Does Airbnb show different prices by country? We checked 1,764 first pages
A guest in London and a guest in Berlin search Airbnb for the same city, the same weekend and the same party. They do not see the same first page. We knew the order changes by country; that is what tauRank measures. This time we looked at the prices on that first page: how far apart are they, and why?
The short version
- Across five Romanian cities, over a month of daily searches, the average nightly price on page one differed by 16% between the cheapest and the most expensive country on a typical day.
- In Bucharest, searchers in the UK were shown the pricier page on 27 days out of 28.
- Searchers in the UK, US and Austria see a more expensive page one; searchers in Germany, Italy and Croatia a cheaper one.
- It is not a surcharge. A listing is quoted the same price to every country. The gap comes from which listings each country is shown, and in some cities half of page one differs.
Airbnb only: on Booking.com the same properties appear for every country, so there is no gap of this kind to measure.
What we measured
- The search. tauRank runs the same Airbnb search every day from several countries, each through an ordinary residential connection. See the methodology.
- Page one. The first 24 results, nightly price averaged and converted to euros at the ECB rate for the day.
- The comparison. Each country's page one against the same search, run the same day, from the other countries: same city, same party, same stay.
- The data. 14 September to 14 October 2026. 1,764 first pages across Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași and Brașov. Pages in an unexpected currency were left out.
The gap, city by city
Two guests, a weekend, averaged over the month:
- Bucharest has the widest steady gap: the UK's page one averaged €67 a night, Germany's €56. That is €11, or 20%.
- Cluj-Napoca follows the same pattern at a smaller scale: UK €56, Germany and Romania €50.
- Iași is the closest, with €3 between Germany and the UK.
- Timișoara is the only city read from ten countries. Romania was shown the cheapest page (€48), Australia the most expensive (€59, from only 20 days).
- Brașov is the odd one. Over the month Romania's page one was the most expensive, by €6, but which country gets the pricier page changes daily. On any given day the three countries were 38% apart, about €22 a night; over a month those gaps mostly cancel out.
It is not one bad day
A single search moves around, so a gap this size could be noise. It is not. The UK's page one sat above the three-country average on:
- 27 of the 28 days on which all three countries were read, in Bucharest
- 81% of days in Cluj-Napoca
- 77% of days in Iași
The ranking holds across every city, party size and stay length
| Searcher's country | Page one, against the same search from other countries |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 3.9% more expensive |
| United States | 3.7% more expensive |
| Austria | 2.6% more expensive |
| Romania | 1.0% cheaper |
| Germany | 1.8% cheaper |
| Italy | 3.1% cheaper |
| Croatia | 3.7% cheaper |
The UK figure is the firmest, read from 337 first pages and good to within about a percentage point. Austria, Italy and the US were read on fewer days. Spain, France and Australia were read too rarely, or vary too much, to rank.
Same listing, same price. Different listings.
A listing on Airbnb is quoted the same nightly price whichever country is searching. We checked that across tens of thousands of listings. So the gap is not a surcharge. It comes from which listings each country is shown.
On days when Romania, Germany and the UK all searched, only part of page one was common to all three:
- In Iași, nearly two thirds.
- In Brașov, under a quarter. Almost half of what each country saw on page one, the other two did not see there at all.
The listings shown to only one country averaged €69 a night, against €63 for the ones every country saw, about 8% more. That is where most of the gap comes from: each country's page one carries its own handful of listings, and in Bucharest and Cluj the UK's handful tends to be the more expensive one.
We can say what each country was shown. We cannot say why. Airbnb does not publish how it ranks, and a country-level pattern could come from many signals.
What this means for a host
- Page one is not one page. In most of these cities, a fifth to a half of what a guest sees depends on where they search from. A listing on page one for a guest in Bucharest can be absent from it for a guest in London, and the reverse.
- Your price looks different from each country. A €60 listing in Bucharest is above the German page-one average and below the British one. Whether it reads as good value depends on whose page it is on.
- Look from your guests' countries, not your own. Checking from home shows you the home page only. That is what tauRank shows: position per country, every day, plus the city reports for the market as a whole.
Caveats
Averages of the first 24 results, read once a day from one connection per country; Airbnb's order moves between identical searches, which is why we report over a month and show Bucharest day by day. Five Romanian cities, one month. Countries read on fewer days carry wider uncertainty, noted above. No figure is modelled: each was read from a search we ran, and no listing is named.