The Sharing Lobby

The regulation or non-regulation of holiday lets has reached the highest levels of Spanish governmental administration. The national competition commission is addressing the issue, taking account of the explosion of the P2P phenomenon, i.e. web portals which place consumers in direct contact with providers, be they apartments for rent or other types of service. As the issue climbs towards the top of the regulatory heap, companies engaged in P2P in Spain have formed an association to lobby government. It includes the most celebrated of the P2P websites, Airbnb, plus other accommodation websites and, for example, car sharing sites. It does not include Uber, however. This taxi and transport network has been condemned in Spain for providing unfair competition. A judge has ordered Uber to cease all activities in Spain. The French are to ban Uber from the start of next year.

But if Uber is a sort of black sheep of the P2P community, other web operators are craving legitimacy and have so formed their association - "Sharing España". Much of this sharing, holiday accommodation and so on, is considered by opponents to represent an underground economy, which this week was said to equate to 22% of the Spanish tourism sector. How such a figure is arrived at is unclear, but the secretary-general of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation, Ramón Estalella, asserted that 22% it was. The hoteliers want tough action on any form of what they see as unfair or illegal competition, but arriving at regulations is far from straightforward. As the director-general for tourism in the region of La Rioja has quite rightly noted, attaining uniform regulation in all regions of Spain would be "unworkable". She has thus reinforced the fact that the devolution of responsibilities for holiday let regulation to the regions by national government is itself all but unworkable; the consequence of this is that there are seventeen separate regulatory frameworks.

The holiday lets sector is now trying to fight back against the hoteliers and their claims. The association for apartments for tourist use (APTUR) in the Balearics has argued that holiday lets generate more employment than the hoteliers do, both directly, e.g. through cleaning services, and indirectly - car hire, restaurants, shops, etc. This lobby in the Balearics has, until recently, been fairly quiet, unlike in the Canaries, and the association for holiday rentals there held its first forum on Monday at which a video was unveiled. It is called "Holiday rental: the tourist decides" and features personal accounts by tourists as to why they opt for non-hotel accommodation. In addition, Homeaway, an online holiday rental marketplace similar to Airbnb, has teamed up with the university in Salamanca to create the first "barometer" of holiday lets activity in Spain and specifically in the Canaries, where the economic impact of the sector is said to have been worth 817 million euros over the past three years. The Canaries are, unlike the Balearics, edging towards a permissive form of regulation akin perhaps to that of Catalonia. And that region, the only part of Spain which has a tourist tax, anticipates generating 10% of revenue from the tax in 2015 from accommodation which has been regularised and which may legitimately form part of P2P sites' offers. Catalonia is looking forward to raising 44 million euros from tax next year, meaning that holiday lets will account for approximately four million. This is revenue which is used for tourism promotion purposes.