UK short-term rentals

• In April 2025 we saw growth across all key metrics except for average length of stay (-4%), compared to April 2024. There was a 7% increase in supply and a 5% increase in nights reserved, resulting in a 1pp increase in average occupancy rate (43%). Average daily rate (ADR) and average revenue per property also increased by 18% and 26% respectively. These increases could be attributed to the timing of Easter, which fell in March 2024 but April 2025 this year. 
• This month growth in supply was seen across all regions with, the East Midlands and the North East continuing to show the strongest growth in supply vs. 2024. Nights reserved were also higher across all regions, except in Scotland, with the greatest increase being seen in Wales (+13%). London was the only UK region to experience a decrease in occupancy compared to April 2024 (-2pp), with Wales experiencing the greatest increase (+4pp). 
• In April 2025, the most notable month-on-month shift to the most popular UK cities by nights reserved was that Birmingham dropped two places, becoming the 6th most popular city, and Bristol becoming the 4th most popular. 
• Brazil and India led for reviews in March 2025, with an 21% and 19% respective increase in reviews left compared to the same month in 2024. In contrast, the volume of reviews from Russia and China are down -195% and -102% respectively.

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.