11/09/2023
Article | Who is Staying in Airbnbs in Cleveland? By Dave Stokley
When I tell people that my company HostPros manages 65+ Airbnb listings in the Greater Cleveland area the #1 question I get is "who is coming to Cleveland and staying in Airbnbs?"
When we started hosting people on Airbnb in 2019 we wanted to help promote the City of Cleveland and provide better experiences to visitors. One of the cool things that has come out of it is that we've actually learned about things going on in our city from our guests that we never would have known about otherwise.
So my go-to answer is typically something like "every reason under the sun, from people going to the Rock Hall or Cleveland Clinic, to people coming for graduations, weddings, funerals, and holidays, and everything in between. There are a lot of people coming to Cleveland for reasons you'd never think of! Our target market is people who (1) need more space than a single hotel room, or (2) don't want to stay in a hotel for a variety of other reasons." We specialize in larger (4+ bedrooms), nicer, single-family homes where people can have privacy, the comforts of home (e.g. pets), and the ability to accommodate larger groups.
With Destination Cleveland's recent release of their 2022 Metrics Report we can put a little more data to those anecdotes:
- In 2022 Cuyahoga County hosted 17.9M+ total visits, a 12% increase from 2021 that outpaced domestic (11%) and Ohio (6%) visitation growth.
- In 2022 these visitors represented $6.4B in direct spending to local businesses, a 19% increase from 2021 that outpaced Ohio (13%) and US domestic (6%) travel spending growth.
Where are all these people going?
•The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame see over 600,000 visitors annually
•The Cleveland Museum of Art brings in over 800,000
•The Browns sell over 500,000 tickets to home games
•Cuyahoga Valley National Park hosted a whopping 2,900,000 in 2022
•Plus tons of other attractions like Playhouse Square and one-off events like concerts and the NBA All-Star Game
And we haven't even mentioned the non-tourist visitors for things like work, family visits, and so on. The bottom line is that there are tons of people traveling to the Cleveland area and many of them have needs that aren't satisfied by the hotel experience. Short-term rentals (aka Airbnbs) fill these needs, and ultimately we don't even think of ourselves as competing with hotels, but instead catering to a different type of traveler.
