The holiday rental marketplace has just released a sneak peek of its annual Most Wishlisted Homes in Australia list, revealing six of the most desired stays across the country. The common thread? Tiny homes, connection with nature and stays with drawcards such as stargazing and outdoor baths.
Here’s what the data reveals about our travel appetite right now
Pepper Tree Passive House was revealed as one of the most wishlisted Airbnbs in Australia. (Credit: Pepper Tree Passive House)
Airbnb’s Most Wishlisted Homes in Australia reveals that travellers are seeking short, low-pressure escapes that provide relief from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan cities.
“The destinations and homes that are featuring on people’s wishlists reflect a desire for digital detox and local travel," says Susan Wheeldon, Country Manager for Airbnb Australia and New Zealand. “As people look for ways to disconnect and reset, the homes featured in the Most Wishlisted Airbnbs for 2026 point to a desire for nature-led stays, from tiny homes to off-grid retreats, that offer various options for those looking for a chance to reset."
The key trends from this year’s list include:
Tiny homes – small, minimalist stays are some of the country’s most wishlisted properties on Airbnb
Nature immersion – frequent search terms on Airbnb’s website include ‘rainforest’ and ‘seclusion’, highlighting the demand for regional, off-grid and quiet escapes
Stargazing and sleeping under the stars – wishlists are increasingly featuring transparent dome and bubble accommodation that allow travellers to watch the night sky
Aesthetic outdoor baths – hot tubs and outdoor baths are a common feature among top Airbnb listings
Need tips, more detail or itinerary ideas tailored to you? Ask AT.
AI Prompt
Here are the six most-wishlisted Airbnbs in Australia for 2026
Red Rock Hut, King Island in Bungaree, Tas
King Island’s Red Rock Hut promises stillness and solace.
Those craving solace and solitude may find no pad more ideal than Red Rock Hut, an ultra-secluded tiny home on the west coast of Tasmania’s remarkable King Island. Replenish your soul in the private, wood-fired hot tub and barrel sauna, then watch mighty waves rise and fall from beneath warm, 1000-thread-count bed linen.
Pepper Tree Passive House in Unanderra, NSW
If ‘contemporary chic tree house’ takes your fancy, you’re in good company. This sustainably designed, two-bedroom loft, set against the backdrop of Mount Kembla in the suburbs of Wollongong, ranks among the most wishlisted Airbnbs in Australia for 2026. The pièce de résistance is the 60-year-old, fairylight-draped pepper tree that rises through the elevated terrace, where guests no doubt linger for breakfast and evening tipples. Though Pepper Tree Passive House’s cantilevered wings and beautifully furnished bedrooms make a compelling case, too.
Escape to a modern treehouse. (Credit: Pepper Tree Passive House)
The interiors draw on natural materials. (Credit: Pepper Tree Passive House)
The cabin offers thoughtful architecture surrounded by bush. (Credit: Pepper Tree Passive House)
Magical Rainforest Retreat in Main Arm, NSW
Step into another world at Magical Rainforest Retreat, NSW.
Magical Rainforest Retreat is an apt name for this unique tropical cabin located across a rustic wooden bridge seemingly pulled from a children’s fairytale. Set along a meandering creek amid towering rainforest in the NSW Northern Rivers region, the romantic one-bedder has Balinese-inspired interiors, an open-plan timber terrace and an adorable swinging chair over the creek. It’s one of the most wishlisted Airbnbs in Australia for good reason.
Weekly travel news, experiences insider tips, offers, and more.
Palm Pavilion in Church Point, NSW
The house blends timber and minimalistic design. (Credit: Palm Pavilion)
Palm Pavilion is hidden with trees in NSW's Church Point. (Credit: Palm Pavilion)
Enjoy a breezy terrace and outdoor pool perfect for groups. (Credit: Palm Pavilion)
This boutique rainforest-encircled home lies just 45 minutes from Sydney’s CBD on the edge of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Architecturally stunning, Palm Pavilion hosts up to eight guests across multiple storeys and features a generous outdoor patio with a private pool, along with wide-open windows that flood the space with natural light. Girls’ long weekend plans sorted.
Star Gazing Bubble ‘Etoile’ in Agnes, Vic
Etoile bubble accommodation is proving that stargazing stays are trending with travellers.
Bubble Retreats’ Etoile dials the wow factor all the way up, thanks to its dreamy transparent ceiling – a front-row seat to one of the country’s premier dark-sky displays. Overlooking Wilsons Promontory National Park, this adults-only retreat sleeps two and comes self-contained with a thoughtfully designed kitchenette, ensuite, private deck primed for barbecue dinners and stargazing nightcaps. Consider it your own little world under the cosmos.
Romantic Lake House Retreat in Hunchy, Qld
Get back to nature at this lakeside tiny home. (Credit: Romantic Lake House Retreat Montville)
Tucked within the Sunshine Coast hinterland, this Romantic Lake House Retreat feels a world away from civilisation yet is located just minutes from restaurants, hiking trails and gorgeous waterfalls. The off-grid, eco-designed home has exclusive access to a private lake, where seasonal baby turtles glide through the water. You won’t have wi-fi –but that’s the point. Here it’s all about slow, intentional living.
Eleanor Edström is Australian Traveller’s Associate Editor. Previously a staff writer at Signature Luxury Travel & Style and Vacations & Travel magazines, she's a curious wordsmith with a penchant for conservation, adventure, the arts and design. She discovered her knack for storytelling much earlier, however – penning mermaid sagas in glitter ink at age seven. Proof that her spelling has since improved, she holds an honours degree in English and philosophy, and a French diploma from the University of Sydney. Off duty, you’ll find her pirouetting between Pilates and ballet classes, or testing her friends’ patience with increasingly obscure vocabulary.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.
