listings — has shrunk.
Fewer available listings and higher demand can indicate longer stays and more revenue. For reference: High supply in 2022 contributed to declining occupancy levels for most of the year. This year, we could see some of that supply differential leveling off with a steady occupancy rate. Recent data from research firm AirDNA found that longer stays are up 71 percent and account for more than 20 percent of nights booked on Airbnb, compared to 14 percent pre-pandemic. And the stays are over 28 days long.
“This was a promising start to the year but the outlook for 2023 remains on a knife edge. With ADRs (Average Daily Rates) weak, it is occupancy that is currently rescuing returns for owners and operators,” Melanie Brown, executive director of Data Insights at Key Data said.
Short-term rentals’ share of demand may be less than the pre-pandemic trend, but it’s still on the increase, and part of that can be attributed to more blended travel for the blended traveler.
There is a reason why supply cannot meet higher demands: Just 22 percent of vacation rentals are listed across
Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, August 29. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
New York City’s Office of Special Enforcement has approved only 257 short-term rental host registrations — out of 3,250 applications — ahead of a September 5 enforcement deadline.
If you follow the short-term rental industry, you would have read or heard Sonder touting itself as “a leading next-generation hospitality company that is redefining the guest experience through technology and design” countless times.
Blueground is seeing its apartments being rented out as safe havens from political upheavals.
Just about everyone has heard of Airbnb.
A new study on the impact of short-term rentals in Puerto Rico, where the proliferation of Airbnb listings played an outsized role in its tourism recovery following Hurricane Maria, found that a 10 percent increase in short-term rental density in relation to the total number of housing units, led to a 7 percent increase in median rents and a 23 percent jump in housing unit prices.
In an era when travelers see short-term rentals as an ever-more attractive choice, Booking.com’s mix of bookings for these types of accommodations on its platforms in the third quarter ticked up just “slightly” compared with 2019 to around 30 percent, the company said. Isn’t this an historic failure? Shouldn’t Booking.com be gaining more ground?
Airbnb thinks it’s unfair that the European Commission is proposing increased data-sharing requirements on short-term rental providers across the zone, but Google seemingly is escaping the clampdown.
California-based RedAwning announced it acquired channel manager Lexicon Travel Technologies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Due to an increase in demand in the short-term rental sector, Skift is back with our Skift Short-Term Rental Summit on June 7 in New York City. Building upon Skift’s comprehensive coverage of short-term rentals, this summit will focus on the forefront of the impact of technology, platforms, and professionalization on both the urban and traditional vacation rental category.
In the era of slow travel and quicker planning, those who wait until late might win.
There is now another subscription service for short-term rentals.