Salone del Mobile: hotels sold out and at home spending an average of 400 euro per night

Milan is a city of trolleys, even in the week leading up to this Salone del Mobile 2024, which, according to the numbers, promises to be a record-breaker. The 62nd edition, from 16 to 21 April, has new exhibition routes and will increasingly involve the city and surrounding municipalities. And if the Salone's official website has an indication of where to stay overnight - in partnership with MiCodmc, an exclusive service has been set up to find the perfect destination during the event with special rates - the debate has shifted to the rising prices, especially for short term rentals in the city of Milan, where the metro stations are already packed with the event's fitters in the Fiera and on the streets of the Lombard capital.

An average hotel occupancy of over 80% is estimated, as last year, with greater demand in the city centre in the medium-high bracket, in the Fuorisalone areas and, more generally, in the north-west of Milan that refers to the Fiera. To understand how the trend in flat accommodation is going, however, we asked Marco Celani, managing director of Italianway Spa, Milan's leading property management company with over 700 flats under direct management, for his insights. "In Milan, where Istat has counted 1.4 million houses, those that are permanently online through short-term rentals are about 7 thousand," he pointed out, "which means 0.8% of the total product available in the city.

With only a few days to go before the opening of the Show, how are things? Have more or fewer houses been rented than last year? "As of 10 April 2024, i.e. 5 days before the start of the event, professionally managed flats in the city of Milan are full at 66% over the entire duration of the Show, with an average rate of €386 per day and a booking window (distance between booking and event) of 34 days. Only a few days ago, the booking window was 48 days and the average rate €406 per day'.

So how much does the Salone effect on rates amount to according to Italianway's data? "The transacted per flat at the moment is about €1,561 for the week," Celani explains. "These are not definitive figures, and you can tell this by looking at the final figures for 2023. In fact, during the last edition (days surveyed from 18 to 23 April 2023), the occupancy rate had exceeded 88 per cent with an average rate of €359 per day and a booking window of 16.4 days. Owners had therefore earned an average of €1,708 per property, a figure from which the costs of managers, portals, cleaning, tourist tax and the dry coupon must obviously be deducted'.

How much Milanese owners will earn is therefore too early to say, continues the Italianway CEO, "because the final figure will depend on travellers booking under the date. What we are recording in the meantime, however, is that nights in 2024 are selling for €27 more than last year, an increase of 7.5% compared to 2023. Analysing the offer on the portals, we notice that while for the first days of Design Week there are around 1650 accommodations still available, for the last ones it becomes more than 2000, which indicates that users did not book until Sunday. Obviously not everyone books on the same dates, in fact the average booking length is 5.17 days, which is a lot for Milan, but the peak is on the night of the 17th on which there are only 640 free structures".