Despite the actual legality of the short-term accommodation sharing platform, Airbnb has continued to grow from strength to strength, with a new report indicating an 8.7 per cent growth in the last year.
The Deloitte Tourism Hotels Market Outlook report has also shown that growth in the traditional hotel accommodation market has slowed right down, from 9.7 percent last year to just 1.2 percent.
According to the report, the number of travellers using Airbnb accomodation instead of hotel accommodation grew by 11.5 percent last year, whilst the number of people using the accomodation platform to visit friends and family members grew by 9 percent.
These figures are certainly great news for Airbnb, but is this some zero-sum game, where Airbnb’s gains are necessarily the hotel industry’s losses?
Well, perhaps not.
Speaking to news.com.au, Bryon Merzeo from Deloitte Access Economics said that despite the massive growth experienced by Airbnb, hotels are still performing strongly:
“(Airbnb) is growing quite strongly but we’re still seeing historic occupancy rates in hotels in capital cities,” said Mr Merzeo.
“It’s not going to be the same across the entire country — in some of the regional areas you might see a little bit more of an effect on the traditional accommodation properties.”
Mr Merzeo’s statements are supported by the Deloitte Tourism Hotels Market Outlook report, which shows that over 12,000 new hotels rooms will be added to the market in Australia in the next two years, and demand was still expected to outstrip the supply.
“Tourism Australia is doing such a wonderful job attracting people to this country that even with all these new hotels were building. and the popularity of these new accommodation options, people are filling up all the available rooms,” Mr Merzeo said.
“Demand growth will continue to outpace that supply growth.”
Source: news.com.au