There's a customer arriving in your area right now who spends more, stays longer, and is actively looking for recommendations. They're short-stay rental guests - and most local businesses have no channel to reach them.

That's about to change.

What the Data Actually Shows

According to the Short-Term Accommodation Association, the average short-term rental guest spends £100 per day in the local area, with 43% of that going directly on retail, food, and drink. For every 200 short-term rental visits to a neighbourhood, a new local job is effectively created in the local economy. Ukstaa

In 2021, short-term rentals contributed £27.7 billion to the UK economy - equating to 37% of the country's entire overnight tourism spend, and rising to 4% of GDP in deprived areas. Ukstaa

In 2024, the ONS recorded 90.1 million guest nights in UK short-term rentals. Westminster alone accounted for 3.9 million of those nights - the highest of any local authority in the UK. Office for National Statistics

That's 3.9 million nights of guests in central London, looking for somewhere to eat breakfast, book an evening out, or find a local experience worth telling people about.

The Discovery Problem

Here's where it breaks down for most local businesses. When a guest arrives at their Airbnb, how do they find you? Google. TripAdvisor. Maybe a recommendation from someone they know. These channels are expensive to influence, dominated by chains and aggregators, and generic by nature.

What guests actually want is a trusted local recommendation from their host. Research consistently shows that host recommendations carry more weight with short-stay guests than any other source of local discovery. When a host says "go to this café for breakfast," the guest goes to that café - almost every time. But most hosts currently have no systematic way to make those referrals, and no financial reason to do so.

The Structural Shift Happening Now

What's emerging across the sector is a concierge partner model - where local businesses register with platforms used by hosts and guests, and guests discover them through the host's digital welcome guide. When a guest sees a curated recommendation for a local restaurant or experience in their host's welcome guide, the conversion rate is dramatically higher than any cold digital marketing channel.

The UK vacation rental market is projected to reach $4.68 billion in 2025, with 78% of revenue coming from online bookings - a clear signal that digital strategy and digital discovery matter enormously in this market. Hostaway

For local businesses, being discoverable within that digital ecosystem - inside the host's welcome guide rather than buried in a search results page - is an entirely new and underexploited channel.

What This Means for You

If you run a café, restaurant, tour company, yoga studio, spa, or any other local experience business, the question is simple: how do you get in front of short-stay guests before they've already decided where to go?

The answer is being where the host's recommendation lives. That means partnering with a platform that puts your business in front of guests at the exact moment they're planning their stay - with a trusted endorsement already attached.

StayPay connects local businesses with short-stay guests through host-curated welcome guides across London.