Small towns: holiday rentals help stem depopulation

The availability of short-term rentals helps to stem the depopulation of towns, a phenomenon of demographic decline to which small municipalities: between 2019 and 2024, the population fell by 3.5% in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, by 1.1% in those with between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants, and by 0.5% in towns with between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. During the same period, however, in municipalities with at least one property available on the Airbnb platform, the population decline stood at -1.3%, compared with -1.9% recorded in municipalities without any such properties.

The figure emerges from the Teha Group Tourism Observatory for the San Francisco-based holiday accommodation platform, which examines the benefits for local areas, property owners (the so-called hosts) and travellers resulting from the promotion of widespread tourism. The research highlights how, by 2025, Airbnb will have generated 836 million euros in total economic impact in small Italian municipalities.

Employment generated by the tourism sector has created around 4,600 full-time equivalent jobs, with an indirect effect: for every person directly employed by the sector, almost 0.9 further jobs are created in related industries.

Airbnb has also announced a donation of 1.5 million euros over three years to ANCI (the National Association of Italian Municipalities), which will be channelled into a fund dedicated to tourism development and the promotion of the rural heritage of small and medium-sized municipalities, with the aim of supporting small businesses and local initiatives, communities and civic engagement organisations, as well as cultural associations and those dedicated to the preservation of artistic and cultural heritage.

As mentioned, one of the aspects highlighted by the analysis is the correlation between a greater presence of Airbnb and a reduced risk of depopulation: an effect on demographic trends that is not immediately apparent but ‘tends to become apparent from the third year following the listing of the first property, consistent with the time required for the introduction of Airbnb to produce more structural effects on the local area, such as the adaptation of the tourism offering, the reorganisation of the local economy and the introduction of complementary services’.