Brussels – Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia are increasingly vital resources for travellers in the European Union. In 2025, the number of nights booked via these three platforms for short-term accommodation in the EU reached almost one billion (951.6 million). The 2025 figure is 11.4 per cent higher than that of 2024 and as much as 32.4 per cent higher than in 2023. This is what Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, reports.
According to the data, people are travelling more and more, and are increasingly turning to short-stay accommodation platforms. In the final quarter of 2025, 172.3 million nights were booked at an EU destination, a figure up 10.9 per cent on the same period in 2024 and 30.2 per cent on October–November–December 2023. Spain, France, and Italy took the top three spots for the most short-term rental nights in the last three months of last year, and these are the same countries that led the rankings in the final four months of 2024.
In the final quarter of 2025, Malta saw the biggest increase compared with the same period the previous year, with a 37.5 per cent rise in nights booked via the platform, followed by Cyprus (30.1 per cent) and Slovakia (26.3 per cent). At the national level, too, the trend in online bookings is rising across all Member States compared with the same period in previous years.
According to the Eurostat bulletin, the European market is highly seasonal: more than a third of all overnight stays are concentrated in July and August. In countries such as Croatia, this accounts for 58 per cent of the annual total, while in other countries such as Germany and Austria, tourism is spread more evenly throughout the year. This type of tourism does not include traditional forms such as hotels and campsites; instead, it focuses on apartments and holiday homes.
In the third quarter of 2025, the Croatian coastal region, alongside regions in Spain and France, was the most popular destination for short-term rental accommodation booked via online platforms. The regions at the top of the ranking were Jadranska Hrvatska in Croatia (27.7 million overnight stays), Andalusia in southern Spain (19.5 million) and the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (16.9 million).
Among the top 20 EU regions, France has six (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Île-de-France, Languedoc-Roussillon, Rhône-Alpes, Aquitaine, and Brittany), Spain has five (Andalusia, the Valencian Community, Catalonia, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands), and Italy has four (Tuscany, Lombardy, Sicily, and Lazio). Greece has entered the rankings of the main destinations, with three regions (Ionian Islands, South Aegean, and Crete). Croatia contributed one region (Jadranska Hrvatska), as did Portugal (Algarve). As for Italy, the regions with the lowest numbers of short-term rentals were Molise (73,336 nights), Basilicata (148,269 nights), and Valle d’Aosta (392,960 nights).
The availability of such data is a relatively recent development for EU institutions: it stems from data-sharing agreements signed in March 2020 between the European Commission and the major platforms, which have made it possible to fill a long-standing data gap on private accommodation, which had previously fallen outside the scope of official tourism registers.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
