Slowing Down or Shifting Gears? The Trends Moving Europe’s Short-Term Rental Industry

In this opening keynote, AirDNA’s Chief Economist Jamie Lane takes the pulse of the European short-term rental market, where the real story sits beneath the headline numbers. From the pricing power divide between operators to weather-driven shifts in demand, shorter stays, and regulatory pressure in Europe’s biggest markets, Jamie will connect the dots between the forces at play, breaking down what they mean for bookings, pricing, and occupancy on the ground, and what the US market signals about Europe’s next chapter.
Backed by AirDNA’s analysis of markets across the continent, including exclusive pacing data on this year’s biggest demand events, this session reveals where demand is headed into 2027, how supply is evolving as the European market matures, and what top operators are doing differently today. Jamie will share practical ways to put data to work: reading the signals in your own market, pricing with confidence, and planning for the year ahead.
Whether you’re investing, managing, or scaling, this is the market briefing you need to make the right moves in 2027 and beyond.

About Jamie Lane

Behind the Portfolio: Growth, Trends, and What’s Next

A look at where demand and bookings are actually growing, what separates outperforming large-scale portfolios from the pack, and what Airbnb is building next for partners managing at scale.

Are You Leaving Money on the Table? 7 Revenue Leaks to Fix Today

Revenue management isn’t just dynamic pricing. It’s your listing description, your minimum stay rules, your competitors, your reporting. Every one of these is either making you money or costing you money, and most people are only watching one thing closely, pricing.

But, revenue leaks are rarely where you expect them. A listing that doesn’t convert because the description undersells the property. A minimum stay setting that made sense in January but is punching holes in your summer calendar. Benchmarks that no longer reflect the market, yet continue to influence your rates. Inconsistent and inaccurate reports that don’t tell the full story.

This session walks through the 7 most common revenue leaks we see across properties of all sizes, from independent hosts to large management operations, covering listing content, minimum stay policies, pricing benchmarks, and market data. For each one, we’ll show you how to spot it and what to do about it.

Key Takeaways

  • Understand why revenue management is broader than pricing, and where the biggest overlooked opportunities tend to hide

  • Learn how to spot each of the 7 leaks in your own setup, regardless of how many properties you manage

  • Walk away with specific, actionable fixes you can apply immediately

  • Build a simple review habit that catches these issues early, before they compound into significant lost revenue

About Sharon Biggar 

Sharon Biggar is a seasoned marketing leader specializing in data-driven strategy and product-led growth. She is currently the VP of Marketing at PriceLabs. With a diverse background that includes key marketing roles at Happy Scribe, TestGorilla, and Hotjar, she brings a wealth of experience in driving customer-centric success. Sharon holds an MBA from MIT, a Master’s in Economics, and a degree in Music, reflecting her unique analytical and creative approach to marketing.

The Three Rs of AI Guest Experience: Revenue, Recovery & Remarkable Hospitality

What happens when AI starts handling guest experience from the moment a reservation is made? It unlocks possibilities we’ve barely begun to use. In this keynote, Sab Mulligan, Hospitality AI Strategist, shares three real stories that show how AI agent conversations can create more revenue opportunities, strengthen service recovery, and empower teams to deliver remarkable hospitality at scale. This is not about replacing people. It’s about using AI to start the right conversations earlier, personalise them beautifully, and trigger the perfect handoff so humans step in with timing, context, and care.  Attendees will leave inspired to design new revenue moments, train their teams to deliver exceptional hospitality, and delight guests in ways that consistently exceed expectations.

About Sabrina Mulligan

Sab Mulligan is an AI-first hospitality brand strategist and award‑winning storyteller who has been humanizing brands for more than a decade across the learning and hospitality industries. Together with the Zzzing team in Malta, she has helped lead the brand’s growth from 50 properties to a diverse collection of hotels, boutique guesthouses and holiday homes, now representing 600+ keys across the Maltese Islands. In 2025, she spearheaded Zzzing’s AI strategy and implementation, applying best‑in‑class technology to guest communication and enabling her digital twin, Zoe, to consistently handle around 80% of guest conversations. Sab speaks regularly at international industry events, sharing practical frameworks for keeping hospitality human while leveraging automation to unlock new levels of consistency, creativity and guest delight.

Data Trends and Traveller Behaviour: What’s Shaping the Vacation Rental Market?

Vacation rental demand is evolving fast, and understanding why, requires more than gut instinct, it requires data. This session takes a deep dive into global vacation rental performance trends, exploring how traveller behaviour is shifting: how far in advance guests are booking, how long they’re staying, how cancellations are impacting performance and which channels they’re using. Drawing on verified reservation data from thousands of professional property managers worldwide, the session will bring to life the various booking personas showing up in the data this year.

About Sally Henry

With more than 25 years in the vacation rental industry, Sally is Vice President of Market Intelligence & Insights at Key Data, where she works with property managers, destination organisation’s, and industry partners to transform data into actionable strategies.

Throughout her career, Sally has championed thought leadership, strategic partnerships, and data education to help raise standards across the vacation rental industry. She is passionate about helping audiences connect the dots between data and decision-making, while inspiring collaboration and innovation in an industry that continues to evolve.

Quality Pays: The Trust Signals That Win Bookings

Quality Pays: The Trust Signals That Win Bookings

New research from Vrbo digs into what quality actually means to today’s vacation rental guests, and the answer isn’t luxury. This session unpacks the specific signals that separate a good rental from a booked-solid one. It’s a practical playbook for mastering the fundamentals, building trust at every touchpoint, and turning quality into repeat bookings and higher rates.

About James Cassidy

Senior Director, Partner Success Vacation Rentals, Expedia Group

James leads the Partner Success teams that helps vacation rental owners and managers improve their performance on the Vrbo platform across EMEA, Australia, and New Zealand. James joined Expedia Group in 2011 and has held a variety of roles including director and general manager of Vacation Rentals in APAC. Prior to joining Expedia Group, James was also general manager of Stayz, the Australian vacation rental site, and was in product management and sales roles for Telstra, a leading Telecommunications company. James holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Melbourne.

Your team is already hybrid: managing the AI half in vacation rentals

If you run a professional property management business, you have already built the instinct the rest of the corporate world is scrambling to learn: managing people you cannot see, all focused on guest experiences, while maintaining a standard that does not slip when you are not in the room. That is exactly what managing an AI team asks of you.

In this session, Vered Raviv-Schwarz, president and COO of Guesty, argues that hybrid stopped meaning office or remote a while ago. It now means part human, part AI, working as one team, and the winners will not be the operators with the best AI. They will be the ones who manage it best.

Vered walks through what that shift looks like in practice: which parts of a role move to AI, which stay firmly human, and how operators keep drawing that line as the business grows and the technology changes under them.

Key takeaways for attendees:

  1. Why hybrid stopped meaning office or remote, and what it means to split a role into skills instead of swapping a person for a bot.
  2. How to tell the difference between an operator who has adopted AI and one who is actually getting value from it.
  3. How to draw the line between what stays human and what moves to AI, and how to keep drawing it as the business and the technology change.
  4. Why the operators pulling ahead compete on value rather than efficiency, and what they do with the time it gives back.

About Vered Raviv Schwarz 

Vered Raviv-Schwarz is President & COO of property management platform Guesty, where she brings over 21 years of experience in global operations and overseeing teams including Customer Experience, Finance, Operations, Legal, HR, Customer Success, Data & Analytics and Strategic Partnerships.

Prior to Guesty, Vered was COO of Fiverr, where she grew the company from 40 employees to over 400 in her six-year tenure. Before Fiverr, Vered held senior executive positions in private and public global tech companies, including Kenshoo, MediaMind (now Sizmek), and Radware. In her free time, she serves on the advisory boards of several startups and participates in mentorship programs focused on female entrepreneurship.

The Leap — Reinventing the Property Management Company Around AI

In this forward-looking keynote, Moran Goldboim, Chief AI Officer at Boom, explores what happens when property management moves beyond simply adopting AI and begins rebuilding its operating model around it.

This transformation is not about replacing hospitality, because it will remove the operational drag that has kept great hospitality from scaling. Just as software moved from AI copilots to agents that can own work end-to-end, property management is beginning the same shift from assistance to intelligent orchestration. When that happens, roles change, rhythm changes, economics change, and the guest experience rises with it.

Through practical scenarios and strategic insight, Moran explores how the industry is shifting from reactive to predictive, from anecdotal to data-native, from manual coordination to intelligent orchestration, and from service consistency to five-star hospitality at scale.

A provocative look at a future that is already emerging—and at what becomes possible for operators ready to take the leap.

About Moran Goldboim

Moran Goldboim is the Co‑Founder and Chief Product Officer of Boom, one of the hospitality industry’s fastest‑growing technology companies. A visionary product leader and technologist, he is the architect behind Boom’s agentic AI platform and BAM, its autonomous Business Agentic Manager, redefining how hotels, aparthotels, and short‑term rental brands build, scale, and operate in the AI‑native hospitality era.

AI Skills for Revenue Managers: The Middle Ground Between Chatting and Coding

Most revenue managers using AI today are stuck at one of two extremes. Either they’re chatting with their pricing platform’s MCP and getting answers to one question at a time, or they’re being told the real payoff requires building a custom software tool with agentic coding — and many don’t know where to start.

This session is about the middle ground: Skills. A Skill is a reusable set of instructions that teaches AI to do a specific piece of your job the same way every time — so instead of asking “how did Unit 412 perform last month,” you run a Skill that reviews every listing in the portfolio and hands you a ranked list of what needs attention.

John deRoulet and Oliver Stern will cover where Skills fit alongside MCPs and APIs, teach the audience how to build one on stage, and walk through two working Skills that attendees can download and use the same day. The approach is platform-agnostic: it works with whatever data your pricing platform, PMS, or channel manager already exposes.

Attendees will leave with

  • A clear model for when to use an MCP, an API, or a Skill
  • A repeatable process for writing, testing, and scheduling a Skill
  • Two downloadable Skills, ready to run against their own portfolio

An AI-powered Travel Experience anchored on Ease and Trust

AI is one of the most rapidly growing technologies we’ve seen in recent history. Roughly a quarter of the world’s population is now actively engaging with AI and at least 50% of travelers have used a GenAI tool to plan their trip. For us in the travel industry, AI is a real accelerant of ease and value: from the earliest inspiration to curation and comparison of options, booking and in-trip support. It also requires a strategic investment in trust. In this session, we will unpack how we can unlock this travel experience together with an eye to vacation rental unique opportunities and challenges, while we keep raising the bar in the trust of our ecosystem.

About Abhishek Gupta

Abhishek Gupta is Senior Director of Product, Accommodations Traveler at Booking.com, where he leads product development across the traveller journey—from search and discovery to property comparison and booking. Over nearly a decade at Booking.com, he has helped shape experiences that make diverse accommodation options easier to find, understand and trust. Before joining Booking.com, Abhishek worked at Amazon, building seller-enablement tools that turned data-driven recommendations into action for marketplace partners. At VRWS 2026, he will share a practical perspective on how AI can make vacation-rental discovery and decision-making easier—while keeping trust at the centre of the experience.

Landfolk – The Lord of the Homes’ by Robin Clifford – A VRWS exclusive

Scaling premium: How Landfolk redefined the marketplace without compromising quality. CEO Christian Schwarz Lausten joins Robin on stage to explain how seven former Airbnb colleagues reunited in Denmark in 2021 and set out to take a fresh, quality-first approach to vacation rentals. Landfolk has since grown to more than 8,000 handpicked homes on close to €15M in venture backing.

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In this fireside chat, Jessica Gillingham sits down with Travelstaytion CEO Jason Anastasinis to explore how standards, certification, and technology are transforming the professional vacation rental landscape. From the philosophy behind “Every Stay Matters” to the launch of Travelstaytion’s new quality assurance platform, the conversation unpacks how property managers can build trust, scale professionalism, and compete on quality.