Room for all?

• The latest Colliers research in to the growth of Airbnb provides some illuminating insights in to its evolution, which almost seems to be occurring in parallel with mainstream hospitality offers.

The report looked at five main European cities which have introduced legislation to restrict short-term rentals – London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid and Paris. Despite new regulation, Airbnb increased its overall share of the overnight stay market between 2016 and 2017, by an average of 3.4 per cent in these cities.

In 2017, London recorded 6,703,337 Airbnb overnight stays – a huge 45 per cent rise compared with 2016, but this phenomenal growth has not had a detrimental effect on London’s hotel market, which according to PwC achieved a 2.2 per cent rise in ADR in 2017, a 2.4 per cent rise in RevPAR and a 0.2 per cent rise in occupancy to 83 per cent.

As the short-term rental market matures, hoteliers, who were once extremely negative towards Airbnb, are beginning to see it as a separate, but complementary, sector. Colliers’ Marc Finney says: “In a lot of ways, Airbnb is a different product offer, and one that now benefits from better visibility. Despite its growing influence, we’re still finding strong business cases for proposed hotels in our development advisory work.”

What will be fascinating to see is whether Airbnb – with more regulation and increased focus on business travel – will be as benign in its impact on serviced apartments. Our sector has broadly welcomed it until now, thanks to the way it has opened up public perception of alternative accommodations and offered a cost-effective distribution travel for short-stay inventory. But will it start eating in to our traditional customer base or continue creating a new travel demographic?

At SAN, we’d be very interested to hear your opinions. Please contact me at george@servicedapartmentnews.com if you’d like to share your views on how Airbnb and serviced apartments will coexist in the future.