Government · UK · Office for National Statistics
UK Short-Term Lets Hit 100.9m Guest Nights in 2025
UK guests spent 100.9 million nights in short-term lets booked through Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia in 2025, an 11.5% rise on 2024. Domestic visitors, not overseas tourists, drove the growth and now account for 67.2% of all guest nights.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 100,911,620 guest nights were spent in UK short-term lets in 2025, booked through Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia Group
- 11.5% rise in short-term let guest nights in 2025 versus 2024, up from 90,507,070
- 67.2% of UK short-term let guest nights came from domestic visitors, a 3.0 percentage point increase on 2024
- 16.7% growth in domestic guest nights in 2025, far outpacing the 2.1% rise from international visitors
- 22.2% increase in guest nights in the North East, the fastest-growing English region
- 17.4% rise in Wales, the fastest-growing UK country for short-term let guest nights
- 24.4% of all UK guest nights were concentrated in just 9 of the 361 local authorities
- 14.0% of the year's guest nights fell in August alone, against 4.3% in January
- 6,214,210 guest nights came from United States visitors, the largest single international country of origin
- 8.5% growth in German guest nights, the only top-four origin to rise as the US, France and Asia other fell
What the report covers
Short-term lets through online collaborative economy platforms, UK: July 2023 to December 2025 is a statistical bulletin from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) measuring activity on the three largest booking platforms operating in the UK: Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia Group. It counts guest nights, nights and stays in rentals such as whole apartments and private rooms, and deliberately excludes hotels and campsites so the figures cannot be double-counted against other tourism data.
The release covers calendar year 2025 against 2024 and sits squarely in the online collaborative economy, the platform-mediated rental market that now sits alongside traditional hospitality. Data is aggregated down to local administrative unit level, then rolled up to local authorities, regions and the four UK countries, giving a granular view of where platform demand is growing and where it is flat.
The headline is straightforward: the UK short-term let market is still expanding, it grew 11.5% in a year, and the growth is being powered from inside the UK rather than from inbound international travel.
What this means for UK marketers
For any agency or operator marketing in travel, hospitality, tourism or property, this data resets a few assumptions. The first is the domestic versus international split. Domestic guest nights grew 16.7% while international demand crept up just 2.1%, and UK residents now drive 67.2% of all short-term let stays. The growth budget for short-let, holiday-cottage and serviced-apartment brands belongs in front of UK audiences, not overseas ones. The marketing playbook for travel and tourism brands should weight paid search, paid social and content toward domestic intent first.
The second is seasonality. August carried 14.0% of the year's guest nights and January only 4.3%, a more than threefold swing. That argues for aggressive budget pacing, dynamic pricing and shoulder-season content campaigns rather than flat year-round spend. Demand is also highly concentrated: nearly a quarter of all guest nights landed in just 9 of 361 local authorities, places like Cornwall, North Yorkshire, Edinburgh and the Lake District. In those honeypots the platform auction is brutally competitive, which is exactly where strong organic visibility earns its keep. Investing in search engine optimisation for direct-booking pages lets an operator capture demand without paying a commission on every stay.
That points to the strategic risk buried in the numbers. This entire market is measured through three platforms because that is where the bookings happen, and platform dependence caps margin and hands the customer relationship to a third party. The operators who win the next few years will pair platform presence with their own conversion-ready website, first-party data capture and a digital marketing engine that turns a one-off guest into a repeat direct booker. Regional momentum, the North East up 22.2% and Wales up 17.4%, also flags emerging markets worth claiming early before the competition thickens. Set against wider consumer caution in our UK household spending report, the message is that people are still spending on UK breaks, but they are shopping around, so visibility and value have to be earned.
How they got the data
The statistics are built from data supplied directly to the ONS by three online collaborative economy platforms: Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia Group (the Expedia figure also includes Vrbo, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets and Trivago). The ONS aggregates this data at local administrative unit level and rolls it up to local authorities, combined authorities, international territorial levels, the four UK countries and the UK total. Guest nights, the headline metric, multiply the number of nights in a stay by the number of people in the booking. Wider ONS leisure and tourism statistics are published on the ONS leisure and tourism page.
The ONS notes clear limitations. Only the three named platforms are covered, so activity booked elsewhere is excluded, and the figures cannot be added to other accommodation statistics because of overlap risk. The merged platform data cannot be de-duplicated, so the ONS cannot count unique hosts or visitors. Because the series carries a strong seasonal pattern, the ONS advises comparing year-on-year rather than month-on-month, which is the approach taken throughout this report.
Government · UK
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From Office for National Statistics · published 24/06/2026