Search for Airbnbs in Paris in late July and you’ll be offered options ranging from a tiny studio with glimpses of the Eiffel Tower for $167 a night up to a stunning luxury apartment steps from the Champs Elysees for nearly $3,500 a night. The company is also offering two lucky fans the opportunity to sleep in the iconic clock facade of the Musée D’Orsay on the night of the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.
Some 3 million visitors are expected to attend the Olympics in Paris and like one of the 10,500 athletes competing, Airbnb has been preparing for years. In 2019 the company inked a nine-year partnership with the International Olympic Committee that runs through the 2028 Summer Games. Airbnb said at the time that it expected the deal to lead to hundreds of thousands of new hosts in cities around the globe as the games rolled through.
In Paris, the Olympics give Airbnb a chance of winning a bigger foothold in a city where local officials have introduced restrictions on short-term rentals. The company has faced similar resistance from cities around the world after Airbnb and similar platforms exploded in popularity over the past decade. Critics accuse them of driving up rent and bringing unwelcome trash, noise, and physical dangers to residential neighborhoods. Airbnb and its rivals say they provide flexibility to travelers and extra income to hosts, who themselves may be squeezed by rising housing costs.
If Airbnb rentals are seen as largely successful during the Paris Olympics, by providing cheaper stays than hotels and a cash infusion for some locals without too much inconvenience for others, the platform could permanently grow its already substantial presence in the city. Last summer, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky urged Parisians to list their homes for the games to keep prices down, and the company hopes some new hosts drawn by Olympic demand will stick with the platform long-term.
Airbnb claims the Olympics effect is already at work. The number of nights booked during the games is already five times greater than for the same dates in Paris in 2023, according to new data released by the company. Olympic events will also be spread throughout the rest of France; the Paris suburbs and other French cities have also seen high rates of short-term rental activity.
The number of active listings in Paris is now at an all-time high, having increased by some 40 percent. The average Airbnb host expected to earn 2,000 euros ($2,145) during the games. But how much cash reaches the pockets of hosts will depend on getting their stays booked, and WIRED’s searches showed that many Airbnbs remain available with the games just five weeks away.
French Disconnection
Relations between the city of Paris government and Airbnb have been rocky for years. The city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo immediately opposed the company’s Olympics partnership when it was announced in 2019, and wrote a scathing letter to games organizers about Airbnb’s impact on residents in the city. The city had already passed a regulation mandating that people can only rent their entire primary residences for short-term stays totaling 120 nights a year.
Paris also recently mulled a ban on the small lock boxes hosts use to store keys, often a tell-tale sign of short-term rentals, citing them as an eyesore. The city did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story but said in 2023 that tightening restrictions on short-term rentals led to decline in fines for breaking the rules.
Dave Stephenson, Airbnb’s chief business officer, claims that without short-term rentals Paris may have crumbled under the pressure from outside guests—and been forced to build new hotels. There are an estimated 160,000 hotel rooms in the greater Paris area, but many of them will be occupied by Olympic staff and athletes. “These spikes in demand are a great way for people to use Airbnb,” Stephenson says. “It’s a great way for local Parisians to earn money and enable the games to be successful.”
Short-term rentals can function as a quick release valve for a city expecting an influx of visitors, increasing capacity for a short time nearly instantly. In fact, despite the usual hype around the Olympic Games, there are still many places to stay in Paris this summer.
A search on Airbnb for a two-person stay during the first weekend of the games returned more than 1,000 results, with many charging less than $200 a night. A search for hotel rooms on Expedia only turned up about 20 hotels offering similarly low rates. Hotel prices for the dates of the Olympics have actually fallen in Paris since December, but remain higher than the same time last summer, with the average cost of a hotel room during the opening weekend of the games going for around 440 euros as of May.
Booking rates for short-term rentals during the Olympics are up by 8 percent compared to the dates two weeks before the games across all locations hosting Olympic events, but the number of available rooms has increased by 38 percent, according to AirDNA, a third party platform that tracks short-term rentals.
The average price in Paris for a short-term rental during the Olympics is $481 a night, while those who booked earlier paid an average of $350. Outside of Paris, rates average $289, up from a previous $198. The “vast majority” of these listings on Airbnb, says Stephenson, come from families listing their primary homes. But other Parisians are begging travelers to stay away, warning that the games will bring chaos to the city, and some are planning to flee the city.
People from more than 160 countries and regions have booked stays on Airbnb for the Olympics, according to the company. The largest influx of tourists comes from the US, with American travelers making up 20 percent of the bookings, with many other guests coming from the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Against that background, and with Airbnb’s marketing push, Jamie Lane, chief economist and senior vice president of research of AirDNA, says it makes sense that more people are signing up with Airbnb to host. “Everyone starts getting Olympic fever,” he says, especially “with Airbnb doing more and more ads and market outreach within the city of Paris.”
Despite the flood of visitors, the ready availability of vacancies suggests that like many athletes competinging in Paris, some Airbnb hosts will end the games with disappointment as their listings remained unbooked. But Lane says that in the past large events have been seen to provide a lasting boost to Airbnb’s footprint in a place. “A city is left with more listings than it had going in,” Lane says. For “people that maybe decide to do it for the first time, it ends up being a good experience. It was very little work. They think: ‘I should do this again.’”
Source : Wired
