The European Commission has presented this Monday measures to reinforce transparency in the short-term accommodation rental business through platforms such as Airbnb or Boooking, for example by obliging authorities to keep a register of owners and their property and operators to ensure that the apartments they show have a real registration number.
The vast majority of member states already have some kind of registry of this type of tourist accommodation at local, regional or national level, but Brussels believes that they are too fragmented and warns that there is no comprehensive control over the information they collect.
Therefore, the Community Executive is committed to harmonize at European level the requirements of the different registers, so that all owners – individuals or companies – with available accommodations report who they are clearly, what property they have for tourist rental and where they are located. These registers should be accessible through the Internet, be easy to use and assign a unique registration number to each owner.
In addition, the registration numbers should be public and clearly displayed next to the properties on the platforms, which will be responsible for randomly verifying that the owners have registered and report the correct registrations.
Community sources have clarified that the national authorities will be responsible for controlling that the parties comply with the new rules and have stressed that Brussels invites the Member States to «foresee sanctions for those who do not take it seriously and thus know that they can be punished if they do not comply».
In this context, the Community proposal, which must still be negotiated between the European Parliament and the 27 to agree on its final version, points out that public authorities will have the possibility to suspend registration numbers and ask platforms to remove hosts who do not comply with the rules.
Another measure aims to «streamline» the exchange of data between online platforms and public authorities, so that they automatically report every month, for example, the number of nights rented and the number of guests accommodated.
The Community Executive also wants the data generated to contribute, in aggregate form, to the tourism statistics prepared by Eurostat and to be incorporated into the next European data space for tourism.
