Clash between Airbnb and Barcelona: Collboni threatens criminal proceedings

BarcelonaBarcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni's ultimatum to Airbnb. After meeting with the company's top management in Spain and Portugal at City Hall, he denounced the platform's "worse attitude" and warned that the council will consider "all civil and criminal administrative measures provided by the regulatory framework to act against illegality" if Airbnb does not cooperate with the collection of illegal listings on its website. City Hall has not yet opened any disciplinary proceedings against the company.

In a press conference after the meeting, Collboni admitted that he was "not satisfied" with how the meeting went and denounced a change in the company's attitude. The mayor has attributed this to a double circumstance: the entry into force on July 1 of the short-term rental registry by the Ministry of Consumption and the desire of Barcelona City Council to eliminate all tourist apartment licenses in the city by November 2028.

Collboni has warned the current collaboration platform and urged it to sign a new agreement with the City Council to regulate this synergy until November 2028.If it doesn't, he warned, the City Council will be much more "forceful." "No one is above the law or the democratic will of a city council to decide what tourism model to defend or what housing policies," he warned.

Tuesday's meeting comes after Barcelona City Council publicly accused Airbnb a month ago of break the agreement of collaboration they had maintained until now. According to the council, they began to notice a change in the company's attitude around Easter. Until then, Airbnb took between 5 and 10 days to remove illegal listings once it had notified the advertisers by email. Since April, the City Council's inspection services had confirmed that nearly 800 irregular listings they had sent to the company have not disappeared from the portal.

The First Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning, Laia Bonet, explained this Tuesday that following the public complaint, Airbnb also began removing those listings. However, she regretted the "delay" and denounced it as a "dynamic that clearly regresses with respect to the commitments made until then." Among the obstacles and delays that, according to the City Council, the platform has put up so far is the fact that it requires the council to send the list of illegal listings by post to Airbnb's headquarters in Dublin each time.

Airbnb's response

In a statement, Airbnb has urged the City Council to stop using short-term rentals as a "scapegoat" and to focus "on the main drivers of mass tourism": hotels and large-scale tour operators. "It is time for the City Council to face reality and change course to truly address Airbnb's tourism problems in Spain and Portugal," Jaime Rodríguez said.

"The mayor's contradictory plans to reduce tourist rentals while allowing new hotels undermine the stated goal of combating mass tourism," denounced Rodríguez, the king of housing. He gave as an example that, although since 2020, tourist apartment listings have been reduced "by almost half," tourism "continues to grow" as do the prices of housing, whether purchased or rented. company, has done so with nuances, demanding from the council a "model that differentiates occasional stays from high-occupancy tourist accommodation" and encouraging Collboni "to adopt collaborative and balanced solutions that empower residents and not just large hotel companies"

The mayor's ultimatum hasn't satisfied everyone at City Hall. Janet Sanz, the leader of Barcelona en Común (Barcelona en Común) on the council, attacked Collboni and considered that Tuesday's meeting confirms "favorable treatment" for Airbnb. "Can anyone imagine the mayor meeting with someone who breaks traffic rules and telling them to act nicely?" Sanz asked, adding that the council should impose sanctions on the company.

From Juntos (Together), councilor Damià Calvet criticized the fact that while the mayor holds press conferences expressing his discontent with Airbnb, "the reality is that illegal tourist apartments continue to proliferate without any effective control." Calvet demanded concrete actions such as a municipal registry of temporary rental housing, robust inspection campaigns, and exemplary sanctions, and accused Collboni's government of "preferring the frivolity of photo ops and grandiloquent declarations to rigorous and constant work."

For her part, the leader of the ERC party in the City Council, Elisenda Alamany, asserted that we must "move from threats to solutions" and act "firmly" against illegal tourist apartments in the city. In this regard, she lamented that BComú and PSC "killed" the team of visualizers proposed by ERC to facilitate the inspection of illegal activity. From the PP, the president of the municipal group, Daniel Sirera, believed that eliminating tourist apartments will encourage "illegality" and criticized Collboni for "criminalizing" the sector.