Hotel Prices Soar to Rp 17.9 Million a Night as People Flock to See the Eclipse

Hotel and short-term rental prices have skyrocketed to more than US$1,000 (Rp 17.9 million) per night in several European regions, driven by tourist enthusiasm to view the solar eclipse. The eclipse, occurring on 12 August, will be visible from the United Kingdom, Iceland, northern Spain, Greenland, and Portugal, triggering a surge in travel demand to these destinations.

Hospitality businesses are capitalising on the moment. According to commercial travel and hospitality firm Lighthouse Intelligence, citing prices from mid-July, the average hotel rate in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, reached US$1,012 per night during the week of the eclipse, double the rate for the same period in 2025. Meanwhile, average short-term rental accommodation hit US$1,172 per night, 178% higher than the previous year.

In Bilbao, Spain, short-term rental prices reached US$1,088 per night, a 206% increase compared to the same period last year, while hotel rooms were priced at US$315 per night, up 35% year-on-year. Santiago de Compostela in Spain was the cheapest destination, with average hotel prices of US$193 per night, as it lies outside the path of totality, though this still marked a 13% rise from the previous year.

“Testing how high the market can go is a common practice for hotels when faced with a demand surge from a once-in-a-lifetime event, like the FIFA World Cup or a Taylor Swift concert,” said Jonathan Gough, content marketing team lead at Lighthouse. He noted, however, that individual hotels adopt different pricing strategies. “Iceland initially set eclipse pricing speculatively. Rooms were offered at three to four times the normal rate, even more than a year in advance. In the last three months, hotels then began to lower those prices back down.”

Gough explained that hotels in northern Spain took the opposite approach, initially setting normal prices in the spring and only raising rates as bookings began to increase. Meanwhile, data analytics platform AirDNA reported that short-term rental accommodations saw significant increases in Spain and Iceland because most available properties lie within the path of totality. Nearly 64% of the roughly 9,000 available short-term rentals in Iceland are within the path, while about 21% of the approximately 365,400 listings in Spain are situated along the eclipse route, according to AirDNA data published on 11 August.