Traveling yes, but where and when you decide at the last moment by purchasing a holiday destination online. In technical language it is called late booking and this winter the trend does not change. In fact, at the moment, 4.4 million nights have been booked in private homes on the Airbnb circuit (42% of sales for the winter of 2023-2024). The most significant numbers, however, stop in November (over 2 million nights, equal to 77% of last year’s sales), while December currently records 1.3 million nights booked (42% of the final balance of the same period of 2023), 674.5 thousand in January (28%), 364 thousand in February 2025 (15%) and 332 thousand in March (10%). This is what it shows an analysis carried out by Isnart-Unioncamere thanks to the Stendhal Platform, using data from the short-term rental market in private homes in a predictive key.
On the side of hospitality businesses, the indications appear positive, with over half of the rooms available for the month of December already booked. The greatest concentration of bookings for the winter months occurs on the short-term rental market in Lazio, probably as effect of the imminent opening of the Jubilee year; followed by Lombardy, Tuscany, Veneto, Sicily, Piedmont and Campania.
The tool used for these forecasts is Location Intelligence, capable of producing data and information obtained from the visualization and analysis of geospatial data. Isnart uses it to profile the prevailing tourist interest of Italian and foreign tourists at the destination, derived from the analysis of smartphone use (information sought on search engines, online purchases, use of apps, geolocation of movements, etc.).
From this type of analysis, some very interesting dynamics emerge regarding tourist movements in Italy. Meanwhile, an important fact: there were 32.3 million tourists, Italian and foreign, recorded on the national territory in the summer of 2024, with a significant growth in international tourism (+2.1% on summer 2023), more marked for the destinations in Lombardy, Veneto, Lazio and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. In addition to the not surprising confirmation of the appeal of the great cities of art and destinations along the coasts, 2024 is a candidate to become the year of lake tourism, given the interest received above all from the lakes of Northern Italy.
The top five locations in terms of incidence of foreign visitors (among those with at least 10 thousand tourists) all overlook the lakes of Como (Bellagio, Menaggio and Varenna), Maggiore (Cannobio – Verbano-Cusio-Ossola) and Caldaro (Caldaro sulla strada del wine-Bolzano). Among the most popular destinations in the cultural cluster, in addition to the great art cities of the Rome-Florence-Venice axis, summer 2024 sees Siena, Pompeii, Verona, Pienza, Bergamo, Urbino, Pisa, and San Gimignano: all places that can boast UNESCO recognition, demonstrating how being included in the list of world heritage sites gives added value in terms of considerable visibility. An element which is confirmed by the fact that as many as 37% of tourists driven by cultural interests report UNESCO recognition as the first variable in choosing a destination (given that in the foreign component of demand it rises to 40%).