The paper examines the size, structure, distribution, dynamics, and use of Airbnb accommodation offer in 167 countries. Web-scrapping Airbnb website in fall 2018 and 2019 resulted in a datasets on 5.7 million listings, including 3.6 million active listings which have been rented out (reviewed) during the last year. Listings are divided into four groups based on types of properties and numbers of offers hosted by one platform user. The results show that the platform is most commonly used to rent out entire apartments by multi-hosts. The numbers of Airbnb listings in countries depend on the level of economic development and size of inbound tourism. One third of Airbnb supply is located in big cities, another one third near seacoasts. Airbnb offer grows most quickly in its relatively new markets, while in primary urban destinations of some European countries it is stable or decreases. The offer of professional hosts is growing more quickly than of peer-to-peer hosts. Differences in the frequency of use and prices of listings exaggerate the geographical unevenness in benefits and impacts of Airbnb activity. Airbnb supply is not a uniform segment of tourist accommodation and its effects on destinations should be considered in relation to territorial context.

The rising number of homes and apartments rented out through Airbnb and similar peer-to-peer accommodation platforms cause concerns about the impact of such activity on the tourism sector and property market. To date, spatial analysis on peer-to-peer rental activity has been usually limited in scope to individual large cities. In this study, we take into account the whole territory of Spain, with special attention given to cities and regions with high tourist activity. We use a dataset of about 250 thousand Airbnb listings in Spain obtained from the Airbnb webpage, aggregate the numbers of these offers in 8124 municipalities and 79 tourist areas/sites, measure their concentration, spatial autocorrelation, and develop regression models to find the determinants of Airbnb rentals’ distribution. We conclude that apart from largest cities, Airbnb is active in holiday destinations of Spain, where it often serves as an intermediary for the rental of second or investment homes and apartments. The location of Airbnb listings is mostly determined by the supply of empty or secondary dwellings, distribution of traditional tourism accommodation, coastal location, and the level of internationalization of tourism demand.

Since the late twentieth century, many developed countries have experienced population deconcentration, labelled as counterurbanization. There has been an academic discussion on the meaning, validity and universality of this concept, drivers of counterurbanization and its impacts on rural areas. To date, research on counterurbanization mostly apply static and discrete definitions of residence, migration and population, which is an increasingly simplistic view in the contemporary reality of a growing multitude of forms of mobility, often related to dual residence. Particularly large-scale quantitative studies on counterurbanization are confined by existing statistical practices. This paper attempts to overcome this obstacle and describe the transformation of the settlement system in Finland acknowledging the role of second home mobility. To achieve this goal, it introduces two alternative measures of population, seasonal and average population, and analyses their spatial dynamics between the years 1990 and 2010 based on georeferenced grid statistical data. The study finds that although registered population has been concentrating during the period in analysis, seasonal population has been increasingly dispersed due to the growing number of second homes. It shows that the counterurbanization process, though not noticed by conventional statistics, does occur in Finland, manifested by seasonal rather than permanent moves. The article concludes that various forms of mobility should be taken into account when analysing the urban–rural population dynamics and transformations of settlement systems as well as in rural development planning.