Brussels Central Station
The city's central railway station, a few minutes' walk from the apartment, with direct trains to the airport and to the coast.
Two homes on the same street get different exchange requests. Usually the difference is not quality. It is that one of them answers a question the other does not, for the people who happen to be looking.
This is about working out which question your home answers. Some of it is published data, some of it is regulation that catches people out, and some of it only you can fill in.
A caution before the useful part
It is tempting to reason about guests by nationality, and it does not work. "German guests are practical" tells you nothing you can act on, and it will be wrong about half the people it describes.
What does predict needs is the shape of the trip: how far someone travelled, how they arrived, how long they are staying, and who came with them. Country of origin matters only where it drives those things mechanically. A guest flying nine hours cannot arrive at 3pm the way a guest driving two hours can. That is a fact about flight schedules, not about the guest.
So the groupings below are about arrival and distance. Where the data does not support a claim, this guide says so instead of guessing.
Who actually comes to Brussels
The Brussels tourism observatory publishes the breakdown each year. For 2024, the share of overnight stays in hotels and youth hostels by market was:
| Market | Share | Change vs 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Belgium | 22% | -1% |
| France | 11% | +4% |
| Germany | 7% | +3% |
| United States | 7% | +11% |
| United Kingdom | 6% | -7% |
| Spain | 6% | +9% |
| Italy | 4% | +4% |
| Netherlands | 4% | +2% |
| Switzerland | 1% | -5% |
| Brazil | 1% | +8% |
Two things in that table are worth acting on.
Nearly half of all visitors arrive from within driving distance. Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands together account for 44% of overnight stays. These are guests who can arrive by car, and increasingly by train.
The United States grew 11% in a single year, the fastest of any major market, and now matches Germany at 7%. Long-haul arrivals are a growing share of who is looking, and they arrive with different assumptions about how they will get around once they are here.
The stay is shorter than you think
The average length of stay in Brussels was 1.98 nights in 2024. Leisure visitors averaged 1.97, business visitors 1.99.
Two nights is not a holiday. It is a city break, and it changes what matters in a home. Somewhere to put a suitcase down matters more than a well-stocked kitchen. A washing machine is close to irrelevant on a two-night stay and becomes important around night five.
Home exchange skews longer than the hotel average, since the whole point is using a home rather than a room. But if your listing is written for a fortnight and most enquiries are for long weekends, that mismatch is worth looking at.
Brussels has almost no low season
The observatory notes that overnight stays across 2024 varied with a standard deviation of only 1% month to month. February is the quietest month and July the busiest, and the gap between them is far narrower than in most European capitals.
That is unusual, and it is good news if you are listing here. There is no dead season to write off. It also means the "book early for summer" advice that applies elsewhere matters less in Brussels than the specific week someone needs.
The thing that catches drivers out
This is the most useful single item in this guide, and almost nobody mentions it to their guests.
Brussels has a Low Emission Zone covering the whole region, in force 24 hours a day, every day. Since 1 January 2026, diesel vehicles must meet Euro 6 and petrol vehicles at least Euro 3.
The part that surprises people: a foreign-registered car must be registered in advance, online, even if it fully complies with the emissions standards. An unregistered foreign car that is otherwise perfectly legal is fined €150. A non-compliant vehicle is fined €350.
So a French or Dutch guest who drives to your exchange in a modern, compliant car, and who has done nothing wrong except not know about a registration form, gets a fine in the post. Given that France, Germany and the Netherlands are three of the four largest markets, this affects a meaningful share of anyone arriving by car.
If your listing is in the Brussels region, put this in your exchange confirmation as well as in your listing. Registration is done once per vehicle at lez.brussels.
The guests most exposed to this are not the ones you would expect. Someone driving over from Lille or Rotterdam is probably in their own car and may already know the rule. A guest flying in from further away and picking up a hire car has a foreign plate, no reason to have heard of the LEZ, and no idea that a compliant car still needs registering.
In our own experience that describes American guests in particular. They tend to arrive expecting to drive, they use public transport far less than European visitors do, and they often keep a hire car for the whole stay so they can make trips out from Brussels between city days. For them a parking space is a real requirement rather than a nice extra, and the LEZ registration is the thing most likely to catch them out.
So parking is worth more than it first appears, but only when it comes with the explanation. A space the guest cannot legally drive to is worth nothing.
What the platform itself says makes a difference
HomeExchange publishes its own guidance on listings, and a few points recur:
- Photograph every bedroom. Partners use bedroom photos to work out whether their party actually fits. A missing bedroom photo is a missing answer.
- Your main image is the one people see in search results. It is doing more work than the other twenty combined.
- Fill in every detail field. The fields feed the filters, and a home that has not declared an attribute does not appear when someone filters for it.
- Keep your response rate high. It is visible, and slow replies cost requests.
That last one has a version specific to this: if you are getting views but no requests, the problem is usually the listing. If you are getting requests but no exchanges, the problem is usually the reply.
Where this guide stops
Everything above is either published data or platform documentation. What it cannot tell you is which of these patterns shows up in your own inbox.
That is the part worth tracking, and it takes almost no effort: for each enquiry, note where they were travelling from, how they arrived, how many nights they asked for, and who was in the party. After twenty or thirty enquiries you will see your own shape, and it will be more useful than any national average.
We are doing exactly that with our own apartment, and we will update this guide with what we find.
