New Orleans edges ahead of Salem Or on higher occupancy (49.3% vs 29.6%), stronger RevPAR (£76 vs £42).
Head-to-head metrics
| New Orleans | Salem Or | |
|---|---|---|
| Median occupancy | 49.3% | 29.6% |
| Median daily rate | £175 | £124 |
| Median RevPAR | £76 | £42 |
| Active listings | 4,619 | 233 |
| YoY occupancy | -5.5 pts | -9.9 pts |
| YoY daily rate | +68.8% | +39.4% |
| Regulation risk | — | — |
| Annual night cap | None | None |
| License required | No | No |
Full analysis: New Orleans vs Salem Or
On the money side of this comparison — what a listing actually earns against the nights it has available — New Orleans finishes decisively ahead of Salem Or. Revenue per available night — rate and occupancy combined, the figure that actually reaches an owner — is 83% higher in New Orleans: £76 against £42. New Orleans sells 19.7 more points of its calendar — 49.3% median occupancy against 29.6% in Salem Or. That is not a rounding difference, and it compounds over a hold period.
New Orleans takes both halves of the yield equation, which is less common than it sounds. It charges more per night — £175 against £124 — and still fills more of the year, 49.3% against 29.6%. 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 £76 against £42.
That verdict needs a caveat, because Salem Or is not simply the weaker market of the two. Salem Or is the less crowded of the two — 233 active listings to 4,619 — so a well-run property has fewer near-identical rivals to out-rank. Salem Or sits at the cheaper end at £124 a night against £175, 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 New Orleans nor Salem Or 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. New Orleans peaks in September at 49.2% and bottoms in December at 30.6%; Salem Or runs from 58.3% in September down to 30.1% in February. New Orleans is the steadier of the two at 18.6 points peak-to-trough against 28.2 — easier to underwrite against a mortgage — while Salem Or 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. New Orleans suits buyers who want a conventional, lightly regulated entry. Salem Or answers to the same regulatory profile, so the split between them is operational rather than legal. It is the contrarian side: buying it means buying a market that has cooled. Every figure above comes from the same Inside Airbnb snapshot pipeline on both sides, dated 2026-09, filtered to listings with at least one booking in the last twelve months. Occupancy medians are drawn from 4,619 active New Orleans listings and 233 in Salem Or.
Frequently asked questions
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