COURTESY OF FLICKR/PAUL SABLEMAN
When it comes to the sharing economy, you can count St. Louis in — in a big way.
Residents of the Gateway City welcomed 88,500 Airbnb customers this year, netting $9.14 million in the process, according to newly released numbers from the "community-driven hospitality company."
And that's solely counting Airbnbs within city limits — suburbs are tallied separately. The top suburb on the company's list, University City, alone saw 4,900 "guest arrivals" and took in $415,000 in host income.
St. Louis, in fact, was by far the biggest Airbnb draw in Missouri; the city saw 13,000 more Airbnb guest arrivals than Kansas City, along with $1.44 million more in revenue. Those numbers were almost double what St. Louis residents earned through the site in 2016, when host income reached $4.5 million, according to the company.
Part of this, of course, was driven by the Great American Eclipse — it's a major reason rural Missouri saw some of the biggest year-over-year growth across Airbnb's platform. (Umm, why else would you want to visit Missourah?) But even factoring that in, a spokesman says, "we're seeing strong growth and a lot of interest in Airbnb users wanting to come to the city."
Overall, a total of 6,300 Missouri residents now offer up their homes via the site. They made $28.8 million through Airbnb in 2017, the company says.
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