Taylor Swift Is Back, And So Is The Demand for Short-Term Rentals

15.01.2024 - 17:55 / skift.com / Taylor Swift / Paris Olympics / Srividya Kalyanaraman / Melanie Brown

It’s a new year for events and the books are already filling up. After Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour took 2023 by a storm, and gave short-term rentals a big jolt, we wanted to see if 2024 events would have a similar effect.

Booking data says yes.

This year, we’ll have the Paris Olympics, the Super Bowl and more Taylor Swift tour dates. Data analytics company KeyData crunched the numbers on what what the booking data shows. It found that travelers attending these major events are already pushing up occupancy in short-term rentals months ahead of time.

“I think one of our takeaways from 2023, especially in the U.S. where occupancy was on the downswing, was that you may need to pull prices back on some weeks, but one also has the ability to push rates high for events,” said Melanie Brown, director of data and analytics at Key Data. “I think Taylor Swift took the world by storm. We talked about her tour a lot. So it’ll be interesting to see the lessons learned, and how those get implemented in 2024.”

Since 2018, travelers have been booking closer to the date of their stays. Travelers in 2023 waited an additional week before making reservations compared to the previous year, with suburban locations experiencing even shorter lead times than in 2020.

Booking for big events like concerts and sporting events is an exception to this trend. People are booking accommodations months in advance and slowly pushing daily rates higher.

“We can already see reservations that are made for those event periods whether it’s Super Bowl in February or way out to Taylor Swift in October in New Orleans,” Brown said. “These are reservations that are already on the books and then we’re comparing it to the same time period last year, so these are not projections as to where we expect things to end up. It’s just simply what’s on the books.”

For the dataset below, KeyData looked at the dates of upcoming events this year and did a comparison with 2023 (not all the events listed below are annual). The percentage change can be attributed to event-related demand.

Commenting on the larger picture, Brown said that she expects 2024 to look a lot like 2023. “In the U.S., we’re calling for a year that stuff similar to the slightly lower occupancy, slightly higher average rates, with revenues similar to 2023. The biggest unknown is what will happen to supply in the U.S., it’s not growing as quickly as it was as revenues came down because of the interest rates going up,” Brown said. “So I think we’re kind of expecting to see similar trends in 2024 as last year.”