Airbnb Italy vs Hotels: Hotels Keep About 60% of Like-for-Like Nights, and Three Official Series Disagree on the Rest

Hotels still hold about 60% of like-for-like nights, and the share falls slowly

ISTAT's statement is precise about its scope. The comparison covers only the accommodation types recorded the same way over the whole period. Non-business private rentals are left out, because ISTAT has counted them in full only since 2025. On that basis hotels went from about 67% of nights to about 60%, and business-run rentals rose to 16.7%. ISTAT says the shares of the other types stayed broadly stable: campsites and holiday villages at about 15%, agriturismi at about 3.5%, B&Bs at about 1% and all other types at about 4%.

Our own arithmetic gives the same picture. ISTAT's 2015 annual report counted 262,951,143 hotel nights out of 392,763,886, a share of 66.9%. Eurostat's series, which carries ISTAT's figures, gives 64.3% for 2019 and 60.9% for 2024, when hotels had 283,910,717 of 466,158,045 nights. For 2025, ISTAT's Storie di dati gives 288 million hotel nights and 481 million nights without non-business rentals. That is 59.9%, consistent with ISTAT's own "about 60%".

Eurostat's Italian figures are ISTAT's figures. For 2024 both give exactly 466,158,045 nights and 283,910,717 hotel nights. They are one series published twice, so their agreement is not independent confirmation. The independent checks come from the survey, the platform data and the capacity counts discussed below.

The fall is slow. It averages less than one point a year, with the pandemic years in between. Hotels added about 25 million nights between 2015 and 2025. The category Eurostat calls holiday and other short-stay accommodation, which holds rental apartments, holiday homes, hostels and similar places, grew from 76.2 million nights in 2015 to 127.6 million in 2024. That is a rise of 67.4% in nine years, against 7.9% for hotels over the same span (our arithmetic). Campsites stayed between 53.6 million and 56.8 million nights in the years outside the pandemic.

Average stays moved in a way the headline shares hide. Hotel guests stayed 2.95 nights on average in 2015 and 2.95 nights in 2024 (derived from ISTAT arrivals and nights). Outside hotels, the average fell from 5.33 nights to 4.21. The non-hotel sector now takes more arrivals with shorter stays. The sources do not say why. A move from long holiday-home and campsite stays toward short city apartment stays would fit, but no ISTAT table we read breaks stays down that way.

The Bank of Italy measures something else. Its international tourism survey asks foreign travelers where they slept. Table 8 of the 2025 edition, published on 26 June 2026, gives 143.3 million foreign nights in hotels and holiday villages, up 13.1% on 2024. Nights in a rented house fell 3.2% to 93.3 million. B&Bs and agriturismi fell 6.4% to 30.2 million, and stays with friends and relatives fell 3.7% to 75.6 million. The hotel share of foreign nights rose from 33.0% (our arithmetic) to 36.5%, the share the Bank prints for 2025. Foreign travelers who stayed in hotels and holiday villages spent €29.6bn on their trips in 2025, 54.3% of all spending by overnight foreign visitors, against €9.1bn by those in rented houses.

Spending per night follows the same split. Table 8 gives average spending of €206.8 per night for foreign travelers who stayed in hotels and holiday villages in 2025, against €97.1 for those in rented houses. These are totals for the whole trip, not room prices. They still show that, for foreign visitors, a hotel night carries about twice the spending of a rented-house night.

This survey is a sample estimate, and it covers stays that ISTAT does not count, such as nights with friends and relatives. Its categories are not defined in the tables. It covers one year of change, so it cannot show a trend. It is still the only official source that splits 2025 nights by accommodation type on an unchanged method, and for foreign visitors it shows hotels gaining share.

The 2025 drop in the hotel share is a new count of rentals

From 2025 ISTAT's count covers private rentals, which by then had to hold a national code (CIN). The result is a new national total. ISTAT's Storie di dati gives over 535 million nights for 2025 including private rentals run on a non-business basis, and 481 million without them (footnote 1). Eurostat's figure for the same year is 535,463,245. The difference between Eurostat's total and ISTAT's 481 million, about 54.5 million nights, is our arithmetic. ISTAT's long-run chart plots the 481 million figure, for continuity with earlier years.

These rentals did not appear for the first time in 2025. ISTAT first published them on 9 March 2026, in its release on 2024. That release gave about 9.63 million arrivals and 39,050,103 nights in non-business private units, from the 92 of Italy's 107 provinces that had sent data. ISTAT called the coverage partial, kept the figures outside its headline total of 466.2 million, and said that adding them brought the total to over 505 million. It also said full coverage would come with the 2025 data. That is what happened.

The 2024 figures also show who uses these units. Guests in non-business private rentals stayed about 4.1 nights on average (our arithmetic from ISTAT's rounded arrivals). Foreign guests took 64.8% of their nights and 65.1% of their arrivals, according to ISTAT. Across all registered accommodation in 2024, foreign guests took 54.5% of nights. Private rentals lean more toward foreign visitors than the market as a whole. In 2025 the roughly 54.5 million non-business rental nights made up about 10% of the national total (our arithmetic).

Eurostat folded the new count into its 2025 figures without a break flag. The last break flag in its Italian series for holiday accommodation and campsites is for 2012. On Eurostat's table, hotels fall from 60.9% of nights in 2024 to 53.8% in 2025, but the 2025 total counts something new. Hotels gained 4.27 million nights in 2025. Read on the old basis, their share stayed at about 60%.

The capacity series shows the scale of the change. Eurostat counted 265,319 accommodation establishments in Italy in 2024 and 738,751 in 2025. In the holiday and short-stay category the count went from 229,996 to 702,590. Bed places rose from 5.50 million to 7.69 million, and in that category from 2.10 million to 4.09 million. Hotel beds rose 0.7%. A market does not triple its establishments in a year. The jump follows the new registration duty, though neither Eurostat's data nor any ISTAT note we read describes it in detail.

One part of the jump has no explanation at all. Campsite nights rose 27.2% in 2025, from 54.6 million to 69.5 million, after years of near-flat figures outside the pandemic. On the old-basis arithmetic, nights outside hotels grew by about 65 million on Eurostat's table, more than the 54.5 million that ISTAT's two totals attribute to non-business rentals. Something else in the non-hotel categories moved as well. It could be reclassification within the new frame. We found no publication that says so, and we do not assign the campsite rise to rentals.

The category split makes the puzzle sharper. If all 54.5 million non-business rental nights sit in Eurostat's holiday and short-stay line, that line would have fallen to about 123.3 million nights on the old basis in 2025, below the 127.6 million of 2024 (our arithmetic). ISTAT's own like-for-like statement says business-run rentals kept gaining share, which points the other way. One possible reading is that some units moved between categories when the new frame arrived. Neither ISTAT nor Eurostat has said so, and until one of them does, the 2025 category lines cannot be read as market movements.

The practical rule is simple. The only clean 2024 to 2025 comparison on the national series is hotel nights, up 1.5%. Any change computed from Eurostat's 2025 total, its holiday and short-stay line, its campsite line, its capacity counts or its hotel share is not like for like. The same break sits behind claims that Italy became the most visited country in the EU in 2025, which we examine in Is Italy now the most visited country in Europe?. Our 2026 tourism record watch uses the same rule for this year's figures.

Hotels are a third of the beds and three-fifths of the nights

ISTAT's 2024 capacity table shows how unevenly the bed base is used. Italy had 32,943 hotels with 2,283,546 bed places. Other registered establishments numbered 232,376, with 3,215,227 beds. ISTAT also counted 316,954 private non-business units with 1,475,986 beds. In total there were 582,273 establishments and 6,974,759 bed places (Statistica Today Turismo 2024, Prospetto 8).

Hotels held 32.7% of those beds, or 41.5% if the private units are left out (our arithmetic). They sold 60.9% of the registered nights. An average hotel had 69.3 beds, an average other establishment 13.8 and an average private unit 4.7. The bed base is dominated by small units, and the nights are dominated by large ones.

The business-run rentals that drove ISTAT's like-for-like shift are visible in its capacity data too. ISTAT's statistical yearbook for 2025 counts 129,695 rental units run as businesses in 2023, with 961,909 beds, and 156,398 units with 1,114,920 beds in 2024. That is a rise of 20.6% in units and 15.9% in beds in one year. Hotel beds rose 2.3% over the same year (our arithmetic). The growth in rental supply is real on the old basis as well, before any private units are added.

A rough intensity measure makes the gap concrete. Dividing 2024 nights by bed places gives about 124 nights per hotel bed, 57 per bed in other registered accommodation and 26 per private bed (our arithmetic; the private figure uses partial coverage). These are not occupancy rates, because they ignore how many days each place was open, and a seasonal campsite or a holiday flat open four months a year will always score low. They still show that a bed outside hotels, and especially a private rental bed, sells far fewer nights than a hotel bed.

The 2025 count widens the gap. On Eurostat's 2025 table, hotels hold 29.9% of bed places and 53.8% of nights (our arithmetic). Most of the new count consists of small units with few nights each. That is why the rental share of beds can grow much faster than the rental share of nights.

Business registrations tell a third story. Unioncamere-InfoCamere counted 29,199 registered hotel enterprises at 30 September 2025, 5.2% fewer than four years earlier, and 44,801 registered enterprises in holiday and short-stay accommodation, 42.1% more (release of 29 December 2025). These are companies. The hotel count is close to ISTAT's 32,943 hotels. The short-stay count is a small fraction of Eurostat's 702,590 holiday and short-stay establishments, which suggests that most rentals are run by people who are not registered businesses (our inference). The figures show rental businesses forming faster than hotel businesses. They do not measure beds or nights.

Eurostat's platform data are a separate unit again. Airbnb, Booking and Expedia reported 138,736,628 guest nights in Italy in 2025, after 126,725,801 in 2024 and 107,273,361 in 2023 (tour_ce_omr). Italy ranks third in the EU, behind France and Spain, according to Eurostat's Statistics Explained page. Tripadvisor stopped supplying data after 2024, so the 2025 change crosses a change in the panel. Eurostat states that these figures cannot be combined with other tourism statistics, such as hotel data, because of possible overlaps. We do not add them to ISTAT's nights or express them as a share of ISTAT's total.

The platform series does allow one cross-country comparison. Italian platform nights rose 29.3% between 2023 and 2025. The EU total rose 32.4%, from 719.0 million to 951.6 million (our arithmetic). Italy's share of EU platform nights slipped from 14.9% to 14.6%. In 2025, Greece, Germany, Spain and France all grew faster than Italy on this series. Italy is a large platform market. On Eurostat's numbers it is not the fastest-growing one in Europe.

Platform data also show where demand concentrates. Eurostat's figures for 2025 put Rome at 18.8 million platform nights, up 19.7%, the second-largest city total in the EU. Five Italian regions are among the EU's top 20 for platform nights in 2025, according to the same Eurostat page. These city and regional figures sit on the same platform basis and carry the same warning against combining them with hotel data.

Listing counts measure supply, not use. Federalberghi's research centre counted 571,982 Airbnb listings in Italy in August 2026, 38,587 more than a year earlier, and found that almost 15% of them showed no national rental code (Open, 9 October 2026). Aigab, the association of short-term rental managers, counted 509,342 homes listed online in September 2026, against about 465,000 a year earlier and 488,000 in 2024 (Moneta, 26 October 2026). Aigab says its figure counts homes and Federalberghi's counts listings. Neither association has published its full method. The Ministry's own register counts, and the unexplained gap between them, are covered in our analysis of Italy's Airbnb rules and the national rental code.

What nobody measures

No official source publishes Italian rental nights on one consistent basis across the decade. ISTAT's like-for-like series stops at business-run rentals. Non-business rentals start with partial 2024 figures and full 2025 figures, so their growth cannot yet be measured at all.

No national table splits 2025 nights between hotels and other accommodation in an ISTAT release. The figures here come from Eurostat's database and from ISTAT's rounded long-run totals. ISTAT's full 2025 annual release, on the pattern of previous years, should arrive around March 2027. Regional and municipal figures on the new basis are also missing. Tuscany is one of the few regions to publish its rental nights separately. Most cities publish nothing comparable.

The supply counts do not reconcile either. Eurostat lists 702,590 holiday and short-stay establishments for 2025. The Ministry of Tourism's register has produced two counts in 2026 about 104,000 apart, as our rental-rules analysis sets out. Aigab counts 509,342 homes advertised online. These are different universes: a capacity survey, an administrative register and a count of online listings. No official note explains how they relate, so none of them should be subtracted from another.

Nobody publishes occupancy for rentals. The nights-per-bed figures above are an approximation. Platform data give guest nights and stays, not occupied nights per listing, and we found no official occupancy figure for rentals.

No source splits resident and foreign guests by accommodation type in the 2024 ISTAT release, except for the private-rental segment, where foreign guests took 64.8% of nights. The Bank of Italy covers foreign travelers only, and it does not define its categories.

No study measures displacement. None of the sources we read estimates how many nights moved from hotels to rentals, or how prices in one sector affect demand in the other. The EU regulation that requires platforms to share data with public authorities has applied since 20 May 2026. We found no Italian data published under it. Local rules are changing faster than the statistics. Our analysis of the Florence short-term rental ban found no count of rentals removed, and the tourist tax rates for 2026 differ between hotels and short lets city by city.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers have more rental choice than any official count from before 2025 suggested. On Eurostat's 2025 capacity table, holiday and short-stay accommodation offers 4.09 million bed places against 2.30 million in hotels. Hotel guests stay just under three nights on average, and guests elsewhere stay longer. If you are choosing between a hotel and an apartment in a major city, our guides to where to stay in Rome and where to stay in Florence compare areas. Check that any rental shows its national code, and budget for local tourist tax, which varies by city and type of property.

Tourism businesses and investors should read the trend as slow and steady. On a consistent basis, hotels lost about 7 points of night share over ten years while still adding about 25 million nights. The 2025 drop to 53.8% is a change of count. Among foreign visitors, the Bank of Italy's survey shows hotels gaining share in 2025. Outside hotels, beds sell far fewer nights each, and rental firms are forming faster than hotel firms. Listing counts from industry bodies differ by tens of thousands and use different units, so they are a weak basis for market sizing.

Journalists and analysts can cite these figures: hotels about 60% of nights in 2025 on a like-for-like basis, down 7 points since 2015, and business-run rentals 16.7% (ISTAT, 17 July 2026); 535.5 million nights in 2025 with non-business rentals and 481 million without (ISTAT and Eurostat); hotel nights 288.2 million, up 1.5% (Eurostat); 138.7 million platform nights (Eurostat, not combinable); foreign hotel nights up 13.1% and rented-house nights down 3.2% (Bank of Italy). Claims not to repeat: that hotels lost 7 points to rentals in 2025, that Italy is Europe's fastest-growing rental market, that 2025 is the first year with any ISTAT data on private rentals (partial 2024 figures were published in March 2026), and any share of platform nights in ISTAT's total. The series finding is that each of the three official measures answers a different question. Registered nights show a slow shift away from hotels, the new 2025 count shows how large the uncounted rental stock was, and the survey of foreign visitors shows hotels gaining share of foreign nights in 2025.