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Spain makes Booking.com scrap 4,000 tourist rental ads / Photo: © AFP
Spain makes Booking.com scrap 4,000 tourist rental ads
Online hotel booking giant Booking.com on Friday said it had taken down thousands of advertisements in Spain in the leftist government's latest crackdown on illegal short-term tourist rentals.
A tourism boom has driven the buoyant Spanish economy but fuelled local concern about increasingly scarce and unaffordable housing, a top priority for the minority coalition government.
"We have deleted a very small number of adverts in Spain at the request of the consumer ministry for supplying valid licences," Booking.com said in a statement.
The Amsterdam-based platform said the non-compliant adverts represented "less than two percent" of its 200,000 properties in Spain and that it had always collaborated with the authorities to regulate the short-term rental sector.
The consumer rights ministry on Thursday announced Booking.com had scrapped 4,093 illegal ads, most of them located in the Atlantic Ocean's Canary Islands, a top tourist destination.
Spain has also ordered online tourist accommodation giant Airbnb to take down more than 65,000 adverts for violating licence rules and has been in a legal battle with the US-based company.
The world's second most-visited country hosted a record 94 million foreign tourists in 2024, but residents of hotspots such as Barcelona blame short-term rentals for the housing crisis and changing their neighbourhoods.
"We're making progress in the fight against a speculative model that expels people from their neighbourhoods and violates the right to a home," far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy wrote on social network Bluesky.
G.Miller--SFF
