The number of Airbnb listings across Europe has dropped off significantly since the pandemic’s start in 2020, with hosts favoring longer-term rentals over shorter holiday stays, according to a report from Reuters.
The drop in short-term rentals led to as much as a 15 percent decline in the price of long-term rentals. The surge of properties listed on Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms over the years has at times priced people out of their own local real estate market.
Property managers in Lisbon, Barcelona, Prague, Venice and other European city centers said that the freefall in tourism caused by the pandemic has prompted many Airbnb-type hosts to change operations from short-term to long-term. Other short-term rental hosts gave up their properties or moved into them, according to Reuters.
Airbnb listings from the biggest European cities that had one night booked or available in the past month dropped 21.9 percent year on year, according to data from holiday rental analytics firm AirDNA.
The European Union has pondered a reclassification of the short-term rental industry as it decides how best to implement new rules governing online platforms. Those rules apply to companies known as “gatekeepers,” but the criteria for that designation is still being defined.
Airbnb said in a January research report that travel will open up for visits between friends and family before vacation tourism rebounds from the pandemic. U.S. consumers have said they mainly want to travel to reconnect with loved ones, and 54 percent of respondents indicated they had either booked a trip or anticipate traveling in 2021.
In its first earnings call as a public company, Airbnb’s fourth-quarter results showed a $3.9 billion loss, most of it due to its $2.8 billion in stock compensation. The deficit was improved over the same time period in 2019
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