Report Puts Numbers on Rental Experience Sales, Details Thin

A new report claims to put hard numbers on something the vacation rental industry has argued about for years: how much guests actually spend on tours, activities and other add-on experiences booked alongside a stay. The figures are presented as the report's own count, not an independently audited industry benchmark, and the underlying sample size and methodology are not spelled out in what has circulated so far.

That matters because the experience side of the business has moved from a nice-to-have to a contested revenue line. Airbnb has spent the past two years building out its own Experiences marketplace and more recently began routing more of that inventory through Tripadvisor rather than building everything in-house. Property management platforms have made the same bet from the other direction, with tour and activity vendor Xplorie changing hands to a rental-perks company earlier this year specifically to bundle amenities with local activities. None of that consolidation had much public data behind it beyond company claims. This report is being pitched as filling that gap.

What the new figures actually claim

The report reports on guest behavior around add-on purchases: whether they buy before arrival or once on-site, how often an experience gets attached to a booking at all, and roughly what guests spend when they do. Those are the right questions for anyone trying to decide whether to sell experiences directly rather than hand the commission to a marketplace. The trouble is that none of the topline numbers come with a stated sample, date range or collection method, which puts them closer to a marketing claim than a dataset an operator can plan around.

One pattern in the new figures lines up with something already documented elsewhere: guests overwhelmingly lock in add-on purchases before they ever check in, rather than deciding on the day. Earlier data on rental add-on bookings put that share at close to three-quarters of all purchases, and the new report's description of booking timing does not contradict it. Where the two diverge is on spend per booking and overall attach rate, numbers this report supplies without the receipts to check them.

Why the timing detail is the useful part

For operators, the pre-arrival timing is the one figure worth acting on regardless of who published it. If most guests are deciding on tours and add-ons before they set foot in the property, upselling at check-in is already too late for a meaningful share of demand. That argues for surfacing experience options in the pre-arrival messaging sequence, not just in a welcome book or a QR code taped to the kitchen counter.

The spend and attach-rate figures deserve more skepticism. Until a data provider with a transparent methodology, an AirDNA, a Key Data or a platform disclosing its own transaction volumes, publishes comparable numbers, operators are better off tracking their own attach rate against their own booking volume than importing a third party's percentage as a planning assumption. The category is clearly growing. How big it actually is remains, for now, an open question the industry keeps answering with press releases rather than audited numbers.