Tourist accommodation offered by individuals via Internet

INSEE has recently carried out an initial estimate of the scale of tourist accommodation offered by private individuals via Internet platforms. Numbers appear to have increased dramatically in 2016 (+30%). This dynamism is more pronounced for the resident clientele (+36%) and for dwellings in the provinces (+36%); the market in Île-de-France seems to have reached maturity. In 2016, 66% of customers appear to have been residents and 80% of tourist visits concerned dwellings located in the provinces.

The growth of Internet platforms has increased the supply of tourist market accommodation, even though some of the supply of accommodation by individuals already existed outside these channels. In 2016, these networks appeared to drain about 11% of visitors in terms of dwellings overall, including accommodation offered by companies: hotels, campsites, tourist residences. Their market share would appear to have been 16% for overnight stays by tourists. If these figures are taken into account, then tourist numbers in France should be revised significantly upwards: the increase would have been 2.6% in 2016 across the entire field, whereas it decreased by 1.3% when considering only the segment supplied by companies.