Online short holiday bookings increased

During Q4 2022, guests spent around 97 million nights in short-term rental accommodation in the EU, booked via Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia Group or TripAdvisor, according to Eurostat.

This is up +25% compared with the same period in 2021.

With this value, platform tourism exceeded the levels (+10%) recorded in the pre-pandemic Q4 2019, when platforms registered around 88 million guest nights.

In 2022, guests spent around 547 million nights in EU short-term rental accommodation booked online.

This means there was a robust recovery compared with 2021 (364 million nights; +50%), and nights spent exceeded 2019 levels (512 million nights; +7%).

In Cyprus, there was a total of 3.796 million nights booked through online platforms during 2022, with bookings not reaching their pre-pandemic level (4.241 million nights in 2019).

However, online bookings have increased compared to 2020 (1.352 million) and 2021 (2.685 million).

Data collected from four private collaborative economy platforms is part of an agreement with the European Commission in March 2020.

In 2022, the largest increases in nights spent compared with 2019 were in Sweden (+33%), France (+31%) and Belgium (+23%).

However, 14 EU members still needed to catch up to 2019 levels.

The most prominent decreases were recorded in Czechia (-36%), Hungary (-27%), Ireland and Estonia (each -23%).

Coastal regions

Traditional coastal holiday destinations remained popular last summer, specifically during Q3 (July – August – September).

The most popular regions for short-term rental accommodation booked via online platforms were Jadranska Hrvatska in Croatia (20 million nights), the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (11 million) and the Spanish region of Andalucía (10 million).

In the top 20 regions, France had seven regions, Spain five, Italy four, and Croatia, Portugal, Greece, and Romania had one each.

In Cyprus, considered a single region for statistical reasons on a NUTS 2 level, there was a total of 1.6 million nights booked during Q3 2022.