Airbnb demands Spain adopt different rules for tourist rentals in rural areas

The company has even defended the potential of short-term tourist rentals - a real enemy of Spain's anti-tourism movement last year - to decentralise tourism and boost economic development in rural areas, essentially demanding a recalibration of the Spanish tourism sector and rules to reflect it.

Town halls and authorities have tried to clamp down on Airbnbs and other tourist rentals in recent years. On a national level, Airbnb was recently forced to take down 65,000 listings by the Spanish government, and Madrid flagged a further 55,000 tourist lets which have not been properly registered.

However, the company claims some areas of Spain could benefit from deregulation on tourist rentals. According to data compiled by Airbnb, less than 1 percent of Spanish municipalities have more than 100,000 inhabitants, yet they account for 40 percent of the population and a large part of tourism.

"Tourism in Spain is hyper-concentrated," says Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago, General Manager for Spain and Portugal at Airbnb. "We have become accustomed to this hyper-concentration, but it is an anomaly."

Writing in La Razón, Inma Bermejo states that although Spain is the second most popular country in the world in terms of tourist visits, Spain's rural destinations "receive one seventh as many as French rural municipalities."

"But for there to be tourism, there has to be accommodation," Bermejo notes. A fair point. Many of these rural areas of Spain, however — known in Spanish as España Vaciada (Empty Spain) — do not have the capacity for hotels.

Around three-quarters of municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants have no traditional accommodation but there are private homes that remain empty for a good part of the year and could be converted into tourist accommodation.

Forty-five percent of vacant housing in Spain is in municipalities of less than 10,000 inhabitants and 70 percent of accommodation in rural areas in Spain has spare capacity.

Airbnb argues that tourism can help turn these areas into assets for their owners and for local businesses without putting pressure on housing, as short-term rentals in rural towns alone represent only 0.6 percent of the housing stock.

Airbnb's Rodríguez de Santiago also questioned the fact that in Spain there are no regulations to differentiate between individuals who rent out their homes from those owners who carry out large-scale business activities, threatening rural development.

He therefore called for a differentiated regulatory treatment for short-term rentals in rural municipalities or those at risk of depopulation, establishing rural areas exempt from regulatory restrictions that do make sense in urban areas with stressed rental markets.

Airbnb has in recent weeks used France as an example. The neighbouring country has a digital registry, allows renting first and second homes, distinguishes between occasional rentals (defined as less than 120 days per year) and professional rentals (120 days per year or more) and does not require unnecessary administrative tasks.

Liberalising rules in rural Spain would also help a key element of Spanish culture and tradition that many Spaniards, no matter where they're from, feel close to.

"There is a lot of rural Spain. We are a country of villages. Sixty percent of Spaniards are one or two generations away from a village origin. We have a strong connection with the rural world," Rodríguez de Santiago told the media.

READ MORE: New tourism promo of Spain's interior clashes with lack of international flights

This comes as the Spanish government has launched a tourism campaign to try and attract travellers to rural and inland Spain and away from the traditional hotspots.

La Razón cites polling data showing that Spaniards are increasingly keen to discover lesser-known destinations (90 percent of Spaniards are considering visiting them), to avoid the busiest and best-known destinations (51 percent now consider them saturated) and to access cheaper holidays (38 percent consider the best-known destinations too expensive).

READ MORE: Why Spain's rural holiday lets are unlikely to be targeted by crackdown on Airbnb