Portugal is among the most popular destinations in Europe on tourist booking platforms

Booking nights in local accommodation in the European Union, through platforms onlinelike Airbnb, Booking, Expedia or TripAdvisor, jumped 13.8% last year, compared to 2022, reaching 678.6 million, according to data published this Wednesday by Eurostat.

Portugal is among the most popular destinations for tourist bookings through this type of platforms, according to the list from the European Union’s statistics office. In the third quarter of last year, the Algarve received 5.2 million overnight stays booked through platforms, a significant amount but far from the 14 million reservations in the neighboring Andalusia region.

The Lisbon region registered 4 million overnight stays, between July and September, in local accommodation booked through platforms, well above the community of Madrid, which stood at 2.6 million. In this period, the north of Portugal had 3.4 million nights covered by platforms, and Madeira almost one million (987,479).

But the outstanding champion in tourists’ search for accommodation through Airbnb or Booking was Jadranska Hrvatska, in Croatia, where an impressive 23.7 million overnight stays were reached, in the third quarter of last year alone, corresponding to the peak of summer, Adding several regions in France (such as Provence, Alps and Côte d’Azur), the total in this period reached 12.2 million reservations, highlighting other important tourist areas, such as Tuscany, in Italy, with more than 6 .4 million reservations in the summer, through this modality.

Eurostat explains that the monthly values ​​of stays in short-term rentals for tourist purposes (typically local accommodation) exceeded those of the previous year in 2023, in 11 of the 12 months of the year, with emphasis on the last quarter, in which increases were recorded in the region of 20%.

The highlight goes to the month of October (increasingly considered an extension of the high season) with a total of 55.3 million overnight stays registered in accommodation booked through platforms, representing an annual increase of 21.9%.

The growth in bookings through platforms continued until the end of the year, reaching 31.8 million nights in November (20% more than in the same month of the previous year) and 45.3 million nights in December (the month in which there was an even more significant annual increase of 25.8%).

This data is collected from four private tourist booking platforms online under a collaborative economy agreement established with the European Commission in March 2020.

In 2022, remember, the volume of tourist nights booked through platforms such as Airbnb, Booking or Expedia amounted to 596.5 million.