More NYC Visitors Spending Holidays In Queens, Airbnb Finds

QUEENS, NY -- The holidays brought yet another wave of tourists to celebrate in the Big Apple this year, marking the city's "busiest Christmas week ever" for Airbnb vacation rentals. But the record-breaking Christmas crowds may not be staying where you'd expect.

More than 41,000 people booked a stay with hosts on Airbnb - an online marketplace that offers alternatives to traditional hotels - for at least a night during their visit to New York City from Dec. 22-25. But the site's highest growth of tourists for that week didn't coming from Manhattan, or even Brooklyn - It came from Queens.

Queens made up nearly 5,000 of the Airbnb guests coming to NYC for the "Christmas week" this year. It resulted in a 125 percent spike in visitors to Queens during the week from 2015 to 2017 - The highest growth recorded in all five boroughs, according to company data.

While Airbnb said all of NYC's boroughs saw record-breaking bookings for Christmas week in 2017, it was spikes in the city's outer boroughs that stood out. While Christmas week Airbnb bookings for Manhattan and Brooklyn - 20,400 and 15,470, respectively - outnumbered that of all the other boroughs combined, both ranked last in the city's Airbnb visitor growth between 2015 and 2017.

Instead, Staten Island took the No. 2 spot after their Christmas week bookings rose by 124 percent followed by 103 percent growth in the Bronx. Both boroughs, though, saw guests by the hundreds rather than thousands, with 380 guests booked in Staten Island and 710 in the Bronx.

While Airbnb did not provide an estimate for how much money the holiday rentals would put into the pockets of Queens hosts, the company estimated it would generate more than $6.5 million for hosts citywide.

The company estimated guests would spend roughly $22 million over the four days, with roughly a third of that going back into the neighborhoods they stayed it.

Lead image courtesy of Airbnb.