Hotel Sales in major Norwegian cities would have been several hundred million higher without accommodation service Airbnb, concludes a new thesis.
In Oslo alone, there are nearly 4,000 hosts associated with the online service. In a thesis from the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), written with a grant from the Center for tax research, students Andreas Grounded and Trygve Lehne analyzed 10.154 advertisements of Airbnb rental housing, said the newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.
Their conclusion is that the hotels’ turnover in Oslo in 2016 would be 132 million higher if Airbnb did not exist.
Including Bergen and Tromsø it would be 240 million kroner. The calculation is based on the fact that the service leads to reduced occupancy and helps to push up the hotels’ rates.
In its analysis, the students looked at Airbnb rates in 28 large urban municipalities and based on hotel data from Statistics Norway (SSB), and net scraping Airbnb pages in April 2016.
In Oslo, the hotels’ total accommodation revenue was 2.926 billion in 2015, according to Statistics Norway.
Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today
