Measuring private short-term accommodation in Canada, 2015 to 2018

Statistics Canada continuously works to ensure economic measures reflect our reality, including new and emerging activities such as private short-term accommodation. This ensures that Canadians have access to the high quality and relevant information they need to make informed decisions. The paper released today provides provisional estimates for private short-term accommodation in Canada, the provinces and territories from 2015 to 2018.

Most of the digital platforms that facilitate private short-term accommodation rentals are foreign establishments and Statistics Canada does not have the authority to collect data from non-resident entities. At the same time, there does not exist a list of individuals in Canada who offer private short-term accommodation services from which a sample can be drawn and a survey designed. As a result, Statistics Canada's traditional methods for collecting data, such as household and business surveys, were not suitable for measuring this activity.

To develop these estimates, Statistics Canada used non-traditional data sources, in this case web-scraped data, to model economic information. Consequently, it is difficult to produce accurate statistical measures of the quality of the estimates. Nevertheless, these estimates provide insight into the size and growth of private accommodation over the last few years. Statistics Canada is continuing to pursue the use of non-traditional data, beyond web-scraped information, to improve the completeness, detail and timeliness of these estimates.

In 2018, private short-term accommodation in Canada generated an estimated $2.8 billion in revenue. This included both the revenue earned by hosts (those listing dwellings for rent) as well as revenues earned by digital intermediary platforms (companies that operate the digital platforms upon which dwellings are listed and rented). Of the total revenue, $2.6 billion or 93% went to hosts, while $196.6 million went to intermediary platforms in the form of host and guest fees.

From 2015 to 2018, the total estimated revenue generated by private short-term accommodation increased nearly tenfold (+940.8%). Despite the significant increase over the time period, growth in this market has slowed year after year.

The domestic supply of accommodation measured by the National Tourism Indicators (NTI) totalled $16.4 billion in 2017. The NTI capture some but not all private short-term accommodation.