STR Unpacked

The World Cup ended last night. The event operators should be watching opens Thursday. Glasgow's Commonwealth Games start 23 July, and the booking data is a case study in event demand: → Supply UP 15% (roughly 770 new listings) → Occupancy UP 9 points to 59% → Nightly rates UP 73% → Hotels averaging £334 a night vs £138 for the same dates last year Now the contrast. The FIFA World Cup pushed US ho...

Britain is booking Britain. 🇬🇧📈 The staycation numbers this summer are hard to ignore: ☀️ 61% of Brits say they're MORE likely to holiday at home this year — 25+ million going domestic 🌊 Booking.com search surges: Morecambe +106%, Carnforth +86%, Exmouth +76% 💷 Average holiday budget: £1,526 — and a third plan to spend MORE than usual 🤖 Vrbo said this week it's using AI on booking data to loca...

The UK gets its first statutory tourist tax next Friday. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 From 24 July, Edinburgh charges a 5% visitor levy on every paid overnight stay: → Applies to short lets, self-catering and aparthotels, not just hotels → Charged on the first 5 nights, on the accommodation cost before VAT → Operators collect it. First quarterly returns land this autumn → Below the VAT threshold? You're still liable,...

Spain just published the numbers on its tourist flat crackdown. They tell a strange story. 📉 ➡️ 341,001 tourist flats advertised in May, down 10.7% in a year (INE) ➡️ That's the second biggest annual fall ever recorded, and 62,000 below the all-time peak ➡️ Valencia lost almost 12,000 listings on its own So the crackdown worked? Not quite. ➡️ Supply is actually UP 3.4% since November ➡️ The Bank...

Vienna just raised its tourist tax 56% overnight. 💶 From 1 July: 3.2% → 5%. Next July: 8% — making it Europe's second-highest after Amsterdam. And the city is now enforcing its 90-day short-let cap in residential zones, with fines up to €50,000. It's not a one-off. It's a wave: 🇪🇸 Spain wants 21% VAT on tourist rentals — decree expected this month 🇳🇴 Tromsø just approved Norway's FIRST tourist ta...

Spain just lost its national short-term rental registry. The fallout landed this week. Since July 2025, every STR in Spain needed a state registration number (NRUA) to list on Airbnb or Booking. In May, the Supreme Court annulled the registry. The State never had the constitutional power to build a national system on top of the regional registries that already existed. Then on Thursday it got surr...

Friday good news for UK operators 📈 London's short lets hosted 21 MILLION guest nights in 2025 — up 6% in a year. But here's the number that matters: outer boroughs like Croydon and Harrow grew almost 20%. Guests are trading Zone 1 prices for space and value. Demand is decentralising — and the yield opportunity is moving with it. It's the same across Europe: Eurostat says EU short-let stays rose...

Airbnb promised investors it will earn more from every booking in 2026. Your host fee stays at 15.5%. Both statements are true. The growth is happening on the guest side of the transaction, stacked on top of your inventory. → Travel insurance sold at checkout. Named twice by Airbnb's CFO on the Q1 call as a take rate driver. → A paid extended cancellation option, launched in June across 12 countri...

What if your STR licence died the day you sold the property? That's now the reality in central Greece's two biggest cities. From 1 July, Thessaloniki's city centre joined Athens under a freeze on new short-term rental registrations. But the freeze isn't the story. The story is what happens to existing registrations: → Properties in restricted zones lose their registration on any lifetime transfer....

The most valuable address in European short-term rentals this month is a ski station most people couldn't place on a map. PriceLabs has published booking data for the Tour de France 2026 route, and the spread between markets is remarkable: → Alpe d'Huez, hosting back-to-back summit finishes for the first time in 113 editions: booked nights up 263%, revenue per available rental up 430% → Bourg-d'Oi...

I took three weeks off. Europe did not. Three countries moved on short-term rentals while I was away, and each one reached for a different lever. Spain went for tax. → The Supreme Court's ruling striking down the national rental registry (NRUA) took legal effect on 8 June. Regional licences stand, the national number does not. → Owners who paid registry fees for a registration now declared illegal...

One mid-term booking is worth about seven short stays. Same platform. Same kind of property. Seven times the value per booking. The numbers behind that, from Rentals United and PriceLabs across 2025: → A standard short stay averaged roughly €845 per booking → A mid-term stay of 30 nights or more averaged closer to €6,000 → Mid-term booking volume grew only modestly, and total value was broadly fla...

Every city in Europe is cracking down on short-term rentals. So the sector must be shrinking, right? Eurostat's own data says the opposite. → Short-stay nights booked via Airbnb, Booking and Expedia hit nearly 952 million across the EU in 2025 → That's up 11.4% on 2024, and 32.4% on 2023 → The entire EU accommodation market, hotels included, grew just 2.2% → Hotels, the biggest slice, stayed almos...

For years, the standards in this sector were voluntary. The good operators chose to meet a higher bar. That's changing. Those basics are becoming the framework everyone works to. Voluntary is becoming vital. And the sector has moved from the margins to a serious part of how this country does tourism. At 12:30 today I'm moderating a panel at SCALE UK on exactly that shift. From Voluntary to Vital:...

The UK's main short-term rental conference gave AI its own full day this year. First time it has happened. I'm at SCALE With AI in Brighton today, the day before SCALE UK. A few years ago AI was a couple of agenda slots. Now it is a standalone event with two stages and a room full of working operators. That tells you where the sector has moved. → The question has shifted from "should we use AI" to...

Most of us in short-term rentals know AI exists. Far fewer of us are using it well. This episode is about closing that gap. My guest is Milena Nikolić, former CTO of Trainline and former senior director at Google Play, now founder of Heywa Labs. She has never run a rental, and that is exactly why she is on. She is one of those rare people who can explain anything, however complicated, in a way tha...

Europe's most expensive short-term rental markets in 2026 are mostly outside the EU. The regulatory squeeze gets the headlines. The rate data tells a quieter story. Fresh AirDNA figures for 2026: → Switzerland: national ADR around 184 euros, 57 percent occupancy → Interlaken: 284 euros a night at 65 percent occupancy → Monaco: the most expensive market on the continent → Iceland: second priciest,...

Next week in Brighton, the short-term rental industry holds its first conference dedicated entirely to AI. Two days, two events — SCALE With AI on the Tuesday, SCALE UK the day after. And if you can get there, go. Here's why I'm saying that. For two years, "AI for rentals" has mostly meant one thing — a chatbot answering guest messages a bit faster. Helpful. But hardly the revolution it was sold a...

Next week the Pope arrives in Barcelona. But forget the Pope for a second. Look at the calendar behind him. Mobile World Congress: 109,000 people. Smart City Expo World Congress. The UIA World Congress of Architects. 142 international congresses in 2025 fourth most of any city on earth. Barcelona has spent a decade becoming the events capital of Europe. And it worked. Now here's the number nobody...

Everyone said 20 May was the day Europe's "wild west" of short-term rentals ended. Less than two weeks in, the first city to actually pull listings didn't touch the new EU rules. Porto cancelled 1,413 licences. Roughly 13% of its entire registered stock. The trigger? Not a night cap. Not a ban. Not the EU's new data system. A missing insurance document. 🔻 1,413 AL registrations cancelled no proof...

+13.6%. That's UK short-term rental demand for this summer, versus last. Italy: +11.6% France: +8.7% Across Europe's top 20 markets: 6.4 million additional guest nights already booked for June to August. Seventeen out of twenty markets are pacing ahead of last summer. This is after the EU regulation went live. After Spain's national registry got struck down. After Barcelona's 2029 phase-out. After...

I sat down with Reto from Elevate Software, and the origin story is what makes this one worth a listen. Reto and his team weren't software people who guessed at what operators need. They were running short-term rentals across two very different markets, Switzerland and Bali, hit the same operational walls every operator knows, and built Elevate Suite to solve them. That product is now what they ta...

Eight days ago the EU's short-term rental data regulation went live. Most of the industry filed it under "compliance admin" and moved on. That was the wrong thing to watch. Remember how this was sold to us? "It's just a data rail. It doesn't ban anything. It doesn't cap anything. It only makes local rules enforceable." Now look at what's being built directly on top of it. The Affordable Housing Ac...

The mainstream take is that regulation is coming for short-term lets and operators should brace. I think that misses it. Regulation being undecided is not a threat. It is a window. And here's what should worry operators: look at the rest of Europe. Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands. In almost every case the sector only mobilised after the rules landed, when the leverage was already gone. Engla...

pain built it first. Its own court just killed it. Spain's Supreme Court has struck down the national short-term rental registry, the one Madrid built to be the first EU country to comply with Regulation 2024/1028. The ruling is straightforward: the central government overstepped. Tourism is a regional power in Spain, and the state had no authority to run a parallel national system on top of regis...