Horror stories on sites like https://www.airbnbhell.com/ are remarkable. Clearly these aren't typical host/guest experiences, but they seem more societally acceptable at hotels vs houses.
For some neighborhoods, Airbnb do make up a much larger share of the finite housing stock. You are adding hotel capacity where there hasn't been any zoned, so you have to make that capacity out of the finite housing stock available, limiting housing available to people who are longer term members of the local economy. That's the fundamental issue with it.
The two are related. Airbnb makes owning investment properties more lucrative. You can generally make more money and you don't have to worry about tenant protection laws that make eviction and raising rent harder for traditional long-term rentals.
And, the numbers from the pandemic in Dublin show it's quite a decent amount: the supply literally doubled once all those short-term rentals went to long-term because lack of tourism. And that's likely just the more over-leveraged owners, so there's still a lot that's being used as AirBnB than for the locals.
Tourists shouldn't feel entitled to live like locals; they're not locals.
Getting rid of airbnb doesn’t solve your problem because some new service for finding short-term tenants will take its place.
Restricting short-term rentals by regulation does solve your problem.
And the issue is these aren't short term rentals. They're long term rentals that are being used for short term. That's the whole issue. These were never short term until AirBnB made it super easy to make them so. Without AirBnB, or some other similar service, this isn't as big of an issue.
Also, in several cities AirBnB allows owners to operate short term rentals illegally because they don't enforce anything or aid in much enforcement at all.
Emphasis mine — this is my point. The barn door is open; the horses are gone. Get rid of Airbnb and others will follow. Music piracy didn’t magically stop with the end of Napster.
Shutting down large public companies with many stakeholders who benefit is both harder and only gets what you want a little bit and only for a little while.
Centres of some popular destinations (e.g. Nice) are now almost completely short term rental. The knock-on effect is that, even for the few long term residents the city is becoming less liveable because supermarkets are moving out and tourist shops are moving in.
Essentially, short term rentals are turning many old city centres into something akin to Disneyland, an attraction park with nobody actually living there, because they can't afford to.
That feels very subjective. I’d rather live in lively city than a ghost town.
In my opinion, there is such a thing as overtourism and we have entered that territory right before covid. Narrow medieval streets stuffed chock-full of people (sometimes I wondered how no one gets trampled to death). So, so many tourist traps selling weird shit. Flocks of Segway riders dispersing pedestrians. Locals living there for decades were pushed out by short term rentals.
Plus, the unhappy fact that especially young British guys arrived with only one objective, to get monumentally sloshed on (relatively) cheap booze. Then fight the police or random civilians, puke everywhere etc. Oh the joy, straight out of William Hogarth's morality pictures, only with modern clothing.
Tourism makes money, yes. But it can be overdone. And I wonder what the effects are for further development of the country. If you have a choice between studying something hard (engineering) and getting your money from neverending flocks of tourists that come your way, the end result may be societal laziness.
This is an old industrial country, a former industrial hotspot of the Austrian empire. A few very old cities (Telč, Český Krumlov) really live off tourism and would collapse without it, but Prague is a modern metropolis and mostly lives off normal economic activity, just like any other major city in Europe.
Not to mention all the differences between hotels and apartments to begin with in terms of amenities and such.