* Updated June 15th, 2021
Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries worldwide and the vacation rental business is one of those sectors driving that very growth. In recent months, the travel industry has been hit the hardest by the pandemic, also dragging down with it the short-term rental market. Many hopeful signs, like the three approved vaccines, are mounting the expectations for 2021 to be a bounce-back year.
There are hundreds of vacation-rental listing sites, and hosts wonder where to best list their properties. Which ones are likely to attract more bookings? Which ones bring quality guests? This article will shed light on the distribution of bookings for the most popular booking sources, in the last 4 years in all the countries, except the USA.
One might wonder why we exclude the US rentals. In the United States, during the pandemic, travel between states was not prohibited. Besides, in other countries, strict lockdowns were imposed. This fact led the owners and managers in the USA to respond differently than the hosts in all the other countries. If you want to read more about the USA’s most popular booking sources click here.
We have collected booking data from Hosthub customers from 78 countries for the past 3 years – more than 500.000 bookings in total, and broke down the data per source channel – these are the results:
Percentage of bookings per channel per month
Click the graph to zoom in
Airbnb and Booking.com equally dominated the market in the last few years. More precisely, Airbnb represents 34% of total bookings in May while Booking .com has a share of 31% of total bookings.
If we look at the correlation and the percentage of bookings in each channel we will find out that the second most powerful source of bookings is direct bookings. More specifically, 19% of total bookings during May 2021 were from direct bookings – a percentage that is not negligible. This movement originated in Europe a few years ago and has been spreading all over the world, except for the USA.
This month, until now, Airbnb and Booking.com are the most popular ones, each of which securing 34% of total bookings. Direct bookings followed with a share of 23% of total bookings.
It seems that the pandemic outbreak created a breach in the dominance of the two major players making room for a new one: direct bookings. Wondering why it is important for you to have your direct booking website and accept direct bookings? You can read more here.
This article will be updated monthly.
Distribution of booking sources per month – USA
Distribution of booking sources per month – Global
