Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, published a 2025 figure of 951.6 million EU short-stay guest-nights in April 2026, a headline 11.4% increase on 2024. The figure is not like-for-like. TripAdvisor exited Eurostat's short-stay data panel in November 2024, and Eurostat has not restated the 2024 baseline. The 2025 figure therefore covers three platforms where the 2024 figure covered four, and the underlying three-platform growth rate is higher than the headline that every mainstream news outlet relayed in the first week of April.
The panel of platforms reporting into the EU collaborative economy dataset has been Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia Group and TripAdvisor since 2021. TripAdvisor's withdrawal was announced on operational grounds in the second half of 2024 and took effect in November of that year. Eurostat's choice to publish the 2025 headline without a restated 2024 baseline is methodologically defensible, since the agency has not yet released a fully reconciled historical series on the three-platform basis, but it is journalistically misleading. A year-on-year comparison between a four-platform number and a three-platform number implies a growth rate that cannot be derived from the data.
The underlying three-platform growth rate is higher than 11.4% because TripAdvisor's contribution to the 2024 figure, which cannot be observed directly in the published series, would have been removed on both sides of a like-for-like calculation. Industry analysts working from Airbnb and Booking.com disclosed data have estimated the real underlying three-platform rate at between 13% and 16%, with the midpoint around 14.5%, though those estimates have not been independently verified against Eurostat's methodology. The direction of the error is unambiguous. The headline understates 2025 growth.
The counter-reading, from Eurostat's methodological notes, is that the 2024 and 2025 figures are not presented as a strict year-on-year comparison but as components of a continuing series, and that users are expected to read the footnotes. That is technically correct and operationally unhelpful, because the 11.4% figure is what travelled through the European and national press in the days after publication. The practical implication for municipal policy-makers in Lisbon, Madrid, Athens and Barcelona, whose STR responses are often calibrated against EU-wide baselines, is that the growth rate they are calibrating against is lower than the underlying one by a material margin.
