Top beauty sites and London’s historic boroughs were among Airbnb hotspots last year, new figures have shown.
A MailOnline analysis reveals how the City of London, Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea had the highest rates of Airbnb stays in England and Wales in 2024.
This was followed by Gwynedd, which contains much of Snowdonia, Camden, Cotswold, Derbyshire Dales, and Pembrokeshire.
Westmorland and Furness, which includes the Lake District, and Isle of Anglesey completed the top 10 areas with the highest rate of Airbnb stays per population.
Cornwall, North Norfolk and North Devon were just outside the top 10 areas in England and Wales.
A wider analysis, conducted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), showed there were a total of 90.1 million guest nights spent in short-term lets in the UK in 2024.
This data revealed the number of apartments or rooms booked through Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia – but excluding hotels or campsites.
The ONS found more than three-quarters (78 per cent) of guest nights spent in short-term lets in the UK last year were in England.
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This compared to 12.7 per cent in Scotland, 6.9 per cent in Wales, and 2.4 per cent in Northern Ireland.
But, according to the ONS analysis, the number of stays was strongly affected by the seasons.
Almost 15 per cent of the total number of guest nights across the year were in August (12.8 million), which was the most popular month for stays.
This compared with just 4 per cent in January (3.7 million guest nights).
The UK local authorities with the highest number of stays in short-term lets in 2024 were Westminster (3.9 million), Cornwall (3.4 million), Edinburgh (3 million) and Highland (2.6 million).
Major cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester were also popular for stays, as was North Yorkshire and the Lake District.
The ONS analysis showed guest nights were concentrated in relatively few local authorities, with a quarter (26 per cent) of all UK guest nights in 10 local authorities.
It also revealed that guest nights were not evenly distributed within areas of the UK.
For example, Hammersmith and Fulham had 899,610 guest nights in short-term lets in 2024, compared with 154,690 in neighbouring Richmond upon Thames.
In Wales, there were 1,156,590 guest nights in Gwynedd in 2024; but next-door Ceredigion had only 353,850.
The average length of stay in short-term lets in Westminster was four days in 2024.
Compared with other local authorities, where the number of guest nights rapidly increased over summer, short-term lets in Westminster were relatively consistent.
The most popular month of July (416,390) had only twice the number of guest nights as January (210,880), the lowest month.
More than four in five guests (81.4 per cent) staying in short-term lets in Westminster in 2024 were international.
By contrast, guest nights in Cornwall were found by the ONS to follow a more pronounced seasonal pattern.
In the summer months, Cornwall overtook Westminster as the place with the highest number of guest nights in the UK.
The August figure for Cornall (803,920) was almost 23 times the UK average guest nights (35,430) at that time.
Most people staying in short-term lets in Cornwall were domestic visitors, with only 16.2 per cent being international guests.
Of the guest nights recorded in Edinburgh, 411,900 (13.6 per cent) were in August when the city hosts the Edinburgh fringe festival.
Of the four UK nations, Scotland had the largest proportion of guest nights by international guests in 2024 (45.8 per cent).
But there were different findings at local authority level.
Of the top 15 areas with the highest proportion of guest nights by international guests, 14 were in London.
City of Edinburgh (67.4 per cent) was the only local authority outside of London to feature.
The number of guest nights was calculated by multiplying the number of nights spend during a stay by the number of visitors in the travel party.
For example, a group of four staying for two nights would be eight guest nights.
