New Orleans edges ahead of Columbus on higher occupancy (60% vs 54%), stronger RevPAR (£47 vs £28).
Head-to-head metrics
| Columbus | New Orleans | |
|---|---|---|
| Median occupancy | 54% | 60% |
| Median daily rate | £88 | £103 |
| Median RevPAR | £28 | £47 |
| Active listings | 2,366 | 4,939 |
| YoY occupancy | +19.5 pts | — |
| YoY daily rate | -1.8% | — |
| Regulation risk | — | — |
| Annual night cap | None | None |
| License required | No | No |
Full analysis: Columbus vs New Orleans
On the money side of this comparison — what a listing actually earns against the nights it has available — New Orleans finishes clearly ahead of Columbus. Revenue per available night — rate and occupancy combined, the figure that actually reaches an owner — is 65.9% higher in New Orleans: £47 against £28. New Orleans's listings run at 60% occupancy against 54% in Columbus, worth 6 extra points of booked calendar every year. Those gaps are wide enough to survive a normal year's variance.
New Orleans takes both halves of the yield equation, which is less common than it sounds. It charges more per night — £103 against £88 — and still fills more of the year, 60% against 54%. A market that leads on price and utilisation at once is normally one where demand has outrun supply, rather than one where hosts are discounting to keep the calendar busy. RevPAR reflects the double advantage at £47 against £28.
That verdict needs a caveat, because Columbus is not simply the weaker market of the two. Columbus is the less crowded of the two — 2,366 active listings to 4,939 — so a well-run property has fewer near-identical rivals to out-rank. Columbus sits at the cheaper end at £88 a night against £103, which lowers the bar for filling shoulder-season dates and usually tracks a lower purchase price too. If your model leans on that dimension, the ordering above can reasonably flip.
Neither Columbus nor New Orleans currently has a verified short-term rental regulation record in our register, so the comparison above is a yield comparison only. Regulation is the single largest source of downside in this asset class — an unverified market is an unpriced risk, not an absent one.
The two calendars also behave differently. Columbus peaks in September at 49.9% and bottoms in February at 22.7%; New Orleans runs from 52.2% in August down to 29.9% in December. New Orleans is the steadier of the two at 22.3 points peak-to-trough against 27.2 — easier to underwrite against a mortgage — while Columbus concentrates its return into a shorter window and rewards operators who price the peak aggressively instead of holding a flat rate all year.
Who each suits, then. Columbus suits buyers who want a conventional, lightly regulated entry. New Orleans answers to the same regulatory profile, so the split between them is operational rather than legal. Every figure above comes from the same Inside Airbnb snapshot pipeline on both sides, dated 2025-09, filtered to listings with at least one booking in the last twelve months. Occupancy medians are drawn from 1,065 active Columbus listings and 1,475 in New Orleans.
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