How tourist accommodation platforms have imposed themselves on hoteliers ?

The weight of tourist rentals, and in particular Airbnb, in the region.

Les locations touristiques par les particuliers se sont hissées à la seconde place des réservations, via les plateformes, selon une étude de Deloitte pour Airbnb. MAXPPP – Alexis Christiaen (Pib)

Une étude du cabinet Deloitte réalisée pour Airbnb montre qu’elles ont affiché, en 2023, le second plus important nombre de nuitées, juste derrière l’hôtellerie et devant les campings.

Short-term tourist accommodation platforms are slowly making headway. Slowly but surely. According to a study just made public by Deloitte on behalf of Airbnb, on the "Economic contribution of short-term accommodation rented through online platforms. France", it occupies second place on the podium in number of nights.

In 2023, Deloitte calculated, these platforms (Airbnb, Booking, among others) recorded 176 million nights, just behind the hotel industry (213 million), but in front of campsites (142 million). Short-term rental thus constitutes the second means of accommodation for tourists in France.

"We are the key player in anchoring tourism in France"

While criticism abounds against the platforms, accused of drying up the rental stock, further supporting the housing crisis, Clément Eulry, director of  rsquo;Airbnb for France and Belgium, highlights the success of this formula which is very popular with families, in the first place.

"We are the key player in anchoring tourism in France , and therefore in the Occitanie region, he insists. As for the unfair competition of which he is also accused with the traditional hotel industry, there again, he puts forward a weighty argument, that of complementarity. "In France, more than 25 000 municipalities have an Airbnb and only 7 000 have a hotel".

42 million euros of spending in La Grande-Motte

The example of the Hérault commune of La Grande-Motte is, in this respect, significant. The study shows that the city recorded, thanks to the platforms, 352,000 overnight stays in 2023 for 88,000 travelers (86% of whom are French). For a total expenditure volume of 42 million euros. "These platforms have become, today, in La Grande-Motte, the first reference in private housing", underlines Stéphan Rossignol, the mayor.

They contribute largely to the municipal budget."Out of 1.5 million tourist taxes collected, a third comes from platforms, around 430 000 euros, 85 % thanks to Airbnb". The luck of La Grande-Motte is the number of its second homes, which "favors tourist rentals by individuals" .

The advantages of tourist rental

For Olivier Petit, general director of In Extenso Tourisme Culture and Hospitality, if short-term accommodation platforms such as Booking or Airbnb are so successful, it&rsquo It is because they "have phenomenal resources at their disposal, that Airbnb has deployed into a new market segment, with customers who would not necessarily have gone to the hotel industry, and that Booking has been able to establish a new, particularly effective global distribution channel.

The Airbnb advantage: "they offer, in their rental, more spaces than traditional hotel offers, for the same price& quot;. A significant asset for families in particular or what Olivier Petit calls the "tribes, these groups who share the same place of stay in complete conviviality, without needing the services traditionally offered by hotel establishments".

"I have not seen any destruction of values ​​in the hotel industry"

It's this flexibility and this freedom, specific to tourist rentals, which "pleases people". A response to "protean needs of customers, depending on whether they are on a business trip, on a leisure trip, with family or with friends". But also a response to an evolution in tourism today, much less fixed than when the only solution to accommodation consisted of the hotel offer alone.

But what tends to create normalization within the tourist universe, following tensions between Airbnb and the hoteliers' corporation in particular (around taxation), is is that the emergence of short-term tourist rentals has not been to the detriment of hoteliers. "I have not seen any territory where we observe a destruction of values ​​in the hotel industry by the presence of Airbnb", analyzes Olivier Petit.

"They knew how to support the developments"

For Jean-François Pouget, marketing director at Hérault Tourisme, platforms today take "a good part of the mediation between the offer and the customer". "No one can do without it", he adds. Grateful that we no longer observe complaints from hoteliers, as was the case at the beginning.

He recognizes that these platforms "have been able to support developments in the tourist accommodation proposition, with, in addition, a marketing capacity of  communicate well with their customers, by offering ever more services and comfort of exchanges. Note that in the Deloitte study for Airbnb, Hérault "is one of the departments having recorded a number of overnight stays exceeding 4 million in 2023".

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