Dublin dream stay? An airbed on a living room floor for €38

Dublin homeowners are cleaning up this summer, as a combination of the city’s enduring popularity with tourists, a rental crunch and shortage of hotels is seeing Airbnb rates spiral.

The spiralling rates means that property-sharing site Airbnb has become an even more attractive way of generating extra income this summer. According to Airbnb, Dublin hosts can expect to earn an average of €168 a week for a shared room, €256 a week for a private room, or €508 for an entire property. One entrepreneurial Dublin host has even gone so far as to offer an airbed – which will be placed in the living room of a city-centre apartment – for the princely sum of €38 a night.

This means that Dublin is now the 23rd most expensive city in the world to rent an Airbnb room for two people acccording to the Bloomberg World Airbnb Cost Index, at a rate of $117 a night. This means that Dublin is now more expensive for travellers than Copenhagen ($114), Vancouver ($105), and Paris ($102). Unsurprisingly, ahead of the Olympics, Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro is the most expensive city in the world to rent a room on Airbnb, with an average nightly rate of $206, followed by Miami in the US at $194 a night.

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New York, New York, where an Airbnb room for two people will cost you an average of $152 a night. (Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Budget hotels

Dublin is also on the pricey side when it comes to budget hotels, ranking in 11th place out of 100 global cities, according to Bloomberg. With an average room rate of $148 a night, up by 0.7 per cent on 2015, Dublin is more expensive than London and Tokyo. San Francisco in the US is the most expensive city for a budget room, at $257 a night, although this is down by 12 per cent on 2015. Room rates in Rio have rocketed by 109 per cent on the back of the Olympics, putting it in second place at $253 a night, followed by Boston with a rate of $228 a night.

On the cheaper end of the scale, intrepid travellers can get a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for $30 a night.