Adriatic Croatia was the most popular NUTS 2 region for short-term rental accommodation booked through online platforms in the third quarter of 2023, according to Eurostat data. During this period, Adriatic Croatia, with 23.7 million overnight stays booked through online platforms Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group, and TripAdvisor, was nearly twice as ‘strong’ as Andalusia in Spain, which recorded 14 million overnight stays through these platforms, and the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (12.2 million overnight stays).
For comparison, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur has 5.1 million inhabitants, Andalusia 8.5 million, and Adriatic Croatia 1.3 million. Among the top 20 regions by overnight stays booked through online platforms, six are from France, five from Spain and Italy, two from Greece, and one region each from Croatia and Portugal.
The mentioned data was collected from four platforms as part of an agreement with the European Commission from March 2020. Eurostat data also shows the growing popularity of online platforms. During 2023, tourists in the European Union spent a total of 678.6 million overnight stays in short-term rental accommodation booked through Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group, or TripAdvisor, representing a growth of 13.8 percent compared to 2022.
This is the third consecutive year of double-digit growth, with 2021 seeing a growth of 33.9 percent, and in 2022, even 63.9 percent. August 2023 was the first month with more than 100 million tourists. The growth of overnight stays booked through online platforms further intensified in the following months. In October, there were 55.3 million overnight stays, an increase of 21.9 percent compared to October 2022, in November the number of overnight stays was 31.8 million, or 20 percent more than a year earlier, and in December the number of overnight stays increased by 25.8 percent to 45.3 million.
Otherwise, Adriatic Croatia was the second NUTS 2 region in the European Union by total number of tourist overnight stays in 2022. Only the Canaries were ahead with 89 million overnight stays. Adriatic Croatia is also one of the five regions in Europe with the highest tourist seasonality and is among the regions with the highest tourist intensity measured by the number of tourists per 1,000 inhabitants. With 787 tourists per thousand inhabitants during peak load, the Greek region of Notio Aigaio is the European record holder for this indicator, and in second place is again Adriatic Croatia with 667.9 tourists per 1,000 inhabitants during the most intense tourist period.