Madrid (AFP) – Online hotel booking giant Booking.com on Friday said it had taken down thousands of advertisements in Spain in the leftist government’s latest crackdown on illegal short-term tourist rentals. A tourism boom has driven the buoyant Spanish economy but fuelled local concern about increasingly scarce and unaffordable housing, a top priority for the minority coalition government.
“We have deleted a very small number of adverts in Spain at the request of the consumer ministry for supplying valid licences,” Booking.com said in a statement. The Amsterdam-based platform said the non-compliant adverts represented “less than two percent” of its 200,000 properties in Spain and that it had always collaborated with the authorities to regulate the short-term rental sector.
The consumer rights ministry on Thursday announced Booking.com had scrapped 4,093 illegal ads, most of them located in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Islands, a top tourist destination. Spain has also ordered online tourist accommodation giant Airbnb to take down more than 65,000 adverts for violating licence rules and has been in a legal battle with the US-based company.
The world’s second most-visited country hosted a record 94 million foreign tourists in 2024, but residents of hotspots such as Barcelona blame short-term rentals for the housing crisis and changing their neighbourhoods. “We’re making progress in the fight against a speculative model that expels people from their neighbourhoods and violates the right to a home,” far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy wrote on social network Bluesky.
© 2024 AFP
