Airbnb has reached an agreement with the Spanish government to remove listings for holiday rentals in Spain that do not have an official registration code.
During a meeting held on Tuesday at the Spanish ministry responsible for housing and urban planning, Airbnb agreed to detect and remove listings for tourist accommodations that lack the valid registration numbers, as well as provide monthly reports – starting in August – detailing the active listings hosted on its platform. ALSO READ: Spanish government makes Booking.com remove over 4,000 tourist rental ads.
The monthly reports will include national and regional registration codes that prove the active listings’ legality.
As part of the deal, Airbnb will take down listings that fail to meet the standards of the new national registry for tourist rentals. ALSO READ: Spain orders Airbnb to remove over 65,000 ‘illegal’ holiday rental listings.
In such cases, hosts will receive prior notification and be granted 10 working days to correct any issues before removal. The only exception applies when a property’s official registration number has already been revoked – in that situation, the listing will be taken down within 48 hours of notification from the ministry.
At present, Airbnb requires hosts to input a valid registration code in a mandatory field on the platform, ideally the new national registration number (NRA). Soon, this will be updated to include two separate fields – one for the NRA and another for the regional code. ALSO READ: Consumer affairs ministry identifies over 15,000 illegal tourist flats in Madrid.
With this agreement, Spain becomes the first EU country to implement the bloc’s rules on a single registration system for short-term rentals, introduced through the EU’s Digital Single Entry Point.
Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago, general manager of Airbnb in Spain, said that the agreement highlights Airbnb’s dedication to ‘transparency and good collaboration’ with public institutions.
Spain’s national registry for tourist and seasonal rentals – established under Royal Decree 1312/2024 and part of a new digital one-stop shop—became mandatory on 1 July, following a six-month transition period after its introduction at the start of the year.
The new regulations in Spain stem from an EU Regulation adopted by the European Parliament and Council on 11 April 2024. The regulation is directly binding for all EU member states and obliges them to implement a framework for managing short-term rentals of furnished properties.
The goal is to combat fraud and reduce the impact that tourist apartments have on citizens’ access to long-term housing, particularly in ‘tense housing zones’, according to a statement from the ministry. ALSO READ: Barcelona wants to revoke all city’s 10,101 tourist apartment licences by Nov 2028.
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