Yahoo Finance Solar eclipse spurring US travel as Airbnb bookings surge
Americans have made travel plans in order to view Monday's solar eclipse. The eclipse's path of totality — where it will be most visible — spans across the United States in a narrow lane beginning in Texas and ending in Maine.
Yahoo Finance Live examines data from AirDNA illustrating the surge in Airbnb (ABNB) bookings for travelers who wish to most effectively view the eclipse.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.
Video transcript
- An approximately 32 million Americans live within the path of totality for this afternoon's solar eclipse. That's going from Texas all the way up to Maine. But that doesn't mean people are not flocking to those areas that they can catch a potentially once in a lifetime event at a little bit more clearly. Take a look at this map of Airbnb bookings for today. We're going to pull that up for you showing across the country the number of bookings happening.
Right along that path, you can see that orange line kind of cutting across the country there with those increased bookings. And Seana, just to pull out some of the crazy numbers that we have here, the occupancy across this path in Canada, the US, and Mexico was at 92% for the night of April 7. That's up from 30% a couple of days prior.
SEANA SMITH: People are excited and rightfully so, right? And many people like you can see from that map were planning ahead because they were doing all they can to best position themselves in order to take part within this excitement. So because of that, we saw that map that was just up on the screen.
Car rentals for the solar eclipse up 3,000% along the path of the total eclipse here. So some interesting numbers. Talking about millions and millions of people traveling to areas of the country where they are able where they are going to hopefully, if weather cooperates, be able to participate at some point of the total solar eclipse that we are expecting later on this afternoon today.
