Back To News/PR Index | | First Annual Homestay Index Brings Focus to Emerging Accommodation Market Segment | Homestay bookings have increased tenfold worldwide in the 2014, and twelvefold in the United States. More than 50 percent of homestay guests are 30 years of age or older, representing a shift away from homestay’s traditional student and language immersion roots. The average per room per night price of US$46 makes homestays an appealing lodging alternative not just for adventurers or students of language and culture, but a wide variety of traveler types, including those on holiday (38 percent of surveyed homestay guests), business travelers (14 percent, including internship stays), and event attendees (6 percent). The use of homestays by event planners was noted in the report, and includes “pop-up” accommodation support for events including the Ryder Cup, the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and, as announced just recently, the World Meeting of Families event in Philadelphia planned for 2015, which is expected to draw 2 million visitors to a city with an inventory of only about 11,000 hotel rooms. Pop-up homestays are designed to solve acute accommodation shortages during events. Europe remains the heart of the homestay experience, with European travelers accounting for 40 percent of all guests in 2014. However, many of the top cities, as measured by the number of bookings in 2014, are outside of Europe, including Havana, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland, New York and Vancouver. Perhaps surprisingly, Havana was the third most popular homestay destination for U.S. travelers. Every year, tens of thousands of people are deciding for the first time to open their homes to guests from all corners of the globe. More and more travelers are taking them up on their offers. Homestays have erupted as the embodiment of the sharing economy for accommodations, and represent a new choice for experiential travel. Homestay.com estimates the valuation of the global private accommodation marketplace to be approximately US $15 billion. To download a copy of the entire Homestay Index, or to learn more about homestays as an emerging lodging option in the sharing economy category, please visit www.Homestay.com/index. About
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