Airbnb: Paris files complaint and demands record fines for ‘hotels in disguise’

A rag is on fire between the city of Paris and Airbnb. It must be said that this is not new: City Hall has long criticized the platform for not respecting the law by allowing owners to rent vacant housing at a high price all year round. And he repeatedly threatened the platform to take the case to court. A law in France requires owners not to present their property on such a platform more than 120 days a year. As such, it’s a limit that many owners cross without the platform preventing them from doing so.

Airbnb: complaint against “secret hotels”

“We cannot accept that Airbnb and others do not respect the law”, Paris mayor explains Anne Hidalgo in JDD columns. Our controllers identified the first salvo of 1,000 illegal advertisements, each fined 12,500 euros. The total addition can then reach a maximum of 12.5 million euros. “The aim is to put an electric shock to an end to these brutal rentals that distort certain neighborhoods of Paris,” he said.

The measure does not punish according to the mayor “Parisans who rent a house for a few days a year to butter the spinach”. But it must make it possible to overcome “problem [des] a large number of property owners and platforms that welcome them, accomplices, who rent apartments to tourists all year round without declaring them”. Still, Airbnb probably has no intention of letting it go. Paris is Airbnb’s largest marketplace in the world, with nearly 65,000 listings. It is also one of the capitals where the competition between rental platforms is strongest.

Company spokesperson quoted by Reuters He added that Airbnb has implemented measures to help users in Paris comply with the applicable rules, but the rules in Paris apply. “ineffective, disproportionate and against European rules”. As Anne Hidalgo noted, a fine of 12.5 million euros “record” just based on “first salvo” illegal advertisements We’ll see if this amount will be enough of a deterrent against a transnational firm that generated more than a billion dollars in turnover in 2018 and is undoubtedly planning to be number 1 in Paris.