Belgium: EU cities urge Brussels to take action on Airbnb data

Laurens Ivens, deputy mayor of Amsterdam, announced at the end of a two-day holiday rental conference that the cities involved will demand platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com are legally obliged to share data with regulators, and new ‘quality rules’ mean hosts cannot be anonymous.

A spokeswoman for Amsterdam city told DutchNews.nl that it is spending €4 million a year in policing casual holiday rentals, including scraping data from the web to see whether hosts are breaking the current rules of a maximum 60 days per year.

‘We will ask the commission to look at quality rules for platforms, so that a platform cannot only put anonymous hosts on its site but it is clear who is offering houses,’ said Ivens to journalists.

 

Share data

‘It’s crazy that all sorts of products have quality rules, so why not ensure we know who is offering a house? If you want to have a platform operating in Europe, you must make it known who the landlord is – and then in Amsterdam we can decide if it is for 30 days or in Paris, for 120 days. It can be done via a registration number on the site, for instance.’

The second demand from the cities, including Barcelona, Madrid, Vienna, Paris, Reykjavik, Krakow and Brussels, is that platforms share data with them, on demand.

‘Platforms can now avoid sharing data with us, and we find that crazy,’ added Ivens. ‘The data includes who the landlords are and who the renters are: I find this very relevant, but the moment I ask platforms for this, they refuse on the basis that it is protected by European e-commerce rules.’

He added that, particularly with the European General Data Protection Regulation which comes into effect in April, this kind of requirement needs to be dealt with on a European level.

Addressing the conference delegates in English at the end of the second annual event, he said: ‘We have the same problems and we have focused in these sessions on enforcement. Tourism isn’t new for us, but the volume of tourists is. Of course all these tourists bring in a lot of money but they also bring a lot of disturbance.

Abuse

‘The constant noise of suitcase wheels on the pavement outside, residents losing their sense of community because of all of the strangers in their building, and large groups of tourists in too-small apartments bothering neighbours – that has to stop, in every city.’

The Socialist Party alderman added, building on a theme he has already talked about: ‘An additional problem is that illegal holiday rentals are reducing the number of properties available on the housing market. Above all, it is my responsibility to ensure that residents in Amsterdam can rent or buy properties at reasonable prices and that Amsterdam stays the wonderful city it is.’

Two other cities, Berlin and London, which could not attend, will be asked if they want to sign the letter and Ivens intends to send it to the European Commission by February.

 

Learn More

Personal Data Protection Policy

International Union of Tenants (IUT) will use the information you provide on this form to provide you updates on policies, events, publications and research related to our activities. This data is also used to customize your experience of our website and to improve our services.

At any time you have the right to access, correct and delete your personal information and object to the processing of your personal information. You can use these rights by sending an e-mail to the following address info@iut.nu.

International Union of Tenants (IUT) undertakes to respect and protect your personal information and personal integrity in accordance with applicable laws, industry rules and other relevant standards. We never disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent.

Accept