INTERNATIONAL REPORT—During the COVID-19 pandemic, as shutdowns have resulted in isolation and economic hardship for so many people around the world, more than 200,000 new hosts have opened their homes to their first guests on Airbnb.
These new hosts live on every continent except Antarctica, across more than 200 countries and regions, and the company estimates that 57% of them are women. Many of these new hosts are in smaller cities, towns and more remote areas, in position to benefit economically from local tourism as people get out of the house and take a break. Collectively, since the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, new hosts in the following destinations have earned:
Portland, ME: more than $900,000
Jersey Shore, NJ: more than $3.3 million
Blue Mountain, Canada: more than $800,000
Penticton, Canada: more than $540,000
Calvados, France: more than $2.6 million
Salento, Italy: nearly $2 million
Costa Blanca, Spain: more than $3.6 million
Hamburg, Germany: nearly $400,000
Rotterdam, Netherlands: more than $800,000
These new hosts are joining existing local hosts who are helping guests take a break and connect to their local community. In a recent 12-month timespan, average annual earnings per host in these same communities were:
Portland, ME: $11,600
Jersey Shore, NJ: $5,300
Blue Mountain, Canada: $7,200
Penticton, Canada: $5,100
Calvados, France: $3,100
Salento, Italy: $720
Costa Blanca, Spain: $2,000
Hamburg, Germany: $1,400
Rotterdam, Netherlands: $1,500
Summer Recap
Although the company’s business has not recovered, it reports encouraging signs among its community over the summer months in both host earnings and guests connecting:
- Hosts of Online Experiences, its fastest-growing product, launched in April, are earning $100,000 per month. About 80% of Online Experience guests are based outside the host’s home country.
- In the month of June, hosts in rural areas of the U.S. earned more than $200 million, an increase of more than 25% from what hosts in these areas earned in June 2019.
- On July 8, guests booked more than one million nights’ worth of future stays at Airbnb listings around the world. It was the first day in more than four months, since March 3, that the one million nights threshold was reached. Guests booking on July 8 did so in more than 175 different countries and regions, including destinations in Togo, Angola, Bahrain, Svalbard and Kyrgyzstan. Nights booked skewed toward domestic travel and travel within 500 miles.