They talked about short-term rentals

On Wednesday, June 5, another meeting of the working group representing the 14 most tourist oriented European cities was held at the City Office of Krakow. This time Krakow was the host.

Anna Korfel-Jasińska –Deputy Mayor of the City of Krakow for education, sport and tourism, met representatives from Amsterdam, Bordeaux and Berlin. Paris participated in the meeting via a tele-transmission connection. The theme of the meeting was the phenomenon of short-term tourist rental.

During the meeting, a joint statement of cities was formulated, in which short-term tourist rental is taking on an unprecedented scale and increasingly affects the housing stock. This is the next stage of works aimed at developing legal solutions that should be included in the EU directives. The developed draft position will be forwarded to all involved cities and after their acceptance, the cities will start talks with the European Commission.

The rapid development of the tourism economy combined with the development of digital technologies and the emergence of peer-to-peer digital platforms has brought both positive and negative effects of the transformations. Uncontrolled, including illegal, renting contributes to the gentrification of city centres, increase in housing prices and housing shortages, problems with public order and broadly understood safety. What is more, the specificity of the way the platform is run by its administrator causes unequal competition between entrepreneurs running a registered business in the field of accommodation services and other persons who did not report such activities. It affects not only the competition rules of legally operating companies, but also does not guarantee the protection of consumer rights.