Background & Method: Exploration of the St. Maarten Vacation Rental Market
Context: The St. Maarten Hospitality & Trade Association produces hotel occupancy rates on a monthly basis with a robust sample. Over 2024, the Dutch side of the island had 3,568 operational hotel, timeshare, and guesthouse rooms.
In earlier estimates, it has become clear that the lodging inventory of independent vacation rentals (IVR, also sometimes called short-term vacation rentals) equals or has outgrown the inventory of hotel rooms. Airbnb, VRBO, but also to a growing extent Booking.com, are well-known companies in this field.
As it is highly dispersed, analyzing the capacity of this sector is complex. In cooperation with IVR data company Lighthouse, data have been collected for 2024 that seem plausible to SHTA, given its own manual research. Contrary to other vacation rental data providers, Lighthouse does not include hotel data (as properties often use Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com as well for marketing purposes).
Additional research has been done to analyze average occupancy. The St. Maarten Bureau of Statistics estimates average travel groups to be two persons.
Analysis Independent Vacation Rental (IVR) Industry St. Maarten 2024
The joint analysis with Lighthouse is separated in Dutch side and French side vacation rental inventories. From the calculations follows that 37% of the total market revenue is generated on the Dutch Side (210 XCG). Of the total occupant count 42% (85,000) stay on the Dutch Side. In 2024, the island total for the IVR market looks as follows:
| INDEPENDENT VACATION RENTALS MARKET | ISLAND TOTAL | INDEPENDENT VACATION RENTALS DUTCH SIDE | INDEPENDENT VACATION RENTALS FRENCH SIDE |
| Monthly average | Monthly average | Monthly average | |
| Units | 5123 | 2297 | 2827 |
| Occupancy % | 38% | 35% | 40% |
| Average Daily Rate USD | 438 | 389 | 488 |
| 30 | 30 | ||
| Room nights (x 1000) | 156 | 70 | 86 |
| Occ Room Nights % | 59% | 25% | 34% |
| Occupant count | 16847 | 7051 | 9796 |
| Revenue USD millions (millions) | 27 | 10 | 17 |
| Revenue XCG Millions (millions) | 48 | 18 | 30 |
| 2024 Annual Total revenue USD millions | 319 | 117 | 202 |
| 2024 Annual Total Revenue XCG millions | 575 | 210 | 364 |
| 2024 Annual Total Occupants (1000) | 202163 | 84608 | 117555 |