Travel fares · Vacation rental data
Vacation rental data: supply, nightly rates and occupancy signals
Vacation rental data is the public record of a short-term rental market: which listings exist, what they charge per night and in fees, and how their calendars fill. Collect it per city on a schedule, from IPs in the market whose prices and search results you are measuring.
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Written for
- Short-term rental property managers
- Holiday-let investors and analysts
- Municipal housing and tourism researchers
- Dynamic-pricing tool builders
The short answer
- Short-term rental markets are large and growing: 854.1 million nights were booked through four major platforms in the EU in 2024, up 18.8% on 2023, according to Eurostat.
- A blocked calendar night is not a booked night. Treat calendar data as an occupancy signal and say so in every chart built on it.
- Prices depend on dates, guests and length of stay; a listing's "from" price is not its nightly rate. Query with dates.
- Since 20 May 2026, EU Regulation 2024/1028 makes platforms share activity data with authorities. Public collection remains useful for supply, price and compliance checks that the official data does not publish.
The problem
What goes wrong without the right IPs
Search results stop before the market does
Rental search typically caps how many results a single query returns. Searching a whole city undercounts supply; tiling the map into small areas and de-duplicating by listing ID is what gives you a real count.
Calendars mix bookings with owner blocks
An unavailable night may be booked, blocked for the owner's own use, or closed because of a minimum stay. Occupancy estimated from calendars is an upper bound unless you model blocks out, for example by excluding long contiguous blocks.
The price is in the fees
Cleaning and service fees can be a large share of a short stay's total. A dataset of nightly rates without fees ranks listings in the wrong order for a two-night stay.
Locations are approximate on purpose
Platforms commonly blur a listing's position on the public map. Aggregate to districts or grid cells rather than presenting pins as addresses.
Listings churn and duplicate
The same flat can be listed on several platforms and relisted under a new ID. Track first-seen and last-seen dates per listing and match across platforms on attributes, not just names.
What to collect
What you can collect
- Listing ID and platform
- The stable key for churn and first-seen/last-seen tracking.
- Approximate location
- Grid cell or district from the public map position, never presented as an address.
- Property attributes
- Entire home or room, bedrooms, capacity, so rates compare like with like.
- Nightly rate by date
- Collected with dates and guest count set, for a fixed sample of future dates.
- Fees and total
- Cleaning and service fees and the total for a reference stay (for example two adults, three nights).
- Minimum stay
- Explains closed nights and separates short-let from mid-term supply.
- Calendar status per night
- Available or unavailable; the raw input for occupancy signals.
- Review count and latest review date
- A second, independent activity signal; a listing with no reviews for a year is probably inactive.
- Registration number shown
- Whether a registration number is displayed where the local rules require one.
How it runs
How a collection run works
- 01
Tile the city
Split the area into map tiles small enough that each search returns fewer results than the platform's cap. Run the searches with fixed dates and guest count so the result set is comparable from run to run.
- 02
De-duplicate into a listing register
Merge results by listing ID, record first-seen and last-seen, and keep the attributes from the latest detail fetch.
- 03
Sample prices and calendars
For each active listing, fetch the calendar and the price for a small set of reference stays: a weekday night, a weekend and a week in peak season. A sticky session keeps each listing's requests on one exit.
- 04
Derive the signals, label the assumptions
Compute supply, median nightly rate with and without fees, and an occupancy signal from calendars with owner blocks modelled out. Publish the method beside the number.
Setup
Recommended setup
Search tiles and listing pages are many small requests; prices and calendars need a stable session per listing. Split them.
| Plan | Role | Session | Targeting | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Fast Rotating residential | Default for searches and priced stays Residential exits in the market, so search results, currency and prices are the ones a local searcher sees, the same point of sale effect that moves hotel and flight prices. | Sticky, 10 minutes per listing | Country + city (e.g. Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Berlin) | €2.00 / GB €1.12 at 1 TB (−44%) |
ARC Basic Rotating ISP | Calendar and detail refreshes Re-reading calendars and listing attributes for a known register is lightweight and frequent, which is the cheapest pool's job. | Rotating | Country | €0.75 / GB €0.59 at 1 TB (−21%) |
Prices are list prices in EUR, excl. VAT. Volume discounts apply automatically at checkout — full ladder on the pricing page.
Connect
One connection string per market
The country, city and sticky session are tokens in the username. Change the token, change the market; keep the session handle, keep the IP.
http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_session-k3f9a1x2_sesstime-10:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000Swap _country-de for any market you quote. The full grammar is on the residential proxies page.
Illustration
What a city of 20,000 listings, refreshed weekly costs
An illustration with round numbers — your pages, payloads and retry rate will differ. The arithmetic is the real price ladder.
Assumptions
- Active listings
- 20,000
- Calendar + price refreshes
- weekly (4 a month)
- Weight per listing refresh
- 250 KB
- Search tiles
- 500, daily
- Weight per tile
- 400 KB
- Bandwidth per month
- ≈ 26 GB
On ARC Fast
€49.40per month, excl. VAT
26 GB bought in one purchase at €1.90 / GB (−5% volume rung, applied automatically).
The same 26 GB on ARC Basic: €19.50 at €0.75 / GB. Move down as soon as the cheaper pool holds up.
Daily tiles catch new and removed listings quickly; weekly listing refreshes are enough for rate and calendar trends. Researchers measuring a one-off snapshot need roughly a quarter of this.
Bandwidth never expires, so a bigger single purchase is only ever cheaper per GB. See the ladder.
In depth
Vacation rental data, in depth
Who uses vacation rental data, and for what
| Audience | Question | Fields that answer it |
|---|---|---|
| Property managers | What are comparable units charging next month? | Nightly rate by date, fees, minimum stay, attributes |
| Investors | How deep and how seasonal is this market? | Supply over time, rates by season, occupancy signal |
| Municipalities and researchers | How much housing is used as short-term rental, and where? | Listing register, entire-home share, location cells, registration numbers |
| Pricing-tool builders | How does demand move with events and seasons? | Calendar fill rate and price changes around dates |
Property managers use these inputs much as hotels use hotel rate shopping, but with fewer, more heterogeneous competitors and fees that matter more. Rentals listed on several platforms raise the same consistency questions as hotel rate parity, and short-term rentals are one input among many in travel fare aggregation.
Occupancy from calendars: what it can and cannot tell you
Public calendars show whether a night can be booked, not why it cannot. A night may be unavailable because a guest booked it, the owner blocked it, or a minimum-stay rule closed it. Any occupancy figure derived from calendars is therefore an estimate.
Practical corrections: treat unavailable runs longer than a few weeks as owner blocks; exclude listings whose whole calendar is closed; cross-check with review activity, since reviews only follow real stays. Report the result as an occupancy signal with a stated method, and compare markets using the same method rather than reading absolute levels.
The EU short-term rental data regulation
Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on data collection and sharing for short-term accommodation rental services entered into force on 18 May 2024 and applies from 20 May 2026. It covers registration procedures run by competent authorities, under which a unit receives a registration number that serves as its unique identifier, and requires online platforms to provide authorities with data on rental activity through a single digital entry point in each member state.
For analysts, two consequences matter. Authorities now receive official activity data that public collection cannot match, so public data is most valuable for what the official data does not publish: prices, fees, attributes and near-real-time supply. And where registration is required, whether a listing displays a number is itself an observable data point. What a given city requires is set nationally and locally; check the current rules for your market.
Total price display: cleaning and service fees
In the United States, the FTC's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, in effect since 12 May 2025, explicitly covers vacation rentals and home shares offered through platforms and requires the advertised total to include mandatory fees. In the UK, the CMA's price transparency guidance uses a holiday-cottage example in which a calculable local tax is added to the price shown in search results.
For your dataset that is helpful but not sufficient: platforms still differ in whether the default display is per night or per stay, and tax treatment varies. Collect the components and compute your own reference-stay total.
Collecting rental data responsibly
- Public, logged-out pages only; no host or guest accounts, no messaging, no booking flows.
- Do not collect or publish personal data about hosts beyond what your purpose strictly needs; aggregate wherever possible.
- Keep request rates modest and respect robots.txt and terms. See collecting travel data responsibly.
- Where a platform or authority offers an official data product for your use case, prefer it.
Works with anything that takes a proxy URL
Playwright- Python requests / httpx
- Scrapy
Crawlee
Apify actors
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
How do you estimate vacation rental occupancy from public data?
From listing calendars: nights that become unavailable over time are treated as likely bookings, with long blocks excluded as owner use and minimum-stay closures accounted for. The result is an occupancy signal, not a measured occupancy rate, and should be published with its method.
How big is the short-term rental market in the EU?
Eurostat reports that guests spent 854.1 million nights in EU short-term rental accommodation booked via Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group or TripAdvisor in 2024, an 18.8% increase on 2023 and a record high.
What does EU Regulation 2024/1028 change?
It applies from 20 May 2026 and sets EU-wide rules for registering short-term rental units with a registration number and for online platforms to share rental activity data with competent authorities through a single digital entry point. It does not itself cap rentals; local rules still decide that.
Why do I need city-level IPs for rental data?
Search results, currency and sometimes prices follow the searcher's location. City targeting is available on ARC Basic, Fast and Ultra for a published list of metros; for other cities, country targeting with fixed search parameters is usually enough.
How much bandwidth does monitoring a city's rental market take?
As an illustration, a city with 20,000 active listings, refreshed weekly at about 250 KB per listing plus 500 daily search tiles, uses around 26 GB a month. Bandwidth is billed per GB and never expires.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Eurostat: New records set by online booking platforms in 2024
- [2]European Parliament Legislative Observatory: Data collection and sharing relating to short-term accommodation rental services: summary of Regulation (EU) 2024/1028
- [3]US Federal Trade Commission: Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees: Frequently Asked Questions
- [4]UK Competition and Markets Authority: Unfair commercial practices: price transparency (CMA209), 18 November 2025
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