Airbnb stays get boost from Ohio State football games
Columbus is one of the world’s top trending destinations for short-term home rentals, according to rental platform Airbnb, with Buckeye football being a big driver of bookings.
Reservations for Columbus apartments and houses through the site are tracking up more than 250 percent compared with 2017 reservations at this time last year, according to an Airbnb report released Friday.
Airbnb’s website allows homeowners to list their homes for rent on a per-night basis, saying this allows visitors to “experience a city like a local.” It also has started listing “experiences” including walking tours, wine tastings and horseback riding in certain cities.
Columbus’ overall reservation numbers are still modest compared with cities such as Chicago and New York, but they’re fast-growing.
Airbnb spokesman Benjamin Breit said there are now more than 600 active “hosts” in Columbus, who brought in a total of $6.4 million in the past year. Only Indianapolis was ranked higher for 2018 growth by Airbnb, narrowly edging out Columbus with a 256 percent rate versus 254 percent.
The only other “trending” destination in the United States was Minneapolis, with 193 percent projected growth. The other top cities were widely scattered around the globe, including in Canada, Vietnam, Japan and Brazil.
Breit said college football is one big driver of rentals in Columbus. Other major sporting events and large meetings also contribute.
And Buckeyes also seem to like to use the service themselves when traveling. Breit said Indianapolis saw its greatest-ever surge around the recent Big Ten football championship game between Ohio State and Wisconsin.
The figures include only the city of Columbus, not its suburbs. That is probably one reason that Columbus’ numbers are higher than Cincinnati’s and Cleveland’s, as Columbus is nearly three times the physical size of each of those cities.
Airbnb says that in the past year, Columbus has logged 56,000 rental
nights booked through the company. Cincinnati had 45,000 and Cleveland 35,000. Cleveland saw a surge in 2016 because of the Republican National Convention. By comparison, Chicago logged 480,000 rental nights in the past year; Pittsburgh, 71,000, and Indianapolis 66,000.
The report comes as the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association, whose members potentially lose bookings to Airbnb, continues to lobby state and local legislators to regulate such home-rental services to ensure public health and safety, and to create a more even playing field with the highly regulated hotel industry.
Joe Savarise, executive director of the lodging group, cautioned that Airbnb’s numbers are self-reported and not verifiable.
“A lot of the ‘reports’ issued by Airbnb are self-serving marketing and promotional gloss,” Savarise said. “Part of the problem with Airbnb data in comparison to hotels is that, unlike hotels, the Airbnb data isn’t auditable and independently validated.”
Columbus City Councilman Michael Stinziano has taken the lead on studying proposed regulation of Airbnb and similar services at the local level.
On Friday, Stinziano said meetings are ongoing, with “lots of wonderful feedback” being gathered from constituents and interested parties. He said his guess is that council may deal with the issue in the first three months of 2018.