Whether you’re a vacation rental property manager, investor, hotelier or destination marketing organisation in the US, do you know who is visiting American short term rentals at the moment?
In this series of interactive charts, we take you through which guests have been visiting the US, how this has changed since 2019 and how the top visiting nationalities have fluctuated through 2020 so far. We then see what percentage of guests visiting vacation rentals in each State have been from the US in 2020.
The pie charts above display the top 6 visiting nations (the US plus the top 5 international visitors), and the percentage of total guests staying in American short term rentals that they represent from January to June of 2019 and 2020. The top 5 guest nationalities both years were the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France and China. While all foreign nationalities fell in their proportion of total US vacation rental guests in 2020, France sank marginally below China to 6th most common visitor. The proportion of US guests meanwhile rose from 87% to 90% of total STR guests year to date.
In our first line chart, we can see the fluctuation of domestic guests throughout 2020 so far. Predictably, as deaths increased, borders closed and international travel ground to a halt, the proportion of domestic short term rental guests in the US shot up. From averaging below 90% of the USA’s total visitors, by the end of May, Americans were accounting for 99% of their total short term rental guests.
The second line chart illustrates the proportion of each of the top 4 foreign guest countries throughout the course of 2020. Again in line with COVID-19 and restrictions ramping up, all international vacation rental guests in the US decreased significantly. Following week 9 (commencing 24 February), share of Canadian visits fell sharply from their 3.2% high to an initial low of 1% by week 12. By the end of May Canadian visits were at 0.09%, lower even than visitors from the UK.
Our final chart is a map of the United States. Here we illustrate the proportion of domestic guests in each state year to date in 2020.
Arkansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska are the 3 states with the highest proportion of domestic guests in their vacation rentals, each with over 98% American guests. At the other end of the scale we see New York and Hawaii. While NY has seen a 13% increase in domestic guests compared with 2019, it holds the second lowest proportion of US guests in 2020, topping only Hawaii, which languishes behind with under 75% of visitors to the state being American.
So where do guests of US vacation rentals come from? The nation providing most international visitors to the States this year has been Canada, but currently, most international guests are arriving from the UK.
Meanwhile, the proportion of domestic guests has been persistently elevated across every state in America since the escalation of the COVID-19 crisis. Since the start of 2020, domestic visits to vacation rentals in the US have increased from 86% to 99%
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