I vividly remember one of the last times I booked an Airbnb. Fresh off the plane into Athens, I wheeled my carry-on to my apartment block and was immediately confronted with graffiti that said “F**k Airbnb”, with a spraypainted arrow pointed directly at the front door. “Yep,” I thought grimly, punching the key code into the lock. “Sounds about right.”
Greek graffiti artists aren’t the only Europeans fed up with the $79bn (£61bn) San Francisco-based tech company. In Barcelona, left-wing mayor Jaume Collboni recently announced plans to ban all short-term rentals from 2028 onwards, effectively wiping out Airbnb and other holiday-letting platforms like VRBO. While visitors to the Catalan capital can still patronise hotels and other licenced lodgings, the halcyon days of being able to book an entire apartment overlooking the Sagrada Familia will soon be over.
Barcelona is not the only city that has turned against Airbnb. Other cities around the world have already placed severe restrictions on the platform. Hosts in New York City can only rent their place out to two guests at a time and have to remain in the property during the stay. In Amsterdam, residents can only rent out their homes for 15 nights a year and face fines of up to €87,000 (£76,500) if they break the rules.
Palma has banned all new holiday rentals and Mallorca has removed 2,300 illegal Airbnb listings last year alone. London remains one of the most liberal tourist cities when it comes to Airbnb regulation: you can rent out your place for up to 90 days. That has severe implications for housing availability here – according to the Mayor of London’s office, one in 74 homes are up for short-term let.
How did we all get so hooked on Airbnb? For an entire generation of internet-savvy travellers like myself and my millennial peers, the once-shiny platform opened up a new mode of visiting a city. You could make yourself breakfast in the morning, swerve noisy guests in neighbouring rooms and relax in your own living room (even if it was, in actual fact, someone else’s living room). All this for cheaper than the nearest hotel. I didn’t look at another booking website for years. Who needed to, when Airbnb existed?
Well, it turns out our holiday dreams were somebody else’s rental nightmare. As mayor Collboni put it in a press conference announcing the Barcelona ban: “Housing is today the first source of social inequality across Europe in cities… Our struggle today is to guarantee the right of citizens to stay in our cities.”
For a while, it felt like Airbnb lived up to its initial promise of allowing travellers to full-body immerse themselves in their chosen destination, courtesy of a friendly local’s spare room or apartment. The idea was that “Juan from Madrid” or “Suzie from Edinburgh” had merely temporarily vacated their quirkily-appointed casa for your stay, allowing you to live the authentico life of a genuine local.
But as anyone who has recently used Airbnb can tell you, that’s no longer the case. These days it’s more likely that you interact with a faceless lettings company that operates multiple listings in the city, all of which are decked out in the same blandly aspirational, mid-century modern decor.
You won’t meet a human being except for the nearby corner shop owner who has been entrusted with the key – even then, they’re being phased out in favour of passcode-enabled smart locks. While the apartment is almost certainly professionally cleaned, you might be expected to strip the bedding, wash the dishes and take out the bins and recycling. In short: It’s all the anonymity of a hotel stay, with none of the perks.
By the time I stayed in Athens, I’d already been berated by another Airbnb host earlier that year for the audacity of leaving a few stray hairs in the shower plughole. That graffiti, in addition to the mounting guilt I felt for relying so heavily on a platform that has been accused of singlehandedly gentrifying entire neighbourhoods, booting actual residents out of their homes and enriching the already fattened pockets of landlords, was what pushed me over the edge. On a big group holiday to Barcelona this year, some of us booked into a hotel for the first time in years.
We slept in hermetically sealed, air-conditioned comfort and swam in a rooftop pool. I didn’t even mind when the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night – at least that meant it was working, which is more than you can say for some of the more unregulated holiday rentals.
The hotel was far more expensive than our usual Airbnb options, but we booked it guilt-free, knowing that we hadn’t helped turf anybody out of their home. It felt like a treat – in other words, just like a holiday should.
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