From the Airbnb Summit: Three Signals Shaping New Zealand’s Short-Term Rental Market

Last week, I joined Airbnb’s ANZ leadership and around 300 of the region’s leading professional hosts and operators at its Summit in Sydney. Stayhub was among the larger portfolios represented.

For our owners, the significance is practical. Airbnb is one of the most important platforms connecting their properties with guests, and its scale gives it a broad view of travel demand, booking behaviour and the policy environment surrounding short-term accommodation. The Summit gave us direct access to Airbnb’s market analysts and its policy, legal and reputation teams, including many of the people helping to shape what comes next for the platform and the wider sector.

I was there representing Stayhub, but also the more than 200 owners who have entrusted us with their properties and income. Our responsibility is to bring those insights home and turn them into better decisions about pricing, availability, property positioning and regulatory preparedness.

Three developments stood out.

Airbnb’s assessment of 2025 and early 2026 was neatly summarised from the stage as “demand is shaken, not stirred”. New Zealand’s domestic travel market has endured one of its most difficult periods in recent years, remaining among the region’s more depressed segments through 2025 and into the first half of 2026.

The more recent direction is encouraging. Airbnb’s data shows international visitor guest nights increasing by +9.1% year on year, while domestic demand has begun a more modest recovery of +0.6%. China is currently New Zealand’s fastest-growing inbound market, followed by Singapore, Australia, and the U.S.

Queenstown and the wider South Island are leading the recovery. Auckland, after one of the weakest starts to the year of any NZ region, has also moved from negative into positive territory. The Bay of Plenty and Taupo lag a bit behind, particularly in the domestic drive market, but are following a similar recovery curve.

There is potential for domestic demand to strengthen further. New Zealanders are estimated to hold around 40 million days of unused annual leave. Airbnb expects some of that backlog to convert into weekend breaks and longer holidays, although affordability and consumer confidence will still determine how much becomes actual travel.

Airline capacity provides another important signal. Airbnb’s analysis shows that changes in available airline seats and guest nights have historically tracked remarkably closely at a market level, approaching a one-to-one relationship. That does not mean every additional seat produces a guest night, but sustained increases in capacity have generally been accompanied by a corresponding expansion in travel demand.

At the Summit, Airbnb estimated that scheduled services could add approximately 463,000 seats on routes serving Auckland over the coming year. Public announcements support that direction, including new connections with the Gold Coast and Western Sydney and expanded China Eastern frequencies through Auckland.

Domestic connectivity is also expected to improve as Air New Zealand gradually increases aircraft availability. The airline has announced additional capacity on several important routes during 2026, including increases of 9 per cent between Auckland and Queenstown and 4 per cent between Auckland and Christchurch.

Airline schedules can change and additional seats must ultimately be filled. Even so, the combination of growing international access and stronger domestic connectivity is one of the clearest indications that travel demand could accelerate through summer and into autumn 2027.

None of this erases how difficult the past 12 to 18 months have been. It does, however, present a considerably more constructive outlook than we had at the beginning of the year. That outlook will inform how we manage pricing, minimum stays and availability over the months ahead.

Airbnb is doing more than operating a booking platform. It is increasingly active in the policy, legal and compliance discussions that will shape the future of short-term accommodation across Australia and New Zealand.

A central theme of the Summit was the need to defend the right of responsible property owners to host, while demonstrating the sector’s wider contribution. Short-term accommodation supports jobs and local businesses, provides flexible capacity during major events and allows travellers to access destinations and property types that traditional accommodation cannot always serve.

This matters because the public debate is too often reduced to the claim that short-term rentals are responsible for much broader housing problems. Those issues are considerably more complex. Airbnb and the wider industry are responding through economic evidence, engagement with regulators and a clearer account of the value that short-term accommodation brings to communities.

Airbnb intends to release a report later this year, provisionally titled More Than a Bed, setting out that economic and community contribution in greater detail.

For Stayhub, participating in these conversations helps us understand possible changes earlier, prepare our portfolio accordingly and represent the perspective of responsible professional operators. We cannot determine public policy, but our scale and industry relationships place us in a strong position to remain informed and to ensure that the legitimate interests of our owners are understood.

The most immediately practical insight concerned booking lead times. Airbnb’s data shows that bookings made well ahead of arrival are growing faster than short-notice bookings. These longer-lead bookings also tend to produce stronger returns.

Airbnb is therefore encouraging professional operators to keep calendars open beyond the traditional six-month horizon. Doing so allows properties to compete for guests planning international travel, major holidays and peak-season stays well in advance.

That creates a practical limitation for properties managed under fixed six-month agreements. When management authority ends within the forward booking window, availability cannot responsibly be opened as far ahead. Those properties risk missing some of the market’s fastest-growing and highest-yielding demand.

We will discuss this individually with affected owners and consider whether moving to an ongoing agreement would allow us to open availability further ahead. The purpose is straightforward: to give each property the greatest reasonable opportunity to capture valuable future bookings.

At the same time, the way guests discover accommodation is beginning to change. Travellers have traditionally relied on search filters, rankings and listing pages. Increasingly, they are asking AI tools to compare destinations, recommend accommodation and assemble complete itineraries. Those tools are also beginning to act on a traveller’s behalf, rather than simply suggesting options.

This development does not make the fundamentals less important. It makes accurate information more important. Listings need specific descriptions, current amenity details, recent reviews and consistent information wherever a property appears online. Generic marketing language gives both guests and emerging AI tools very little on which to base a recommendation.

There are also clear limits to where automation belongs. Guest privacy, factual accuracy and sensitive owner or guest conversations still require human judgement. Used properly, AI should reduce repetitive administrative work and create more time for guest service, revenue management and owner relationships.

Staying ahead of both changes, how guests book and how they choose, will be an increasingly important part of protecting property performance.

Stayhub has operated in New Zealand’s short-term accommodation market since 2017. Our scale now places us among the larger professional operators engaging directly with Airbnb across Australia and New Zealand.

That standing gives us useful access, but access alone has little value unless it changes what we do. Our role is to translate what we learn into practical decisions for each property: opening calendars at the right time, responding to shifts in demand, preparing for regulatory change and representing our owners as the industry evolves.

We are also treating the emergence of AI-led discovery and booking seriously. Stayhub continues to invest in current technology and apply the latest practices in listing content, distribution, pricing and conversion. This helps our properties remain visible and competitive within Airbnb’s algorithms today, while positioning them for a future in which AI tools play a greater role in how guests search, compare and book.

That is the benefit we want our owners to receive from Stayhub’s presence at forums such as the Airbnb ANZ Summit: stronger market visibility, better-informed management and a professional operator equipped to anticipate what comes next.

We will keep sharing what we learn. If you would like to discuss how these developments apply to your property, your account manager is the best place to start.