STR Unpacked

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...

It's been a rough week in our space. EU Regulation 2024/1028 went live. Portugal's licences are vanishing. Italy's tax regime just got heavier. And Airbnb's Summer Release quietly absorbed half the services that used to set good operators apart. So here's a story going the other way. Albania. Non-EU. Record 12.5 million visitors in 2025. Non-resident overnight stays up nearly 38% year on year. The...

Airbnb's Summer Release dropped this week. The travel press is losing its mind over car rentals and grocery delivery. They're missing the actual story. Every "new service" Airbnb just launched is something good operators already do. The stocked fridge. The luggage storage. The airport pickup. Airbnb just turned your differentiator into a feature in their app. And the new AI tools? They raise the f...

Tomorrow the EU's biggest STR regulation in history goes live. One law. 27 countries. One system. Except not really. Airbnb came out yesterday and said it plainly: not every Member State is ready. Platforms are looking at "27 different systems" on day one. Some portals will work tomorrow. Some won't. Where they don't, the regulation's verify-and-suspend teeth don't bite. But here's the bit being m...

The EU regulation goes live in two days. Everyone's checking their registration numbers. Almost no one is checking the question that actually decides who carries the loss. Who is the legal host? In France, your property management company can register using its own SIRET. The PM is the host. In Spain, the registration is tied to the owner's land registry record. The owner is the host. Same regulat...

I sat down with Georgina Kennerknecht Biosca, founder of Liliho, and honestly she's one of the most captivating founders I've had on the podcast. Georgina is relatively new to short-term rentals but brings a serious track record from outside the industry, and you can feel it in how she's approaching the problem. We got into: → Why DIY AI keeps failing property managers → Where AI's real limits sit...

951 million guest nights. That was the EU short-term rental market in 2025. But the headlines all go to the same five countries. Spain. France. Italy. Germany. Portugal. Here's what Eurostat just published that nobody's talking about. In Liechtenstein, Iceland and Malta, over 95% of every short-term rental booking is an international guest. The highest concentration of foreign demand anywhere in E...