Journey platforms need to transfer away from vacationer areas in seek for sustainability – EURACTIV.com

Because the Fee and native authorities search to handle over-tourism in populous European cities, short-term rental tech platforms are encouraging stays in additional distant and rural areas.

The expansion of journey platforms like Reserving.com, Airbnb and Expedia has been a supply of a lot debating.

On the one hand, on-line platforms have been seen as leading to significant economic advantages in decreasing transaction prices, permitting for extra environment friendly useful resource allocation, and offering dependable data and real-time costs aligned with market circumstances.

On the opposite, the growth of short-term leases pushed by these platforms has accelerated gentrification in key city areas. Evidence also shows that growing the share of lettings like Airbnbs in an space drives up long-term rents. 

“You must discover a steadiness for town. You need a metropolis the place you have got the Airbnbs. However you additionally need to have the people who reside within the metropolis. That’s one thing socially crucial,” Carlos Moedas, mayor of Lisbon, mentioned on the Internet Summit final month.

Tourism sustainability

Brief-term leases are sometimes blamed for the ‘touristification’ of the centres of cities akin to Amsterdam, Barcelona and Venice, with severe implications for the native communities and the setting, resulting in native authorities regulating tourism entries.

Sharing the stage with Moedas was Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and Chief Technique Workplace at Airbnb, who acknowledged that an excessive amount of tourism in a too small place might be overwhelming.

“And but, how can we disperse that?” he requested.

In response, Airbnb has redesigned its journey search, shifting from a configuration by which it asks individuals initially the place it needs to go, to 1 the place the search pertains to classes primarily based on a selected expertise.

In 2021, the corporate launched a ‘versatile’ search, with the view of shifting the vacationer flows away from the standard ‘hotspots’, to stop them from overheating. According to an Airbnb report, in 2019, the highest 10 most visited cities on Airbnb within the EU accounted for 20% of all journeys to Europe, a determine that dropped to 14% in 2022.

Equally, Airbnb states {that a} pattern that began through the pandemic – particularly stays in rural areas – is more and more well-liked, rising by 55% within the final three years. The report discovered that the availability is adjusting to this new demand, with a rising variety of Airbnbs in ‘nationwide parks’, ‘Farm Stays’, or comparable.

For Blecharczyk, these figures are “a reminder of how highly effective platforms are to form client behaviour.”

Business pattern

The European Journey Fee (ETC), an EU-funded observatory, found that whereas Europe’s hottest vacation spot international locations have already bounced again and surpassed pre-pandemic ranges, “this demand continues to be leaning in the direction of non-urban short-term leases, which have gained a market share of roughly 10% over the course of the pandemic.”

The examine signifies that trip rental reservations for city areas dropped from 66% in January 2019 to 52% in September 2022, while reservations for rural areas have gone from 23% to 31% in the identical time interval.

“What we discovered is an rising consensus amongst travellers on desirous to keep away from busy and over-visited locations,” wrote Reserving’s chief lobbyist, Peter Lochbihler in an op-ed, stressing that over 1 / 4 of its customers selected to journey to a much less well-liked vacation spot within the final yr.

A report sponsored by Reserving.com final yr, discovered that on-line platforms permit vacationers to entry extra rural areas in a approach that accommodations merely can’t and are greatest positioned to reply to this rising demand.

In 2021, the Expedia Group printed data indicating that probably the most searched areas in France post-COVID-19 are extremely rural areas within the south of the nation, with two-thirds of French households in search of non-urban vacation locations.

Managing change

Cities are additionally taking part in their elements in supporting a shift of short-term leases away from metropolis centres.

As an example, Barcelona put collectively a Particular Vacationer Lodging Plan (PEUAT) to strictly “management the establishing of vacationer lodging within the metropolis and guaranteeing residents’ fundamental rights”, in line with metropolis companies.

“Individuals need to journey once more, uncover new locations and cultural heritage, however the pandemic has modified fashions of tourism in the direction of locations which can be nearer and fewer massified,” mentioned Alfonso Rueda Valenzuela, President of the Galicia area at a convention on sustainable tourism in June.

In 2021, the European Parliament additionally adopted an own-initiative report for an EU technique for sustainable tourism, which “highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shift within the nature of travellers’ calls for in the direction of secure, clear and extra sustainable tourism.”

The parliamentary decision invited the European Fee to operationalise the European Tourism Indicators System, a instrument to offer governments with real-time knowledge on tourism locations to watch tourism’s financial, social and environmental impression.

The system additionally seeks to convey authorized certainty by the shareability of short-term rental knowledge from the platform to empower native authorities to manage the dangerous impacts of over-tourism.

“To behave properly, short-term private and non-private entities want quantitative and qualitative metric knowledge”, MEP Claudia Monteiro de Aguiar advised EURACTIV.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald/Alice Taylor]