Airbnb breaks its pact with Barcelona: it no longer removes illegal tourist apartment listings.

BarcelonaOpen war between Airbnb and Barcelona City Council. The collaboration that until recently existed between the tourist accommodation site and the city council in the pursuit of all illegal offerings has been severed. According to recent reports, Eldiario.es And as confirmed by ARA, this company has stopped removing the tourist apartment listings sent to it by the City Council's inspection service when it detects them as illegal. This attitude was rebuked by the First Deputy Mayor, Laia Bonet, on Wednesday, who accused the company of being "complicit in an illegal activity" and announced that the council is already considering action against Airbnb.

Municipal sources explain that they began to notice a change in the company's attitude around Easter. Until then, under an agreement signed with the City Council in 2018, Airbnb took between 5 and 10 days to remove illegal listings once it had notified the advertisers by email. However, since April, the City Council's inspection services have confirmed that nearly 800 irregular listings they have sent to the company have not disappeared from the portal.

"It makes no sense that what has been an example until now can no longer be done," Bonet lamented in statements to journalists, explaining that Airbnb has also sent the City Council a new proposal for an agreement "in which it takes a step back in terms of responsibility in the prosecution of tourist apartments." "We consider it irresponsible to be complicit in an illegal activity," concluded the first deputy mayor of the Catalan capital.

A day later, Airbnb responded to the City Council, saying that the problem is that the council's latest request asked for listings to be removed "indiscriminately." According to the platform, the latest list of irregular listings sent to it by Barcelona City Council for removal included listings that did not require a license, such as seasonal rentals. "Airbnb has already informed the City Council that this situation could cause a necessary delay in the processes in order to ensure appropriate decision-making," they point out.

The strained relationship between Airbnb and Barcelona City Council comes almost a year after the mayor of the Catalan capital, Jaume Collboni, announced that the city's 10,000 tourist apartment licenses will be phased out by 2028 in order to reclaim these homes. Bonet considered the connection between that announcement and the platform's change of heart "obvious" on Wednesday.

Possible sanctions

Bonet explained that the City Council is analyzing possible actions against Airbnb if it does not cooperate, but admitted that "municipal tools will not be sufficient." Therefore, he called on other institutions to work together against illegal activities. Last week, in fact, the Generalitat (Catalan government) announced that it had identified more than 9,000 illegal tourist apartment listings in Catalonia advertised on the Airbnb platform, 6,200 of which were in Barcelona.

Tourism sources indicated at the time that Airbnb had already been asked to remove the affected listings and that failure to do so could result in disciplinary proceedings. A few days earlier, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs blocked more than 65,000 illegal tourist apartment listings on the platform, some of them in Catalonia.