Barcelona tourist flat owners expect better relationship with new council after ex-mayor's 'persecution'

Barcelona's tourist apartment owners believe that the new Socialist council will herald a new era of improved ties with local authorities after what they describe as "absolute persecution" over the past few years under progressive ex-mayor Ada Colau.

"We hope it will get better," Maria Rosa Reixach, the co-founder of vacation rental company Flatelli, told the Catalan News Agency (ACN) in a recent interview. "We want to do things well and to regulate them." 

Reixach criticized the "criminalization" of her profession and argued that tourist apartments were not to blame for increased housing costs as those have continued to go up while the number of tourist apartment licenses has staid the same over the past few years: "How can they relate one thing to the other? It makes no sense."

Federatur, a business association for tourist apartment owners, expressed a similar sentiment and said it had already been in concert with members of the new council.

And although the association president David Riba said they expected to meet with Jaume Collboni, the new mayor, soon, they also said they did not believe there would be any sudden policy changes affecting the sector.

Riba also stressed that there are "very few" tourist apartments in the city as they account for only 1.7% of housing in Barcelona, and argued that these could actually be a more "sustainable" way of discovering a new city as people who rent them out are more likely to shop at local businesses than people who stay at hotels. 

Residents call for more oversight

Meanwhile, on the other side of Barcelona's eternal over-tourism debate, neighborhood associations such as the FAVB reject that there ever was any "persecution" of tourist apartment owners at the hands of the former anti-austerity mayor's council.

Tourist apartments "clearly have a gentrifying effect" on city center old town neighborhoods such as the Raval, Barceloneta, or Born that are losing long-term residents to higher prices, the FAVB's Miquel Prats argued. 

Prats also believes that the council, which seems open to allowing more hotels to open in the city, should carry out more tourist apartment inspections to ensure regulations are being complied with.

According to FAVB, the issue goes beyond the legal tourist apartments, as they say there are many that are unlicensed that are disrupting life in neighborhoods popular among tourists, as are 1-year rentals - regular housing contracts are 5 years long.