STR Unpacked

It's been a rough week in our space. EU Regulation 2024/1028 went live. Portugal's licences are vanishing. Italy's tax regime just got heavier. And Airbnb's Summer Release quietly absorbed half the services that used to set good operators apart. So here's a story going the other way. Albania. Non-EU. Record 12.5 million visitors in 2025. Non-resident overnight stays up nearly 38% year on year. The...

Airbnb's Summer Release dropped this week. The travel press is losing its mind over car rentals and grocery delivery. They're missing the actual story. Every "new service" Airbnb just launched is something good operators already do. The stocked fridge. The luggage storage. The airport pickup. Airbnb just turned your differentiator into a feature in their app. And the new AI tools? They raise the f...

Tomorrow the EU's biggest STR regulation in history goes live. One law. 27 countries. One system. Except not really. Airbnb came out yesterday and said it plainly: not every Member State is ready. Platforms are looking at "27 different systems" on day one. Some portals will work tomorrow. Some won't. Where they don't, the regulation's verify-and-suspend teeth don't bite. But here's the bit being m...

The EU regulation goes live in two days. Everyone's checking their registration numbers. Almost no one is checking the question that actually decides who carries the loss. Who is the legal host? In France, your property management company can register using its own SIRET. The PM is the host. In Spain, the registration is tied to the owner's land registry record. The owner is the host. Same regulat...

I sat down with Georgina Kennerknecht Biosca, founder of Liliho, and honestly she's one of the most captivating founders I've had on the podcast. Georgina is relatively new to short-term rentals but brings a serious track record from outside the industry, and you can feel it in how she's approaching the problem. We got into: → Why DIY AI keeps failing property managers → Where AI's real limits sit...

951 million guest nights. That was the EU short-term rental market in 2025. But the headlines all go to the same five countries. Spain. France. Italy. Germany. Portugal. Here's what Eurostat just published that nobody's talking about. In Liechtenstein, Iceland and Malta, over 95% of every short-term rental booking is an international guest. The highest concentration of foreign demand anywhere in E...

Yesterday's King's Speech introduced the Overnight Visitor Levy Bill as standalone legislation. Mayors in England will get the power to charge a tourist tax on overnight stays. West Yorkshire and York have already said yes. Manchester and London are expected to follow. National projections? £1.2 billion a year. Here's the part the headlines are missing. The operator is the legally liable party. Yo...

Every time a European city cracks down on short-term rentals, hotel revenues go up. That's not opinion. That's the data. Amsterdam: Airbnb listings down 54% (2019–2024). Hotel RevPAR now ~10% above 2019. Analysts call it a "quasi-monopoly." Barcelona: phasing out all 10,101 tourist apartment licences by 2028. Hotel ADR H1 2025 over €195, up 3.1% YoY. Florence: introduced the CIN code. 20–30% of ST...

Paris just issued nearly €1M in illegal Airbnb fines. In three months. For context: 2024 total: €1.3M 2025 total: €2.4M Q1 2026 alone: ~€1M And that's before a €585,000 judgment lands in Q2 against one SCI that converted a former social housing building in the 9th arrondissement into 11 Airbnbs. Third corporate landlord fine in ten weeks. Why now? → New mayor Emmanuel Grégoire ran on tightening ST...

TowneBank has sold Towne Vacations to Belcrest Vacations Acquisitions. Cash. No earn-out. 4.3x revenue. Belcrest didn't exist a year ago. It's a newly-formed platform backed by Alpine Investors — the PE firm that owns AirDNA. 3,000 vacation rentals. 340 staff. Five regional brands across the US Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. And it's part of a pattern. ViewStay. Avari. Stayterra. Away Day. Monarch. A...

A bailiff walked into Booking.com 's Amsterdam HQ this week. With IT specialists. And started seizing records. Court-ordered. On behalf of 15,000+ European hotels. Here's why. For 20 years, Booking forced hotels to sign price parity clauses. No cheaper rates on your own site. No undercutting anywhere. Commissions: 15, 20, 30 percent. In 2024, the European Court of Justice ruled those clauses illeg...

Marcus Räder is the founder of Hostaway one of the only true unicorns in the short-term rental industry. But the path there wasn't a straight line. I sat down with him at SCALE España for a wide-ranging conversation about his journey: the businesses he built before Hostaway, the lessons that shaped how he runs the company today, where he sees the STR market heading, and the bigger questions he's w...

Last week I was invited out to Scale España by the team at Scale to run live podcasts onsite and what an event to be part of. The team built something special. The right people, the right rooms, the right conversations and a level of energy you only get when an industry knows it's at a turning point. I sat down on the mic with some of the real needle-movers in the Spanish market. Operators navigat...

Two weeks today, EU Regulation 2024/1028 goes live. Every headline will be about Barcelona, Amsterdam, fines, crackdowns. Here's what nobody's saying. While the cameras point south, look north. Norway: revenue up 68% YoY. Listings up 27%. Switzerland: luxury demand up 14%. UK: summer pacing up 15-16% on AirDNA data. Poland up 37%. Czech Republic up 30%. Belgium and Germany up 24%. None of these ma...

Fifteen days before EU Regulation 2024/1028 takes effect, George Mavros, their Head of EU Government Affairs, went public with three demands. Clear implementation timelines from every member state. Harmonised technical standards across all 27 countries. Proportionality guardrails to prevent blanket city bans. This is the same Airbnb that got hit with a 64 million euro fine in Spain four months ago...

19 days until EU Regulation 2024/1028 goes live. And the platforms are worried it won't work. MLex reported yesterday that Booking, Airbnb and Expedia are openly concerned about the regulation's effectiveness. The reason? Member states are behind on building the registration infrastructure the whole thing depends on. Spain and Italy: already late. France: scrambling. Poland: implementing law not y...

Cyclades — Mykonos, Santorini, Paros: → RevPAR +41% → Revenue per property +41% → Occupancy +33% → Average nightly rate +3.95% Ionian Islands: → RevPAR +36% → Revenue per property +37% → Occupancy +23% → Average nightly rate +2.82% Read those numbers again. This is not a price-led recovery. After two years of correction in the headline islands, hosts have stopped chasing 2022 rates. The market is...

Valencia just rewrote the playbook on holiday rentals. No night cap. No licence freeze. A hard density ceiling written into planning law. The numbers: → 2% max holiday rentals per neighbourhood → 8% max tourist beds per district (hotels included) → 15% max ground-floor tourist use → Effective April 2026 Why it's a big deal: It's not a tourism rule. It's a planning rule. That makes it harder to cha...

That's how long Poland has to build a national short-term rental registration system before EU Regulation 2024/1028 takes effect on 20 May. The draft act was submitted to the Polish parliament on 29 December. First reading: 17 April. Today: still no clarity on who keeps the register, what verification looks like, or what landlords need to provide. The fines? Up to 50,000 złoty - around 12,000 euro...

The conversation covers the accidental entry into the short-term rental industry, the transition from property management to technology, and the growth and expansion of the Scale brand. It explores the challenges and experiences of the guest, from adapting to the 2008 financial crisis to founding a PMS company and organizing industry events. The conversation delves into the impact of cultural diff...

In 23 days, EU Regulation 2024/1028 takes effect. Every short-term rental in the European Union needs a registration number. Platforms have to verify them, share booking data monthly, and pull listings that don't comply. There are only two major short-term rental events left in Europe before the deadline. Both are in Spain. 📍 SCALE España Madrid, 28–29 April 📍 VITUR Summit Málaga, 13–14 May SCAL...

On April 15th, a Paris court handed down the largest illegal short-term rental penalty in the city's history. A property company had bought a building in central Paris previously social housing and converted all 11 flats into Airbnbs. No permission. No change-of-use authorisation. The fine: €585,000. That's nearly half of what Paris collected in illegal rental penalties across the entire year of 2...

Andy Fenner is stepping down as CEO of the STAA. And his parting message to the sector is sharper than you'd expect. Yesterday at the Short Stay Summit, he used his final opening speech to tell the room: UK short-term rentals are no longer on the margins of tourism policy. They're at the top table. Now the sector needs to stop being defensive and start speaking with confidence. He's right. Because...

1,300 people just walked into Old Billingsgate. The entire STR industry is at the Short Stay Summit today. Airbnb. Booking. Expedia. Every major PMS. Every major operator. And two days ago quietly Airbnb changed the game on all of them. On April 20th, a new clause went live in their privacy policy. Section 4.2. It gives them the legal right to process your data to "develop and improve our AI." Tha...

Six weeks before EU data-sharing goes live, Airbnb just launched its most important PR campaign in history. Almost nobody's talking about it. In March, Airbnb published a report reframing short-term rentals as "essential housing infrastructure." Not tourism. Housing. The argument: STRs aren't the problem. They're the solution — for students, medical patients, workers in transition, and families di...