With Barcelona announcing a total ban on short-term rentals from the end of 2028, how will decisions to curb Airbnb and others in the world's major cities change how we travel?

On 21 June, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni announced plans to ban short term rentals in the city starting in November 2028. The decision is designed to solve what Collboni described as “Barcelona’s biggest problem” – the housing crisis that has seen residents and workers priced out of the market – by returning the 10,000 apartments currently listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb and other platforms into the housing market.

Barcelona is not the only city to be strongly regulating – or even banning – short-term rentals outright. It has been illegal since September 2023 to rent out an apartment as a short-term let in New York City unless you are registered with the city and you are present in the apartment when someone is staying – a change also made to assuage the city’s housing crisis. Berlin banned Airbnbs and short-term rentals back in 2014, bringing them back under tight restrictions in 2018; and in many of California’s coastal cities, including Santa Monica, short-term rentals are either banned or highly restricted.

In British Columbia, Canada, Premier David Eby put the issue succinctly as he clarified new short-term rental rules: “If you’re flipping homes, if you’re buying places to do short-term rental, if you’re buying a home to leave it vacant, we have consistently, publicly, repeatedly sent the message: Do not compete with families and individuals that are looking for a place to live with your investment dollars.”

  • SeaJEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    That is far on the norm these days. Many AirBnBs add on a ton of fees like a massive cleaning fee but still require you to clean up so the cost comes out to be more than a hotel and you still have to clean up and there are a ton of house rules. It has only been recently that AirBnB gave you the option of seeing the extra fees while searching but it’s still not the default option. Their customer service kind of sucks too. I stayed in a place in LA that had sewage backing up into the sinks and the place itself was pretty gross. They offered a slight discount on the night we stayed and allowed us to cancel the second night. A hotel would have probably comped us a night and given us a decent room.

    There are still diamonds in the rough though which are generally people who genuinely have a mother in law unit or room spare and they live in the rest of the place. Most of them are done by corporations though who are simply looking for lower taxation.