Airbnb urges Barcelona to reconsider crackdown on tourism rentals

MADRID — Global holiday home rental company Airbnb has urged Barcelona's mayor to rethink a widening crackdown on short-term rentals, arguing that it only benefits the hotel sector while failing to address overtourism and a housing crisis.

"The only winner from Barcelona's war on short-term rentals is the hotel industry," Airbnb's head of Policy for Spain and Portugal, Sara Rodriguez, wrote in a letter to Mayor Jaume Collboni sent over the weekend and seen by Reuters.

Barcelona city hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In June, Collboni announced a plan to shut all short-term rentals by 2028 to contain soaring rents for residents. The measure is being challenged in courts.

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Airbnb argued in its letter that none of Barcelona's earlier measures that had imposed strict limits on new tourist accommodation licences in the city centre since 2014 proved to be effective.

"A decade later, official data shows that while short-term rentals numbers have fallen, challenges related to housing and over-tourism are worse than ever," it said.

It cited official data showing long-term rents have soared more than 70 per cent and the average price of a hotel room has increased by more than 60 per cent, even as the number of short-term rental homes halved to 8,842 last year from 2020 levels.

Meanwhile, it argued, Spain has built fewer houses in the past decade than at any time since 1970 despite a sharp increase in demand, also pointing to official data showing that vacant homes outnumbered short-term rentals eight to one in Barcelona.

"Policies that address this issue (vacant homes) are more likely to boost affordable housing supply than clamping down on Airbnb," the company said, adding that it had removed over 7,000 listings from its platform since 2018 in Barcelona.

While Collboni has said he will keep a ban on building new hotels in the city centre, he wants new hotel capacity elsewhere in Barcelona.

Spain's travel industry association Exceltur, which groups major hotel chains, travel agents, tour operators and airlines, has lobbied for strong regulation on short-term rental platforms since 2022, describing the boom of holiday homes as "out of control" in Spanish cities.

A number of other cities such as Madrid and Malaga have also applied restrictions this year.