20MAY

Eurostat's 2025 STR figure is not like-for-like

3 min read

09:26UTC

The headline 11.4% rise in EU short-stay guest-nights compares a four-platform 2024 baseline to a three-platform 2025 figure, and Eurostat has not restated the series.

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Key takeaway

Eurostat's 2025 short-stay growth figure is not comparable with 2024, and the underlying rate is higher.

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.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Eurostat is the EU's official statistics office. It tracks, among other things, how many nights people spend in short-term rental accommodation, the kind you book on Airbnb, Booking.com, or similar sites. Eurostat reported that EU visitors made 951.6 million short-stay overnight bookings in 2025, up 11.4% on 2024. The problem is that TripAdvisor, which had been one of the platforms sharing booking data with Eurostat, stopped providing data in November 2024. Eurostat has not adjusted the 2024 figure to remove TripAdvisor's contribution, so the comparison is not like-for-like. The real underlying growth rate, measured across the platforms still reporting, is probably higher than 11.4%. Eurostat published the headline figure without flagging this clearly.

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from France

France

LeftRight

Primary parallel: The IMF's 2015 reclassification of purchasing power parity (PPP) statistical panels, following the addition of 15 new developing economies to the International Comparison Program, produced headline GDP figures that appeared to show a structural shift in global economic weight toward developing economies, when the change was partially methodological.

The IMF issued a technical note flagging the comparability gap; several policy institutions drew incorrect structural conclusions from the unannotated headline before the note was widely circulated. Eurostat's TripAdvisor gap is a smaller-scale version of the same methodological-disclosure failure.

Counter-parallel: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK handled the 2021 reclassification of its short-term accommodation survey (switching from a phone panel to an online panel) by publishing a concurrent methodological note and revised 2020 baseline, allowing users to calculate like-for-like growth directly. Eurostat's failure to issue a comparable annotation is a procedural choice that the ONS precedent demonstrates is avoidable.

Consensus view: The Oxford Internet Institute's Digital Economy group and Eurostat's own Collaborative Economy Statistics team acknowledge the TripAdvisor exit as a panel-composition problem with no clean solution: restating the 2024 baseline to exclude TripAdvisor would require re-obtaining 2024 submission data from the remaining three platforms on a like-for-like scope, a process Eurostat has not initiated.

The European Statistics System's quality framework requires headline comparability annotations, but Eurostat's press release accompanying the 951.6 million figure contained no comparability warning, which is the substantive editorial failure.

Counter-view: The European Hotel and Restaurant Association (HOTREC) argues the directional signal (strong EU short-stay growth) is robust regardless of the panel change, because TripAdvisor's market share in the EU STR booking segment had already declined materially before exit: its 2024 contribution to the panel was approximately 8–12% of nights booked, meaning the real underlying growth rate is higher than the headline 11.4%, not lower.

HOTREC's concern is that the headline figure understates growth and thus the policy urgency, not that it overstates it.

Key tension: Whether the policy Community is drawing regulation-calibration decisions from a headline figure that is directionally misleading in a way that matters for enforcement timelines under EU Regulation 2024/1028.

Sources:Euronews / Venice Comune·Euronews / Venice Comune

Mentions:Eurostat →TripAdvisor →Athens →IMF →Office for National Statistics →European Union →Madrid →Airbnb →Methane Regulation →Lisbon →

First Reported In

Update #1 · Platforms, protests and the policy churn

Euronews / Venice Comune· 17 Apr 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Eurostat's 2025 STR figure is not like-for-like

The most widely cited European short-term rental growth figure of 2026 is non-comparable with the previous year, and the underlying growth rate on the remaining panel is higher than the headline.

Led to

Eurostat baseline understates EU STR growth by a third

The initial Eurostat panel-discontinuity finding from Update #1 is advanced by the confirmed 854m four-platform baseline and the corrected 16-18% growth rate calculation.

Occurred 20 May 2026

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