Airbnb Set to Top One Million Guests in a Single Night on New Year’s Eve

Airbnb has over one million guests booked for this upcoming New Year’s Eve, up from 550,000 last year.

It will be the first time the room sharing company has ever booked one million people in a single night, surpassing the previous record on August 8, 2015, which was just shy of seven digits.

Airbnb is not releasing exact figures or providing access to the data, so these numbers can’t be independently verified.

The five cities with the highest booking volumes on December 31, 2015 are: New York, Paris, London, Sydney, and Berlin.

The five destinations with the biggest jump in bookings over 2014 include three cities in Japan, plus Cuba and Acapulco. Three cities in France were also among the top 10 destinations with the highest surge year-over-year.

The three most traveled routes from point A to point B are: Singapore to Tokyo, Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong to Osaka.

When we asked Chip Conley, head of hospitality for Airbnb, what were the biggest surprises for him among the data, he responded, “First of all, it’s encouraging to see Paris up there. After what happened a month ago, it’s good to see Paris rebounding.”

Conley said the 10 most popular cities were pretty much expected. However, the trio of Japanese cities — Fukuoka, Osaka and Kyoto, showing 1,287%, 678% and 417% increases, respectively — did raise some eyebrows.

“I think what were seeing in Japan is based on a very fast growing middle class and millennial traveler base,” suggested Conley.

With regard to the rest of Asia, he said that the demand is there. Airbnb is consistently reaching capacity during peak periods but supply needs time to catch up.

It’s much the same situation in Cuba, which posted an 877% rise over New Year’s Eve 2014. Presently there are just over 2,000 listings, mostly in Havana, which is well below what’s needed to meet exploding demand. Partially driving that, Airbnb guests traveling to Cuba are sharing a higher volume of social media traffic than any other city worldwide.

Regarding France, Conley attributes part of the surge to Parisians, many of them Airbnb hosts, seeking a getaway for the holidays.

“We have such a strong Paris community and I think that growth is just a function of the growth of supply in the rest of France,” he said. “Because Paris is so popular, that’s helping spur growth in other regions around Paris. It also shows how Airbnb is moving beyond just urban rentals and more into the countryside and an expanding variety of vacation rentals.”

Conley also suggested that the trend toward more multi-generational travel is a boon for Airbnb around the holidays, because extended families typically want a “real living room and a real kitchen.”

[Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Airbnb registered one million bookings for New Year’s Eve, when the correct information is one million guests.]

Data for Airbnb, December 31, 2015