Housing Tourists or Young Families

Booking.com has removed more than 4,000 illegal vacation rental listings in Spain, mainly on the Canary Islands, following a request by the Spanish Consumer Protection Agency.

Private rentals of apartments is an issue of growing concern in European tourist destinations. Tenants feel the influx of guests is intrusive and creates too much disturbance and feeling of insecurity. Statutes may prevent much of the unwanted activity, but people still feel lacking enforcement in some cases. A related issue is that large cities, such as Paris, have thousands of empty apartments, without tenants and sometimes intended for unauthorized commercial renting purposes, which is illegal in most places. At the same time, some countries have a housing crisis with scarcity of offers, especially affordable housing for young people and families. Southern Europe is particularly hard hit by this problem.

Booking.com

On Thursday, 26 June the Spanish Consumer Affairs Ministry informed the Booking.com accommodation portal that it has found illegal advertising for tourist accommodations on its platform, urging for its removal.

• Following this Consumer Protection request, Booking has removed 4,093 illegal listings, most of them for accommodations located in the Canary Islands, one of the most popular tourist destinations.

• This action comes a week after the High Court of Justice of Madrid upheld for the second time the order that the Ministry of Consumption imposed on Airbnb to remove more than 65,000 illegal advertisements.

In this notice, the Ministry urged Booking.com to remove this illegal advertising. Following this communication, the multinational company has removed more than 4,000 illegal advertisements (4,093) for tourist accommodation, most of them located in the Canary Islands.

With this action, the Consumer Affairs Ministry has taken up its fight against illegal advertising of tourist apartments. A fight that, in the words of Minister Bustinduy, is decisive in ‘putting a stop to the indiscriminate proliferation of this type of accommodation’ and which, in his opinion, is one of the causes behind the difficulties with lack of accessible housing that thousands of people currently experience in Spain, especially in areas with a high influx of tourists, such as the Canary Islands. In addition to the archipelago, Booking.com has removed listings located in Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León, Navarra, La Rioja, and Castilla la Mancha.

The Consumer Affairs Department has praised the collaboration the company has maintained with the Ministry following the initial request to ensure that tourist apartment listings comply with current legislation and offer consumers full guarantees.

Request to Airbnb

This action comes a week after the Madrid High Court of Justice (TSJ) for the second time upheld the Consumer Protection Agency's action against Airbnb, which required the Ministry to remove more than 65,000 illegal listings for this type of accommodation. Airbnb requested injunctions from the Madrid High Court to avoid having to comply with the earlier request, which affected a total of 5,800 listings, but the court again rejected this request, as it had done in a previous ruling, and ordered the platform to remove the illegal advertising.

With these two court orders, the court has upheld the order issued by the Consumer Affairs Department for Airbnb to remove advertising for tourist accommodations that violate the law. In this case, the orders refer to the listings included in the first notice sent, which are complemented by more than 60,000 other listings included in two subsequent notices. All of these, a total of 65,935 listings, were identified as illegal by the Consumer Affairs Analysis Unit.

Infractions

Both the illegal listings removed by Booking and those reported to Airbnb commit one of these three possible violations:

• The ads do not include the license or registration number. This is a mandatory requirement in several regional regulations and is the most common advertising violation analyzed.

• The advertisements include license numbers that do not correspond to those issued by the authorities. This practice can mislead or deceive consumers.

• The advertisements do not indicate the legal status of the landlords, that is, they do not indicate whether the landlords are professionals or individuals. This question is crucial to determine whether the person contracting the service is protected as a consumer.

The crackdown is part of a broader national effort to regulate the booming holiday rental sector, which many blame for rising rents and the growing strain on housing availability in tourist-heavy regions. Authorities say the goal is not to punish legitimate rentals, but to ensure that all properties meet the rules designed to protect visitors and local communities alike.

Affordable housing

The mismatch of supply and demand on the housing market results in the uncomfortable situation that young people cannot find suitable accommodation they can afford, while at the same time there is idle capacity of too large and expensive square meters that is often rented out on short term contracts.

Many towns in Europe have experimented with ways to provide affordable housing over the last decade. Urban Rigger was founded in 2013 as a response to the shortage of affordable housing in our cities and the first build was these student/youth units floating in an old industrial part of the Copenhagen harbor.

One of the 5 Urban Rigger units at Reffen. Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, Urban Rigger uses floating architecture to develop homes and communities by waterfronts. As an alternative to traditional buildings on land, Urban Rigger explores the social and sustainable benefits achieved by life on water. At the same time, Urban Rigger addresses several conditions challenging our cities today, like crowding and the lack of available and affordable housing.

In different other approaches, the city is applying the principles of the 15-minute city to build new developments with more smaller units in a mix with traditional ones, and in a dense lay-out that mixes residential and business/work environments in order to minimize transport. The Guardian:

While ambitious urban planners try to make 15-minute cities a reality, the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen has gone one better. What’s life like when everything you need is just a stroll away?

EU initiatives

Under some pressure by Mediterranean member states in need of political action on a mainly domestic issue, the EU appointed a Housing Commissioner for the new 5-year period starting 1 December 2024. The responsible Commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, shares his attention between energy and housing, with the risk of the strategic energy portfolio sometimes overshadows the housing one. Russian oil and gas, energy prices, nuclear and renewable energy initiatives, funding and industrial development.

The first three bullet points of the Commissioner’s job definition (Mission Letter from the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen), in the second half part about housing, say:

• You will put forward the first-ever European Affordable Housing Plan. The plan should offer technical assistance to cities and Member States and focus on investment and skills needed.

• As part of the European Affordable Housing Plan, you will develop a European Strategy for Housing Construction to support housing supply. You will focus on measures to reduce building costs, increase the skills of the labour force, raise productivity and enhance the environmental performance of construction.

• I would like you to focus on attracting more private and public investment for affordable and sustainable housing. You will work with the European Investment Bank to establish a pan-European investment platform for affordable and sustainable housing. You will work closely with international financial institutions, national promotional banks and institutions and other stakeholders in this work.

The European Affordable Housing Plan is now ready for review and political approval. The review process with organizations ended this week, feedback period 7 May 2025 - 4 June 2025 and the next step is public consultation and adoption by the Commission.