Norwegians barely use WhatsApp. Your guests do

A question we often hear from Norwegian hosts: does anyone actually use WhatsApp? In Norway, it's a fair question. For your guests, it's the wrong one.

Norway is a Messenger and Snapchat country

In the last public edition of Ipsos's SoMe-tracker, from the fourth quarter of 2023, 10% of Norwegians aged 18 and over used WhatsApp every day. Messenger was at 48%, Snapchat at 52% and Facebook at 65%.

DataReportal's Digital 2026 report for Norway, based on GWI's survey from the second quarter of 2025, tells the same story. Roughly one in three Norwegian internet users had used WhatsApp in the past month, far behind Messenger and Snapchat.

So if you don't use WhatsApp yourself, you're in good company. Most of your neighbours don't either.

Most of your guests aren't Norwegian

Eurostat counts nights booked through Airbnb, Booking, Expedia and similar platforms. In 2025, Norway had 9.9 million of them, and 70% were by guests from abroad. In Northern Norway it was 86%.

Hotels and campsites point the same way. In Tromsø, 59% of guest nights in 2025 were by foreign guests, up from 54% the year before, according to Statistics Norway.

On the booking platforms, Germans were by far the biggest foreign group, with 1.3 million nights. Then came guests from the US, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.

Where most of them come from, WhatsApp is the default

DataReportal's reports for those countries show the gap. In Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy, WhatsApp is the most used platform of all, by more than eight in ten internet users every month. In France it's about two in three. Worldwide, it's just over half.

For a German or Dutch guest, a WhatsApp chat with the place they're staying isn't a novelty. It's what they expect.

The exception: Americans and our neighbours

Not every guest fits the pattern. In the US, only about three in ten internet users use WhatsApp in a month; iMessage, SMS and Messenger do that job. Danes and Swedes are closer to Norwegians than to Germans.

That matters, because Americans are a big group. In Tromsø they were the largest foreign group in 2025, with 17.5% of foreign guest nights.

So the answer isn't WhatsApp instead of SMS. It's meeting each guest in the app they already use.

What this means for you as a host

1. Don't use your own phone as the guide. Your guests' habits were formed in Hamburg, Rotterdam and Madrid, not in Bodø.
2. Offer WhatsApp, but not only WhatsApp. SMS still reaches Americans and Norwegians best.
3. Follow Airbnb's rules. Make the chat optional, offer it after booking, and never ask for the guest's number. For reservations booked from 20 November 2026, asking is not allowed. We've written a separate guide on how to offer WhatsApp within Airbnb's rules.
4. Answer in their language. A German guest writes in German, an Italian in Italian.

HeyConcierge was built for this. The same concierge answers on WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS, in whatever language the guest writes in, from the information you add once in your own language. When it can't help, it alerts you on the channel you choose.

Sources

• Ipsos, SoMe-tracker Q4 2023: daily use among Norwegians aged 18 and over, 1,913 respondents. Ipsos no longer publishes the tracker openly.
• DataReportal, Digital 2026 reports for Norway, Germany, the United States and the world: GWI survey data from Q2 2025, internet users aged 16 and over, use in the past month.
• Eurostat, nights booked via online platforms, 2025.
• Statistics Norway, table 12898: guest nights by municipality and country of residence, 2025. Covers hotels, campsites, holiday homes and hostels, not Airbnb.

HeyConcierge is built in Tromsø, Norway, by Jacob Nørby and Erik Austheim.