The mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has wondered why Airbnb sells housing for tourist use (VUT) that “it knows are illegal” since he has stressed that You can’t say “you don’t know” since the City Council published a list.
“Why do they market and publish tourist homes that they know are illegal? Because one of the problems we are having in large cities is that platforms like Airbnb are precisely what they are doing is publishing tourist homes for illegal use,” the councilor said at the press conference after the Government Board.
Furthermore, he highlighted that the Madrid City Council published the list of tourist homes that had an urban planning license in the capital.
For this reason, it respects that the tourism company presents the allegations that it considers appropriate to the Reside in Madrid Plan but has demanded that it cease the publication of those homes that do not comply with urban planning regulations.
“I think that in this way we can establish a more frank and sincere dialogue between the City Council and marketing platforms such as Airbnb. I have nothing against it, tourism seems to me to be a fundamental sector, but what it should do is not allow tourist homes for illegal use to be advertised on its platform,” he stressed.
Airbnb’s position
Airbnb has proposed to the mayor in a letter the possibility of local hosts being able to host occasionally in the city center and has called the city’s new residential protection plan “unjustified.”
It proposes that the rules make it easier for tourism to disperse beyond the city center, preserving local communities and ending a model “that only benefits a small group of companies.”
Consider, however, that the City Council’s current proposal “it is far from complying with the proportionality standards required at the European level”will be “very difficult to apply in practice and unjustifiably punishes an accommodation modality that, today, contributes to Madrid being an international tourist reference.”
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