Barcelona will have the data of Airbnb advertisers starting June 1st

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"On June 1st we will have finished a cycle, we will have done the duties that the citizens of Barcelona gave us," says Arnaldo Muñoz, General Manager in Spain and Portugal of Airbnb, at the company's headquarters in the Eixample.

On that day, he says the platform will have no illegal tourist apartments, as claimed by the City Council for months. But a new tool will also be launched, which will be presented tomorrow to the municipal representatives, to make it much more difficult for the "bad actors" (that is, those who act against the regulations) to be able to advertise on the platform. The registration system will introduce some changes, among others, so that the host will have to authorize the transfer of data to the administration.

"Now the City can not access it directly, but from this system they will have the ability to dump that data," says Muñoz.

Data - such as the name and ID or passport of the advertiser, the address of the property or email - will be noted almost automatically.

"This will exceptionally facilitate the inspection work of the City Council," adds the head of Airbnb, who also explains that there will be changes when registering a property.

There will be a new field in which users will have to enter a code that corresponds to their property - as long as there are no exceptions, such as for those rentals of more than 30 days, boats, or people who want to share rooms in their home. If it is not, it will not have this code. If you try to falsify it, the platform will detect it, and if it does not do it, the municipal inspection services will as they will have access to this data. The new tool has been created by the company exclusively for Barcelona. The project started at the end of last summer.

The company asks to stop being "demonized" and advocates to deepen public-private collaboration

"At the end of the summer, the City Council spoke of 6,000 floors of undeclared tourist use, on June 1st. All those floors are going to be outside Airbnb," says the manager in Spain and Portugal of the multinational, which includes in the veto the new list of 2,577 advertisements for illegal tourist flats that the City Council moved last week.

But the head of Airbnb takes advantage of the finding that "they have done their homework" to ask the Consistory several questions. The first, which requires other similar companies do as they have demanded of them, but also to stop "demonizing" the tourism accommodation platform and its activity.

"40% of mobile visitors were in the city through Airbnb," says Muñoz, who says that the platform, in addition to having one of its headquarters in the city in which 29 people work, also employs thousands of people who support it. The director of Airbnb asks that the dialogue and collaboration that the company and the City Council have been holding for a year now be understood "more broadly and accelerated" as of June 1st.

"Platforms like Airbnb can be allies. If the city wants some neighborhoods to be developed touristically, we can add. If the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona wants to develop the whole metropolitan area, we can do it," defends the person in charge of the platform, who advocates deepening public-private collaboration.

"The bad actors in this year and a half have distracted a lot with respect to what is the essence of Airbnb, which is precisely that individuals from Barcelona can have a source of income and that they can benefit from tourism in the same way that they benefit what are the most classic and traditional companies," defends the Airbnb executive. "Beyond the judicialization path, let's enter into a dialogue channel."

Waiting for the Generalitat

Arnaldo Muñoz defends the Airbnb model: he points out that it is a way of sharing the benefits of tourism, the way that many citizens reach the end of the month. 50% of users of the platform, explains the manager of the multinational, do so to have a source of additional income, as they explain in their registration. Muñoz insists again and again on the need to work together with the administration. Neither they have just arrived nor nothing indicates that they will disappear, rather the opposite. "We hope that the Government, when the Government is formed, approves the decree of collaborative economy that recognizes the opportunity for individuals to make their house available to travelers whether they are in it or when they go on vacation, to obtain extra income," says the Airbnb executive.