Most short-term rental investment content leans on point-in-time numbers, the average daily rate here, listing count there and that age out within a season and rarely survive a bylaw change. A more durable way to size up opportunity is to watch how traveler behaviour is shifting, because those shifts move slowly and tend to show up across markets before they show up in any single city's stats. Europe's 2026 travel data offers a useful early read on a pattern that's starting to surface in Canada too.

The rise of the staycation economy

Eurostat reported that short-term rental stays across the EU rose 9.7% in the first quarter of 2026, with growth broad-based across nearly every member state rather than concentrated in one or two hotspots. Airbnb's own summer 2026 data adds texture to that number: in major markets including France, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and the Netherlands, domestic and short-haul travel is outpacing international trips, and roughly a quarter of guests in those markets chose to vacation within their own country. Sweden's median booking distance has contracted meaningfully since 2023.

What's notable isn't just that people are traveling closer to home, it's where they're going once they get there. More than half of summer bookings in Germany and France targeted rural destinations over cities, group and family bookings are climbing, and France's rental inventory now spans upward of 26,000 villages and towns rather than concentrating in a handful of urban centers. Read together, this points to demand broadening outward from flagship city markets toward secondary, rural, and experience-driven destinations, and toward larger-format properties suited to groups.

What's actually happening in Canada

It's tempting to graft a "remote work is driving relocation demand" narrative onto this pattern, but the current Canadian data doesn't support it. CMHC's 2026 mid-year rental market update names return-to-office trends, easing affordability, and household formation as the active demand drivers and doesn't reference short-term rentals as a meaningful factor in rental market conditions at all. Separately, REMAX's 2026 outlook for Canadian STR buyers describes a market that has moved from rapid, speculative growth to a more balanced and strategic phase: buyers increasingly favor hybrid properties that double as a personal retreat and an income asset, concentrate on well-established, supply-constrained leisure destinations, and strongly prefer turnkey properties over renovation projects.

Put side by side, the real parallel between the two markets isn't "remote work is fueling mid-term stays." It's that demand in both regions is broadening beyond the obvious, most-competitive city cores toward leisure, recreational, and hybrid-use markets and that investors on both continents are getting more selective and better-informed rather than chasing growth wherever it appears.

A category framework that doesn't expire

Rather than ranking specific cities by a snapshot ADR or income figure, it's more useful to evaluate any short-term rental market against a small set of categories, then check the current numbers for whichever category applies at the time you're actually looking:

1. Established urban cores: highest demand and supply, but also the most regulatory complexity and competition.
2. Leisure and recreational destinations: seasonal demand patterns, strong fit for hybrid personal-use-plus-income ownership, often supply-constrained.
3. Secondary and rural growth markets: lower entry cost, with upside tied to the same broadening travel base showing up in Europe's rural booking data.
4. Regulatory-first markets: wherever compliance cost and licensing complexity should be the first filter in the decision, not an afterthought once a purchase is already underway.

Because municipal tax rates, licensing rules, and specific market figures change on their own timelines, the more reliable habit is to check them directly against primary sources. The municipality's own bylaw and tax pages, CMHC's published data, and provincial tourism board reporting, each time a decision is being made, rather than relying on any single article's numbers, including this one.

The takeaway

The most useful thing to track quarter over quarter isn't a city's rank on a "best cities" list, it's direction of travel: which category a market falls into, whether local regulation is tightening or loosening, and whether demand is broadening toward the kind of leisure and secondary markets that both European and Canadian data are now pointing to.

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