May 19 (UPI) — Spain announced Monday it has ordered Airbnb to block tens of thousands of illegal listings from its platform.
The Ministry of Social Rights, Consumption, and the 2030 Agenda, or MAS, said in a press release that Ministry head Pablo Bustinduy has “urged” the international hospitality company to take down exactly 65,935 listings from its Irish subsidiary under the claim that they are “illegal for violating regulations on advertising this type of tourist accommodation,” as they purportedly “violate the regulations of the various autonomous communities where the Consumer Affairs Department has detected them.”
MAS said that all the allegedly illegal listings “are for entire tourist accommodations,” and that “no listings for individual rooms appear.”
MAS further said that it has sent Airbnb “three resolutions notifying it of the more than 65,000 illegal tourist accommodation listings detected on its platform, ordering the company to block these ads.”
According to MAS, Airbnb appealed to the Spanish legal system against the blocks, but the Madrid High Court of Justice has since ruled in favor of the first MAS resolution, which reportedly sought Airbnb to “immediately remove 5,800 tourist accommodation listings.”
The press release said that Bustinduy chose the listings to remove based on whether an ad includes the mandatory license or registration number, the business classification of the renter and if an ad has a fraudulent license number. The reasons for these stipulations come from regional regulations, whether a renter is also a legally recognized landlord and if license numbers posted match up with officially issued licenses.
The court ruling was reportedly driven by the laws in effect in the Spanish regions of Andalusia, Catalonia, Valencia province, Basque Country, Madrid and the Balearic Islands. Short-term rentals have been viewed in Spain as a cause of a growing housing affordability problem, and that areas which attract tourists are especially central to this situation.
Bustinduy said in a press conference Monday that “behind each of these 65,000 Airbnb ads is a home that used to belong to families, workers and students,” and that “They are now being evicted from their neighborhoods and watching their cities become theme parks for the profit of a few investment funds and large companies.”
According to official data, there are around 321,000 Spanish homes with holiday rental licenses as of November of 2024, which is 15% more than in 2020.
