79% of Airbnb Listings In Barcelona Are Illegal

dkatana writes: Barcelona has more than 16,000 Airbnb listings and, according to reports on Cities of the Future, 79% could be illegal. "In April, Airbnb's European General Manager Jeroen Merchiers confirmed, during the Student Tourism Congress in Barcelona, that the platform has more than 85,000 listings in Spain alone." But most Airbnb hosts do not apply for a permit, fail to pay insurance and tourist tax, and ignore Catalonian law that forbids short-term rentals of rooms in private homes. "Residents," says the article, "had been complaining about the rising number of tourist apartments and the conduct of the mostly student-age renters. The majority from Italy, Germany and the UK were partying all night, some running around naked, and generally trashing their neighborhoods."

Comments

Re:"Are" or "could be"?

[ultranova]

Not having insurance means this: the hotel industry lobbies the government to make competition illegal, that is all it is.

According to the summary, the customers are "partying all night, some running around naked, and generally trashing their neighborhoods". The hotel industry is perfectly within their rights to demand everyone plays by the same rules. If you can figure out a better way to run a hotel, good for you; but if you simply figure out a new way to externalize the costs, you should be forced to eat them - and for Joe Average, that means licensing and insurance.

As a side note, we have far too many people who want to be treated as business geniuses despite doing nothing but turning costs to externalities, and often even making them costlier in the process. It's that failure of human spirit that makes it impossible to have completely free markets.