tourist apartments

Rule will affect 95,000 holiday rentals in 260 municipalities

Company reported 83% fall in profits, but landowner rejected repeated calls to reduce monthly payments

Business trips only bookings in Barcelona, AirBnB apartments become short-let flats, and hotels allowed to open from Monday not expected to do it

City authority also rents 200 tourist apartments for people at risk and opens three centers for homeless

The northern Catalan town of fewer than 900 inhabitants is seeing similar issues as Barcelona and Girona

Capital has 12 flats for every 1,000 inhabitants, more than Rome and London, finds joint Catalan-Canadian report

Visitors could be charged more to spend the night in the city if parliament makes the necessary changes to legislation

Affordable housing activists claim locals are being pushed out of their homes, while the Girona city council says there’s no issue

Increase in council tax for tourist apartments, as well as tourist surcharge, proposed by Barcelona Global

70% of hotels in Sitges already booked up for MWC

Event organizers forecast more than 108,000 attendees

The Catalan capital’s action plan against illegal accommodation for tourists resulted in July in the closure of 256 apartments whose activity has been considered illegal, a figure which has to be added to the 112 orders announced in the first half of 2016. Besides ordering the ceasing of their activity, the accommodation websites responsible for the flats, Airbnb and Homeaway, will have to face a 30,000 euros fine for not having the required licence. This has been possible mainly due to the task of the so-called ‘flat scouts’, a figure recently created by Barcelona’s city hall, who have found 234 illegal accommodations, while the official inspectors in charge of this only detected 22. “This is not a summer campaign but an action plan which has come to stay” warned Barcelona’s deputy mayor for Ecology, Urbanism and Mobility, Janet Sanz and emphasised that tourism in Barcelona “is not related to seasons”. 

The City Council of the Catalan capital has announced it will remit 80% of the fine on tourist apartments with no licence located in Barcelona's Ciutat Vella district if the owners put the property up for social housing rent for a minimum of 3 years. Once this period is over, the owner will be able to extend the social rent or pay the remaining 20% of the fine. The City Council explained that the initiative is "a pilot test" in order "to start changing the city's tourist model", as tourists are too concentrated in some areas. This has created some friction with locals, mostly due to some visitors' wild street parties and to the rise in rent prices, as many properties have been transformed into tourist rentals, quite often without a licence. In this vein, the City Council will ask digital platforms such as Airbnb for the identification data of all their rentals in Barcelona. These platforms will be fined for each illegal flat on offer or if they refuse to issue the requested list.