Whether you’re a short term rental property manager, investor, hotelier or destination marketing organisation, do you know who is visiting short term rentals in the UK at the moment?
In this series of interactive charts, we take you through which guests have been visiting Great Britain, 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 each British ‘region’ have been British in 2020.
The pie charts above display the top 6 visiting nations and their percentage of total guests staying in UK short term rentals from January to June of 2019 and 2020 respectively. The top 5 guest nationalities both years were British, American, French, German, and Australian. However, in 2020 domestic guests have been, predictably, much more prevalent, now making up over 70% of overall short term rental guests in the country. All other nations saw a decrease in their share of guests, most notably the US, which fell from 9% to 6% year on year. Perhaps less predictably, Chinese guests actually overtook Canadian guests to be the fifth most common international nationality staying in UK short term rentals.
In our first line chart we look at how UK guests staying in their home country has fluctuated through 2020. Generally speaking there has been an increase throughout 2020 in the proportion of domestic guests seen in UK vacation rentals – as evidenced in our pie charts. A step rise was seen in week 11, mainly on account of the other principal nationalities, with the exception of Australians, reducing significantly. This coincides with the effects of these countries entering travel restrictions and lockdown periods. Lows at weeks 13 and 17 coincide with a crash in visits at the announcement of UK lockdown, and an uptick in stays by both American and French guests respectively.
In our second line chart, we can see the fluctuation in guests from the top 4 international countries visiting the UK throughout 2020 so far. At this stage, Americans (9.6%) are the most common international visitors, with Australians next most common guests.
Our final chart is a map of UK divided into ‘NUTS2’ regions. Here we illustrate the proportion of domestic guests in each area year to date in 2020.
As we can see, there is a large degree of variation across the country, with Devon, West Wales and East Yorkshire boasting the greatest proportion of UK guests at 91.9%, and Shropshire & Staffordshire and Cornwall just behind. Meanwhile, only 27% of the guests in West London and 32% in East London are British, with the outer London regions next lowest around 50%.
So where are UK guests from? The nation providing most international visitors to Great Britain this year has been the United States, who have provided almost double the visitors of France, who are comfortably second. Meanwhile, the proportion of domestic guests at short term rentals in the UK has been persistently elevated with UK regions seeing a 6% increase on average year on year. Only the West Midlands have seen a decrease in their proportion of domestic guests, and parts of Scotland and Ireland have seen an increase of over 20% relative to 2019.
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