New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Airbnb’s summer bookings in state hit $27M
Middlesex County generated close to half the dollar value of Airbnb’s Connecticut bookings this past summer, the hosting service reported Thursday, with New York City and Boston funneling the largest influxes of visitors to Connecticut.
But significant numbers of Hartford and New Haven denizens also booked “staycations” in their own backyards using Airbnb.
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, more than 93,000 people booked Connecticut stays on Airbnb, the pioneering platform allowing people to rent out rooms or whole houses as an alternative to traditional hotels and inns.
Vastly more Connecticut residents used Airbnb to book travel elsewhere, however, with nearly 620,000 reserving rooms using the website.
New York City was the top destination this past summer ahead of Montreal and Boston, with Newport, R.I., and Portland, Maine, the only other Northeast destinations to crack the top 10, with Cape Cod a notable omission.
Some 23,400 Middlesex County visitors spent $550 on average, compared to about $290 in Fairfield County and closer to $200 for other parts of Connecticut.
An Airbnb spokesperson did not provide an immediate analysis of the disparate dollar totals, with one possibility a larger percentage of Airbnb hosts renting out whole houses for extended stretches, rather than individual rooms.
New Haven and New London counties had more than 20,000 visitors each, with Fairfield County Airbnb hosts bringing in more than 12,000. Hartford County and Litchfield County seeing less than 7,000 each.
With Connecticut applying to Airbnb receipts the standard lodging tax of 15 percent — the highest in the nation — Airbnb visits this past summer equate to more than $4 million in revenue for the state.
Airbnb stated it has about 6,000 active hosts in Connecticut, with nearly 350 offering availabilities for the upcoming weekend as of Thursday afternoon, ranging from a $30 bedroom in Fairfield to a $2,500 cottage on Candlewood Lake in
New Milford.