UK short-term rentals
Released on:
May 2024
Next release:
June 2024
For further information, please contact research@visitbritain.org.
Lighthouse: short-term rentals trends
Report highlights
- March 2024 saw growth in the supply of short term rental properties continue to accelerate compared with 2019 and 2023, with London seeing further growth vs. last month and Scotland now meeting pre-COVID volumes.
- After dips from January to February, we now see some uplift in the volume of nights reserved, occupancy rates, and average revenue per property between February and March. However, occupancy rates and average revenue per property remain down year on year.
- Birmingham and Glasgow gained popularity between February and March, with Saudi Arabia and Brazil leading year on year growth in the number of reviews left for short term rental properties.
- Please note: Lighthouse recently identified an issue with the supply data caused by an error in their algorithms. All historical data has now been re-issued with this error fixed, which means that supply data may differ slightly compared to previous publications. Other metrics have been unaffected.
View the latest report
Lighthouse - Short Term Rentals Mar 24.pdf
Find out the latest trends in the supply and performance of short term rental properties across the UK.
Explore short-term rentals trends in more detail
Browse data showcasing the latest trends in the UK short-term rentals sector using our interactive dashboard. The dashboard reveals insights on the supply of short-term rental properties, along with occupancy, average daily rates and more. Use interactive filters to compare trends across different time periods and UK regions.
About the report
Lighthouse (formerly Transparent Intelligence) tracks over 35 million vacation rental listings worldwide and maintains a proprietary database of hundreds of thousands of reservations tracked by month. Listings on the four major short-term rental platforms are tracked: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and Tripadvisor. Listings data is deduplicated when the same property is advertised on more than one platform.
The UK Government defines a short-term rental property as ‘a dwelling, or part of a dwelling, provided by a host to a guest, for use as accommodation other than the guest’s only or principal residence, in return for payment, in the course of a trade or business carried on by the host’.
Historical data is available back to 2019, with future performance also available for up to one year in the future. We have limited future performance data shown in reports to three months in the future in order to ensure reliability, based on guidance from Lighthouse.
For further insights into accommodation in England, explore the results of the England Occupancy Survey (EOS) which measures bedroom and bedspace occupancy across the accommodation sector.