In Barcelona there are 15,221 tourist accommodations advertised or dedicated to seasonal rentals on Airbnb, located mainly in the Eixample neighborhood, as can be seen in un map prepared by the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth (ABDT)which has crossed ads on this platform. In addition, he has compared them with the licenses issued by the City Council and warns that in many cases they do not have a valid license.
In more than half of the cases that violate the regulations, it is an owner who has more than one tourist accommodation and, although he has a license for some of them, others have not been registered. In addition, it also highlights that in 19.3% of cases a repeat license is used. That is, it is registered with the permission granted to another accommodation. And in up to 13%, the owner has not carried out any procedure to regularize it.
“It is disastrous,” says Daniel Pardo, spokesperson for the ABDT, who points to the competent administration as responsible for granting licenses and ensuring that the offer announced in the city complies with legality. One of the novelties of the map prepared by the entity is that it locates the tourist offer in the city, to make this data known to the citizens. “The homes devoid of their social use and destined for tourist speculation were homes in which neighbors now expelled lived,” they say.
They point out 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 park could be a tool to solve the housing emergency.
The entity demands the effective closure of all tourist homes and also demands that hotels whose licenses expire soon be returned to the housing stock. “The reduction in tourism supply must be accompanied by policies that guarantee that they will not increase the speculative race but rather increase the affordable housing stock,” they point out.
For its part, Barcelona City Council assures that, with data from September 2024, 25% of the ads on this platform lack a license. But they warn that the data is difficult to collect, since “sometimes, the same accommodation has several ads within the same platform.”
Airbnb assures that the data may be “inaccurate” and adds that the various types of tourist accommodation have their own rules and regulations. Likewise, they point out that the data shown on their platform is not always “reliable” because not all the ads shown are necessarily active.
From the council, they also remember that they are aware that there is irregular activity on the platforms and that they are intensifying the control and inspection of illegal tourist apartments. Until September of this year, 1,214 inspections have been carried out, 944 orders to cease illegal activity have been carried out and 491 sanctioning proceedings have been initiated. According to calculations, there would be 6,000 apartments still operating without a license.
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