How Airdna is going to change the STR game in 2023
15 Feb 2023 · 38 min
Jamie Lane from AirDNA walks through the company's tools for short-term rental investors: neighborhood-level revenue estimates, smart pricing, and a Pro dashboard with comps and amenity analysis. AirDNA tracks Airbnb and VRBO calendars back to 2014, and booking lead times have shortened roughly two weeks since pre-COVID levels.
Chapters
Welcome back to the Boostly podcast. We've got something very cool today. We've got Jamie from Air DNA joining us. And Jamie is going to walk through the back end of Air DNA. He's going to go through the most important parts that you need to check out when you're looking at rates, performance or investing in a new market. Make sure you check the description below, above or wherever, because every Boostly member gets an exclusive discount when they sign up to any of the paid Air DNA discounts, which is super cool. So airdna co go and check it out. Go and register. If you want to purchase your local neighborhood or if you want to purchase a wider area, you can do so at a reduced race. That's exclusive to Boostly. So go and find the coupon code. It's above or below. I'll even get up on the screen right now in the edit of what that may be. But as soon as you do, go and do it because there are some amazing, amazing new features coming into Air DNA this year. They're going to start bringing in booking.com and data, which is going to take the game up. They've got some really big features coming. Plus as well, they're going to be able to index your live rates from ADNA into your property management software tool as well. So good things come in. We have a really interesting input into the Pro Dashboard at one point and if you were to freeze frame it enough, you'll get everything that you need from that. And that's the data that Dota is again, which is a very expensive product. So I really appreciate Jamie sharing that with us today. Let's get on with it. It's action packed, it's about an hour long, but there's so much good in this. You'll thank me later. Okay, Jamie, thank you very much for doing this. If you could just give us a little bit of background about yourself and how you came into the world of Air DNA. And then what we're going to do is we're going to dive in, share the screen and we're going to look behind the hood or under the hood of Air DNA, which. Which I'm excited to.
Awesome. Yeah. So I joined Air DNA back in October of 2020. I was actually a client of Airdna back from 2015, working in the hotel industry and doing research on the US hotel industry and forecasts and helping our clients understand and at the time was what the impact this whole thing called short term rentals was going to have on traditional hotels. And then got in deep to the AirDNA dataset and decided to join them full time. So now VP of Research and spend my day looking at data and helping our clients understand how to best use that data to help them form their business.
Fantastic. I'm really looking forward to today because we're going to obviously want to dig in under the hood, so to speak, of our DNA. So if anybody's never used it before, or even if you've used it a lot, I would really want to try and uncover some of the features that you never knew of before. And then we're going to look more to maybe the market and what's going to be happening over the course of this year, which is exciting. So, yeah, so let's delve in, if you, if you don't mind, if you want to share your screen. So what we're going to do is I've asked Jamie just to give us a bit of data on, on leads. So I think our DNA, you know, rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, maybe people assume that it's just an American thing. Right. But this, obviously there's worldwide company, we've got offices in Europe as well as America. And I wanted to focus on leads because a lot of the people that tune into the podcast are obviously UK based, maybe Europe based. And I wanted to just, I have a little look and Jamie just, this is a beautiful thing, is that we can have Jamie on here and go, right, well, this is what you need to be looking for. So when you're ready, what's the sort of typical things and, and how should a host be using it when looking at leads, for example, as a potential area where they want to maybe invest in and the numbers that they should be looking at.
Yeah, so to start with is I think about the UK and one of the countries with our largest subscriber base. So we do have a lot of subscribers coming from the UK. We actually, in 2021 did a remap of the entire country. So what before we had like 600 different cities that you subscribe to or could subscribe to. We boiled that down to 53 markets. And these are sort of bigger chunks of the country that you could then subscribe to and get a better sense of the trends happening within and you can click through all around to those. So if you wanted to subscribe to the Peak District, you could actually subscribe to the Peak District, the Lake District. So you're not sort of limited to just individual cities, but broader, what I think of them as vacation rental market. So where are people looking to Travel so you can get understanding if you're looking at a region to invest in or if you've got and broadly an area that you're operating in, you can start more broad and then dive in deeper. So I'm going to start here. We're in the lead Sheffield market and then we can look specifically at the trends within this broader area of which and it's dominated by both Leeds and Sheffield. I did a bit of digging in prior to the call and these markets have had entirely different performance. And over the past couple of years, Sheffield really dominated, I think by people going to the Peak District and it being sort of a jumping off point where demand has been very strong, full Recovery back to 2019 levels where leads has, has really lagged. And as of 2022, demand was still about 7% below 2019 levels and a lot of that was dominated by summer performance. So for leads and we can get into this where you can start to see what the trends are by month. And we break out the data in a bunch of different ways to help you understand where the strength of the market is, maybe where some of the weaknesses. So when you start looking at the trends, you see that July and August, we're typically in the strongest month and where most of the revenue is being generated, because we're not. I'm fully back in terms of supply, the market hasn't been able to achieve sort of back to 2019 levels. But for the hosts that are in that market, we're essentially at 2019 levels of occupancy and have come slightly off it in this past year as more supply has started to come online, as sort of guests have started to return. So as we're looking around here so we can look at specific areas of Leeds, so we've got the center city that you can dig into and you see there's about 150 listings in the sort of center city, old city of Leeds. We can compare occupancy, we can compare rates. We have a lot of different filters. And the filters is where I suggest people really dig in at the beginning, because ideally you're looking to find how am I going to operate if you're maybe looking to make a new investment into the market, or if you're already operating, trying to find how am I performing relative to my competition. So let's say I'm already in there and now I want to find some really good benchmark statistics to compare how I'm doing compared to maybe some of the others in the market.
I was just going to Ask a super quick question when let's just say for example a free bed property has become available somewhere in Leeds. You've been given it like a little a hint from a friend to saying hey, this has become available. We think this would be really good for a potential. I can see from the filters here. You talk about the filters. Let's just say it is a free bed property. What would be some cool things to look at when it comes to breaking down this data. So I can see here you've got bedrooms all at the moment priced here, all like how would you like approach it with the scenario would be like say a free bedroom property has become available in Leeds and you want to see if it is a worthwhile to go for the free or maybe should you keep looking for maybe a four or five bed, just for example.
Yeah. So what I would start with is our rentalizer tool and there you're going to actually put in the exact address of that property and it's going to pull back comparison properties. So let's say you said it was a three bedroom, three bath in Leeds. Uh, and I'm not. Maybe it'll work.
Could do the city center.
Yeah, just like. And I can say three bed, three bath and let's say we can accommodate a guest.
Yep.
So now it's going to pull back property comparisons. So what's sort of operating leads that sort of best matches that comparison? And now you're going to see exactly. Okay, I'm what are comparable properties? What are they earning? So it looks like a lot of these properties earning around 80% occupancy, something we notice just in the beginning. And it had a really high seasonality score which means that compared to other markets in the UK it does not see the wild swings that some of the other markets do. Maybe down in Cornwall or up in the Highlands. So it's being maybe a larger city market. It's not as volatile in terms of monthly seasonality and then average ADR. So it looks like we're running what about 210 pounds if you look at averaging these top ones. And then you'll see it's going to average out all the comparisons that we pulled and give you both an average rate for the year and occupancy as well as what the expected revenue would be. And then you can see here on the right how we see has seen that revenue change over time. So one for me, this tells me in 2021 the average we would have said this property would have earned about £25,000. Where today we're saying that's about £50,000. So massive increase in performance over the past year. And then you see the seasonality. So when is that revenue going to be earned and where's the sort of confidence range we have around that? So you see top month is July, but actually a pretty decent shoulder season in leads from really April through to October of generating over £4,000amonth.
So the question that I get the most when it comes to things like Air DNA is where exactly do you get your data from? Because it's a great numbers, but it's. Is this like. Is this just from say, Airbnb and vrbo? I can see the logos or is this including other elements as well?
Yeah. So it's going to be our estimated performance of all properties listed on Airbnb and VRBO for which we're getting the data by monitoring the calendars. So which nights are available? When do those nights go unavailable and what was the last rate available for that night when it went unavailable? Then we model whether it was a booked or blocked night and then sort of store that along with each reservation. So even if properties are getting booked direct, we're still going to be capturing that data because as soon as it gets booked direct, you're still going to be blocking out those dates on your calendar. And we're looking at typical guest booking behavior to then model whether things are getting booked or blocked. So it's a bit six months in Cornwall during the winter that someone's blocking out of their calendar. We're going to see that more than likely as a block, as someone saying, hey, I'm not going to be getting bookings during this time. I'm going to delist or block out those dates from my calendar. And not saying that it's someone booking six months in Cornwall for a nice winter stay.
Just to confirm. We don't get any data from booking.com and the booking group, not yet.
So we actually started scraping them about a year and a half ago with the idea of once we load them all in, we need there to be a long enough time series so we can sort of compare relevant year over year trends. So it's all in our database and we're going to be rolling it out in 2023.
Fantastic. So the next question would be the rentalizer estimate there goes back to, say, 2021, when in fact does the data roll back to is it over a certain sample size or is this based on like years and years and years? Because obviously you've been going for for nearly about 10 years now.
So yeah, so we started tracking global performance back in 2016, started tracking the US and the top 150 largest cities in 2014. We definitely have the longest time series of data in the industry. And so when you look at just this occupancy chart, you see it goes back to January 2018. And so we keep in the system here five years of data. So you can see five years of occupancy, ADR revenue trends and then we also provide weekly and daily performance as well. And all that data is now downloadable so you can just hit this download button and export each chart to Excel.
Lovely. So here's another question. We've got a lot of people who will be tuning into this, who may be in the bed and breakfast or small hotel market. Now, seeing that you've come into this from a hotel background of when you've been trolling through all of the data, is there anything that a potential bed and breakfast owner or small hotel owner could get from this? Or is this really more speaking to those who are going all in on short term rentals, medium term rentals?
Absolutely. I'm getting a sense of one. For me, if I was a hotel operator, small B and B operator, I would really want to know forward booking pace of short term rentals is what I know from operating the short term or short term rentals and hotels is that when people are booking short term rentals, it's usually well in advance of when they're booking hotels. So now I'm looking at Leeds center city, I can get a sense of what the forward demand over the next through August looks like. So I can see I am here. I have more nights booked for July, what is it, fourth through eighth in Leeds than I do at any other point in time.
So that would be quite interesting because then you could go to Google and go, well, what's happening in leeds between the 4th and the 8th? Is there an event, is there a festival? Is there something like this you can like sort of forward plan clever and.
You can get a sense of, okay, what rates are people booking at? What is the available rate for the average short term rental? What is getting booked and then what was getting booked as of the previous year? So in terms of managing your revenue in that space. Yeah, I think short term rental bookings are a really strong forward demand indicator for really anyone operating in the lodging industry.
So if I'm somebody who isn't yet using air DNA and if I wanted to get this data, do I, do I purchase blocks of Data, as in, I would purchase leads in Sheffield and if I want to get Manchester, for example, I'd get them. Like how does, how does it work in terms of pricing and getting access to this data?
Yeah, so we do it in two different ways. One is by city or submarket, so you can start really granular or you can go broad. So if you wanted the entire uk, you could subscribe to that. We also have the individual regions. So what is there 13 different sort of, I call them states. You probably have a different nomenclature for them.
Yeah, counties.
Yeah, counties. So you could subscribe to the county or the individual market or submarket. So we really give you lots of options there to subscribe to what makes most sense. So you can click on the purchase button and it shows the sort of range of options. So neighborhood, city, state. Or you could go to the entire country or even global take on the globe.
Yeah, I like that. So again, if you're. For example, there'll be people who are watching this who just want to be focused on, say, Leeds City center, so they can just go for the neighborhood. The city plan was the region that we looked at and when we, when we delved in right at the very start, Leeds and Sheffield also covered Huddersfield, a big region. State is obviously like the county. So you're going to get Yorkshire and Humber, which is, you know, York, that's Hull, that's everywhere. And then again, you can choose. So it's pay monthly. So technically people can pay for one month and then it can come back again maybe in a couple of months, etc. Or you can save money by just getting the full year and taking full advantage of that. Really good.
Absolutely. Yep. And that's all been a change within like the past three months that we offer those sort of state and country plans and that we're offering annual discounts. So really trying to be more flexible and not just have individual cities that people have to subscribe to each one to sort of build out what they're interested in.
Love it. So just very quickly going back into airdna, obviously you've been the company now for coming up to three years. What are your personal favorite features that are behind, behind the scenes, so to speak?
One is that we do pricing. So you think of the other pricing operators out there to give you sort of how you should be charging on a nightly rate. Most of them charge per property or percent of revenue. We actually include it with our, our offering. So if you just subscribe to a monthly neighborhood plan for Lead center, it had five properties you're going to be able to set up each of your listings and get nightly pricing for for each of those. So you can set your own pricing using our smart rates feature. So we're gonna, for any property you connect, be able to suggest rates for any day out into the future. So what is average getting booked in the market? And then what do we suggest on a daily basis that you should be charging for your unit, given all the trends that and we were talking about earlier. So what is forward pacing, what rate is getting booked, what isn't, and then the booking curve for your market. So if you want to make sure you're sort of meeting your sort of average occupancy goals, what how you need to adjust your rates to sort of meet that.
And a quick question on that, sorry, is would this automatically sink into your pricing system on your property management software or would you then go in and manually make sure that's all right?
Yeah, right now it's still a manual basis. We do have the ability for you to export those daily rates into Excel, but in early 2023, we're going to be rolling out automated connectivity.
Wow, cool. So big things coming, big things coming. Things have happened and big things are coming. So just to recap on the big things that have happened, breaking down the pricing. So not just you have to buy like USA or statewide, you can break down neighborhood, et cetera. And then coming very soon, we talked about your live rate to be able to sync in straight with your property management software. And the other thing that is going to be coming in 2023 was, well, is obviously at the moment it's Airbnb and VRBO where they get the data from. But we're going to be adding in booking.com very, very soon as well. So exciting things have happened and coming with the world of air DNA.
Yeah. And. And just briefly, my other sort of favorite thing is top properties. So if you're sort of bringing a property market, one of the easiest way to sort of make sure that you're going to be able to compete well and maybe even outperform is seeing what are the properties doing in that area that you're going to be competing with that are outperforming the rest. So what are the amenities that they have, what are they offering, what is sort of the quality so that then you can get a really quick sense of what you need to be operating in the top percentile in that area.
Very cool. So this all leads nicely into my next sort of realm of questions is I believe that this year, 2023, we're gonna really see a lot of hosts go down the route of a niche. So in 2022 and the data show 2020 was an absolute rebound and a massive curve for many, many reasons. 2021, that didn't sort of slow down. 2022, it started to slow down. But what we sort of notice is that so many people now have come into this industry. We've got many investors who are doing long term rents, who have pivoted their model to short term because they see the return of investment is like way higher than a long term. And we've got loads of people coming into this market like never before. So with that we've got a ton of people say saturation. I mean, this year what's going to happen is we're going to shake out a lot of the average hosts, hobbyist hosts, who didn't really get what this is all about. And what's going to be left with is a lot of middle and then higher quality hosts. And so I think the higher quality hosts are going to really be the ones that focus on a, on a niche. And this is where I can see this tool being fantastic because let's just say you're in Leeds and you know the area well and you've done your research and you know that a lot of people come into this town, business guests or people that are staying for, you know, not just a few days, but they, you know, they want to be coming for a couple of weeks. So you, your niche is that you'll be able to find similar properties like it and you'll be able to filter it down on bedrooms and you'll be able to look at the, what you believe to be true and then look at the dates to be true. So for example, you can see here that for bedrooms, all filters, et cetera, the length of stay, the majority was being two days. If you look at the top right hand corner, the booking lead time is about 46 days and the occupancy rate is 60, 64 days. So it's like how can you bring in this niche that you want to do? How can you then look to appeal and to attract to these. And it may be not that LEED City center is the place for you. Maybe you need to be looking Holbeck, Wortley, Chapel, Allerton. Meanwhile, you know, just like a little bit further afield. And so this, this is a really, really, really cool route for you. So how could a host who says thinks that about decor, amenities and features, how can they use this data to sort of filter down to find exactly the types of properties that are very similar to theirs and, and find like a good price in our occupancy. Can we dig in more into these filters I guess is the question that we're talking about here.
Yeah. So I'll show you what's in the platform now and then I'll show you maybe a glimpse into our Pro dashboard that we have people using now. That sort of gives a better sense of some of the features and functionalities that that that's coming. One is when you're going and setting your property comparisons and you can do this and to start with two and when you go and connect and go and start searching for comps, you're going to be able to filter to comps that have in the specific amenities that, that your property has. So I'm going to go to let's say this property, sunlit bungalow, vibes, good.
Vibes and lots of wine. That's a got my attention already.
And so when I go and set my comp set we're going to go ahead and suggest properties that look closest to you based on distance, based on forward occupancy, ADR, et cetera. But then you can go in and set a very detailed filters. So bedroom, bathroom, guest counts, max distance, ratings, reviews. So let's say you're running a four, nine star business. You only want properties pulling back that have four, eight and above. Let's say you want to get rid of properties that don't have a significant review history and then you can also let's say you've got a hot tub and you don't have a pool. So I want to pull back listings that have a hot tub but don't have a pool because those are going to being meaningful in terms of the rate that I am able to charge in that market. I not a whole lot of hot tubs in Atlanta. So it didn't pull back a filter but you can imagine it would, it would bring bring back that list.
Yeah.
For new investments. So that's great. When finding comparable properties we have our sort of new Pro dashboard that I built and this allows a much deeper dive into finding comparable properties that have certain amenities where you can really understand what the impact of those amenities are and so you can find the right investment and make sure that you're differentiating yourself. So I've here now already sort of filtered down to the leads area. I can then click on market summary and this is going to give me a monthly history over Time for ease of use. I'm going to sort of aggregate this now by annual performance so you can see annual occupancy ADR RevPAR and now I can start doing analysis of what is the impact of all these different amenities on my occupancy in adr. So let's say I want to pull back and find properties with a pool and see what the impact that is on rate. So we see roughly $67 and then if it doesn't have a pool, what that may mean. So it says 106. So this immediately tells me, given that those numbers were totally unreasonable, is that I need to apply all my other filters first. So I need to get down to entire home listings, probably similar bedroom counts. So I comparing like for like properties and then I can really start to understand what the impact is of different amenities and what that might mean.
So just a quick question. When it comes to average length of stay, is there an option there to filter out those that are maybe looking for medium term rentals, 30 day stays, etc. Is that, is that an option to get a fair indication of those types of prices?
Yeah. So we have in here the ability to filter by minimum stay requirement. So if a host says I'm only going to accept 30 plus days or 14 plus days, we could filter those out. But we don't have a way to filter for just certain types of stays. So if someone allows anything to filter out there, sort of if they did get a two month long bill looking.
Out of that, I guess it's same, same, just different way of saying it. So if you want to say yeah, I want a minimum of a, of a 14 day stay for example.
Yep. And then we also have the ability to dig into specific property managers. So if you wanted to get a sense of like other operators that have business types that are business plans that you want to copy and get a sense of where they're operating and how they're doing. So you can go into our property manager section and you're going to get a sense of. And there's not a whole lot of property managers actually operating in leads. So we could add it go more broad but you're going to get a sense of. So now we're rolling out to more broadly in the UK who's operating how many listings they have, what is their sort of typical operating performance. And then if we want to maybe understand more broadly like where certain ones are and how they're operating in those markets, you could then filter by property manager and see the markets that they're in and how they're performing.
Oh nice. So you could go right, property manager, how many, how many of their listings are in leads for example. You can go, right, well let's just look at one and say, right, what's the competition in the area?
Yep. So let's say I think cottages.com was.
They had post. Yeah, yeah.
Was big. So we could filter to cottages.
There it is on above Derbyshire.
Yep. And then apply. And now we're going to see all the markets that cottages.com is operating in. So it looks like their biggest and looks like over 400 listings and Devin Lake District, Highland. But and so you can see how that sort of manages out and then how they're performing in each of those markets. Wow.
And this is something you built.
Yep.
Very cool. When is this being made available to all?
So this is, this is available now. So we've actually have quite a few UK clients using it. It sits at a higher price point than our, our sort of standard market minder subscription. It's meant for more the professional investors, large property management groups, OTAs sort of using it to, to better run their business.
Is this like a bespoke, A bespoke price etc they have to contact.
Yeah, but yeah, and, and mostly so that we can charge the large OTAs a whole lot more than we charge the average investor.
Excellent. Makes a lot of sense. But that was nice to give us a little sneak peek behind the scenes. That was lovely. Okay, so the next question is 2021. 2020, 2022. There was the rise of last minute bookings for obvious reasons like the lead between the booking and arrival got shorter and shorter from the date of it you've been looking at. And this could be you know, air DNA wide or it could be USA or UK specific. What is the data pointing towards for 2023 for the bookings that we've already had? And I know the context is, you know uh, we're, we're only a month in to 2023 but from everything that has been shown, say let's say for the last like say three months is, is that trend going to persist where people now are? Sort of. Because digital nomads are more prevalent, prominent and you know, they're more readily accessible. People can work from anywhere now, doesn't matter if they've got an office job or not. Is the data still pointing to that where the lead gen from the point of booking to the point of arrival is going to stay kind of small or do you see more going back to 2018, 2019 levels. What's, what's sort of like the, the, the Mystic Meg sort of hat saying.
Yeah, I'm the. The short answer is, is it doesn't look like it's getting back to 2018, 2019 levels. I mean, if anything, during peak season we sort of see it getting closer given that, and people were sort of training them that you got to book far ahead in advance to get in the sort of best locations, the best properties. And I was just digging into the December numbers which. And in the US is it's off season. Yeah, you get quite a bit of bookings during sort of the Christmas holiday, New Year's season, but it's still a pretty weak month. Not as weak as in November or January, but booking lead times just not anywhere close to 2018, 2019 levels. So if the typical booking was coming in like a month ahead of time, so about a 28 day lead time, we are still seeing it two weeks further out, so about six, two weeks closer. So it would have been six weeks and now is only four weeks.
As a business owner, I know if you're listening to this and if you're in the world of hospitality, you must be like going, oh my gosh, you want a bit of structure. You know, you're so. But this is the, this is the thing. If you've just come into the market as of 2020, you're like, what are you complaining about? This is the norm. But like anybody who was around in 2019 and below, you're very used to setting your dates in January, putting out an email blast or whatever, getting your bookings coming in and then you can plan ahead. But you know, you have to adapt with the times and this is the new times. So I don't think anybody who was hoping for those 2018, 2019 sort of levels, you should be ready. And if you are listening to this and watching this and you're 100% booked already for 2023, well, the signs there point to me that your prices are too low. So do some about your prices maybe for 2024. Okay, so the next question, this is something close to my heart because I've been geeking out on this for at least the last six weeks is the emergence of AI and GPT. I don't know if you've been up to date with this. I'm sure there's maybe conversations around ad offices and slack groups about it, but is there anything you can share in terms of how AIR DNA is looking to, to sort of welcome this into the world. Is there anything that we could look forward to or are you just sort of going it's just a fad and we're not going to pay attention to it. Like what's the sort of, how can, can you share anything to this if you can?
Yeah, one is and we're still investigating. One thing that I'm sort of the part of the secret sauce of Air DNA and how we've got to where we are is we embraced SEO. We embraced being the number one search on Google. No matter what term you're looking at for that. We want to make sure we have the content that gets us number one and we leaned into that from the beginning and that's been a big part of our success. So can we leverage it to help us generate content? Help us generate content ideas? Can we leverage it? And once people start using ChatGPT to find out searches where they're and they're going to be leveraging, I'm sure they're already leveraging our data, our free content out there to, to generate responses. And then once they, and they're going to have to start linking back to where they're getting these answers from, I suspect we're going to be pretty top of the list. So to the extent that host operators, investors are looking to understand what's going in the short term rental industry, we want to make sure we're number one. And to the extent that those type of people are leveraging ChatGPT to get those answers, we want to make sure that they know it's coming from Air DNA. And then we, we know that they have tools and data to sort of support those decisions more over and above what these AI tools are going to give them.
Yeah, it's, it's very cool. I saw a video and this tool isn't available by all. It looks like somebody created it but they, I think they went onto a site like Zillow, I think that's big in the States and they just typed in find me a three bed property worth between 405, 500,000 that's got all these things and it just boom, went to action and just spat out boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was like, wow, it just cuts the time of doing all of these things like, like, like crazy like minutes. So it's, it's really interesting to see how every business, not just, you know, our businesses like Boost Lee and obviously idna, but how every business adapts, adapts to it because it's very powerful and whether we like it or not, it's going to be around for a while, which is, which is very cool. Last question. There's been a debate going on and obviously you've been very connected to the hotel world and obviously hotels haven't been performing as well since obviously March 2020. But there's a comeback. Hotels versus STR, hotels versus Airbnb. It's been around. What are, what is the data showing our hotels back? Are cruises back or is it still very much sti? What's the sort of data that you're seeing to sort of back up this hotel versus Airbnb? TikTok.
So we did a deep dive into the research with the big hotel provider, annoyingly named str, making it more confusing to sort of report out the analysis. But the trend, yes, hotels are now are. We're growing and at a really strong pace in 2021, 2022, sort of catching up to the growth that short term rentals had. From what I've seen and digging in, it is not sort of stealing away from short term rentals. It is incremental improvement over and above what our industry already brought back. In terms of going after leisure demand, what has been coming back really strongly for hotels is business demand. It's group demand. And how many conferences did we go to in 2022 versus what we went to in 2021? I know for me it was a massively different year and most of those big conferences we were all staying in hotels and not necessarily short term rentals. And that not to say that you weren't still taking the trips you were doing in a short term rental. You were incrementally adding more trips and hotels. And that's broadly what we'd been seeing around the world. So. And we've been looking at share shifts. So what is total paid accommodation demand and how does short term rental demand and hotels play into that? And broadly, short term rentals have been growing. Hotels have been growing. Short term rentals had been gaining about 2% of share a year up until the start of the pandemic. During the pandemic that really accelerated and for obvious reasons, but in 2021 that came essentially back down to pre Covid levels. And now we've only been growing at about 1% a year, but we've still been growing at that 1% a year. So we're still pulling back demand from hotels just at a much slower rate than we had been doing pre Covid.
And during COVID Very interesting. This has been an amazing conversation and I really appreciate you digging in and showing, most importantly so please go check out what's the best domain for people to go to to find out more about Air DNA to get started.
Yeah, it's airdna Co and we've got lots of tutorials there, lots of free tools. So the overview page in our rentalizer tool is free if you just create a login. And obviously there's other paid tools, but love for everyone to just go and check it out and see what's there.
Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Everybody. Do go and check it out. Thank you very much for that. And we will be back very soon for another episode.
More from Mark
Airbnb Pricing Strategy That Beats Your Competition (Higher Rate + Higher Occupancy)
2026 Predictions: AI, Direct Bookings, Regulation and the Future of Short-Term Rentals