Booking platforms data (Eurostat)

In 2020, the European Commission signed a data sharing agreement with four platforms - Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia Group and Tripadvisor. This allows the statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat), to publish data on short-term accommodation offered through these platforms. Since 2025, Tripadvisor has no longer been part of the agreement, and the results are now based solely on data from Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia Group.

This is a publication of the results for Switzerland, which benefits from this agreement and is intended to provide users with an overview of the rentals yet does not claim to present rentals in entirety and cannot ensure that the same concepts have been applied as for tourist accommodation statistics.

• The results only refer to accommodation offered via these platforms. Data for accommodation that is not offered via these platforms is not presented in these results. Therefore, no conclusions can be made about this tourism accommodation category in entirety.
• Additional problems regarding coverage of the statistical population under consideration may also arise due to differences in the categories of accommodation used in tourism statistics and those on these platforms. The results cannot be aggregated with other tourism statistics (e.g., hotel and supplementary accommodation statistics) due to possible overlapping.
• Solely the aggregated data is presented, whereas data on the individual platforms is not presented.

Eurostat receives the data from the platforms on a quarterly basis and publishes them on:
Collaborative economy platforms - Experimental statistics

National statistics offices may publish certain additional details to address specific national needs. In Switzerland’s case, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) is authorised to publish the data at tourist region level. The FSO receives the results of the platforms from Eurostat, which have already been aggregated, for this purpose. The results presented below are based entirely on the data provided by Eurostat, and the FSO cannot verify or guarantee the quality of the data.

A dataset with monthly data by visitors’ country of residence and tourist region can be found here:

The results are based on data provided by three (or four, up to 2024) international platforms: Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia Group (as well as on Tripadvisor until 2024). Data for accommodation that is not offered via these platforms is therefore not presented in these results.

The statistical population under consideration is as defined under NACE 55.2 'Holiday and other short-stay accommodation'. However, the (non-harmonised) categories of accommodation used by the platforms do not correspond to the existing concepts and definitions for tourism statistics. This can lead to additional problems concerning the coverage of the statistical population under consideration.

The data is aggregated by the platforms according to local administrative districts (in Switzerland, the communes, in German, Gemeinde) and transmitted to Eurostat. The platforms allocate the data to the communes based on the geo-coordinates of the accommodation.

The data sets of the platforms are then aggregated by Eurostat. There is an assumption that a rental is only registered on one platform at any one time. The results about the rentals of the platforms are added together.

For detailed information, see this note on methodology from Eurostat.

Contact: info-tour@bfs.admin.ch
Telephone: +41 58 463 61 97

If you have any questions, please call or email us. Please bear in mind, that as the FSO receives the data from Eurostat in a form that is already aggregated, we may not be able to answer all questions about the content of the statistics. Eurostat can also be contacted directly (see link below).

Experimental statistics from Eurostat on collaborative economy platforms