Coronavirus has so far claimed over 20,000 lives, and as a result of the global spread of the virus, much of the world’s population is in lockdown.
In the midst of the this international pandemic, the vacation rental industry is very aware of the knock on impact to business. With limited movement and far reaching travel bans, reservations are, in many markets, exceeding cancellations. But how are individual countries or even markets fairing? And what about leisure markets compared with those in urban environments? As part of our overall Short term rental coronavirus impact tracker, we’ve done the analysis.
How has your area been affected?
Below is an interactive data studio containing the ratio of cancellations to bookings in different markets across the world. Percentage values over 100% indicate a higher proportion of cancellations (newly available inventory), while those values under 100% are indicating an excess of bookings (newly unavailable inventory).
You can use the dropdown filters as you wish, or see the larger interactive version within our full tracker page: https://www.seetransparent.com/coronavirus-impact/cancellation-trends.html
Analysing by region shows that while North America felt the effects after Europe and the Middle East, it is now suffering from a higher degree of cancellations than all other parts of the world as cases pick up there. All regions are indicating more cancellations than bookings, with all but the Middle East logging over double the number of cancellations.
Meanwhile drilling down by country, despite being the last to feel the impact, Ireland has the highest level of cancellations of the default European countries.
In North America, all default countries analysed are experiencing around 350% cancellations except for Canada which is fairing slightly better with around half the proportion of cancellations than its North American counterparts.
By market is also an interesting consideration. The Floridian city of Clearwater, famed for its Gulf Coast beaches and Louisiana’s major city of New Orleans have felt the cancellations most significantly so far considering those default display markets. Indeed certain markets – those in Florida being a prime example – are more heavily impacted due to legal bans.
Taking our European markets for example; as a relatively isolated ski resort, Val Thorens was impacted last yet after the closure of French Alpine resorts on 15th March, cancellations rose dramatically.
Markets are behaving very differently depending on their situation – where there are situated but also the type of guest they serve. From this perspective we thought it worthwhile to explore the different sectors of the vacation rental industry.
Urban Vs. Leisure
Below we have a further breakdown of the data by market type. We have categorised each market in the selection as urban or leisure, and this has allowed us to track the progression of cancellations in each of the sectors.
As you can see from the charts above, leisure markets predictably are behind urban markets in terms of cancellations. Cancellations have increased more gradually in the leisure sector, but have now reached a level comparable to urban. There is also below a breakdown by vacation rental market with leisure/urban market type tabs. Please note, you can toggle pages at the bottom of that table.
Access our data free
As a company we collate data from over 32 million listings in order to serve short term rental property managers with market and competitor insights into demand, rate, supply and performance, and empower them to optimise their operations.
We have recognised that in the current climate, our data has the power to help property managers and other industry players navigate this crisis, and so we have compiled a Short term rental coronavirus impact tracker.
We have created sections on many topics as listed in the panel on the left. These include a timeline or events as well as a case tracker, stock price tracking for the main listed OTAs, as well as information on impact to supply, and the demand as we have explore above.
Additionally, we have created sections to assist as well as inform. We invite you to take a look through the property manager resources including articles and interviews from vacation rental property managers in similar circumstances. Also the ‘opportunities’ tabs present some examples for short term rental property manager strategies in the current climate.
We continually update this tracker with current information, so please check out the full site at https://www.seetransparent.com/coronavirus-impact/timeline-of-events.html or click the button below.