Spain’s controversial crackdown on unregulated holiday lets has, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned the spotlight on the situations in individual holiday destinations.
As reported widely in the Spanish and international media, the government has ordered Airbnb to remove more than 65,000 property listings from its website due to breaches of information requirements. The country’s Ministry for Consumer Affairs said many of the listings it was asking to be removed did not indicate if they were owned by an individual or a company, while others failed to include the required licence numbers or the number shown did not match details held by authorities.
Consumer minister Pablo Bustinduy said the order for Airbnb to block listings involved the immediate removal of 5800 properties from the site and further orders would be issued until approximately 65,000 removals are reached.
The move is the latest action by the Spanish government to address the housing affordability crisis in the country, which saw thousands of anti-tourism protesters take to the streets in the Canary Islands on 18 May.
The mass delisting announcement by the government has been followed by extensive media reporting of the estimated number of non-compliant holiday lets advertised on Airbnb and other platforms in each part of Spain.
According to the estimates, which have been provided by a well-known tourism and travel data intelligence firm, 60% of advertised short-let properties in the province of Las Palmas – which comprises Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura – do not indicate the required licence number or state whether they are private/business, with the figure slightly higher for Tenerife.
While the figure is not the highest in the country – an estimated 85% of lets advertised in Madrid do not give the required licence details -, it is considerably higher than regions such as Catalonia and, in particular, Andalusia, where the figure is as low as single digits in several major tourist hubs.
