In Barcelona, there are 15,221 tourist accommodations advertised on Airbnb. More than half (51.6%) do not have a valid license. This figure is added to the supply of hotels, accommodation and rooms to rent for tourist use. The data comes from a map prepared by the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth (ABDT), which cross-referenced the announcements on this platform and the authorizations issued by the Town Hall.
In more than half of the cases that violate the regulations, it concerns an owner who owns more than one tourist accommodation and, although he has a license for some of them, others do not are not recorded. Furthermore, it also highlights that in 19.3% of cases a renewed license is used. That is, it is registered with permission granted to another accommodation. And in 13% of cases, the owner has not carried out any regularization process.
These calculations concern hotels as well as apartments and tourist rooms advertised on the platform, but the creators of the card estimate that the vast majority of fraud corresponds to accommodation, with more than 40% of cases without a permit.
“It’s disastrous,” says Daniel Pardo, spokesperson for the ABDT, which designates the competent administration as responsible for granting licenses and ensuring that the offer announced in the city complies with legality .
For its part, Barcelona City Hall announced that during Jaume Collboni’s mandate, it would close all tourist apartments in the city. The municipality estimates them at around 10,000, but according to ABDT calculations, there are 12,600. To which must be added the rent for 7,600 rooms.
The Town Hall, questioned about this dance of numbers, assures that it is preparing its own report to explain that the map drawn by this entity is different from the town hall’s diagnosis. The Collboni executive has also made tourist apartments a flagship of its mandate and is in the midst of a campaign to inspect illegal offers in the city. According to their calculations, there are 6,000 operating without a license, a figure slightly lower than that envisaged by the ABDT.
From Airbnb they deny that the situation is such and assure that the data is “inexact” and add that the different types of tourist accommodation have their own rules and regulations “Not all of them need to present an accommodation license to tourist use (VUT) because they are subject to other types of regulations”, we specify from the platform. Likewise, they ensure that the data displayed on the platform is not always “reliable” because not all the advertisements displayed are necessarily active.
One of the novelties of the map prepared by the entity is that it locates the tourist offer of the city, to make this data known to citizens. “The houses deprived of their social use and intended for tourist speculation were houses in which neighbors who were now evicted lived,” they say.
They emphasize that it is too late to return these apartments to their former owners, but they insist that reducing the supply and returning these properties to the tourist accommodation stock could be a tool to solve the housing emergency.
The entity demands the effective closure of all tourist residences and also demands that hotels whose licenses expire be soon reinstated in the real estate stock. “The reduction in tourist supply must be accompanied by policies guaranteeing that they will not increase the speculative race but rather the stock of affordable housing,” they emphasize.
