A new tool to better avoid Airbnb drifts

During these summer holidays, you are probably a few to have chosen to rent an Airbnb. On the eve of the first departures, the subject was invited to the city hall of Strasbourg.

Thursday evening, the Bordeaux Matthieu Rouveyre, founder of
the Airbnb Observatory – and also elected county councilor of the Gironde – came to present its platform, first developed for Bordeaux but enlarged since at the national level.

The refusal that "Strasbourg becomes an amusement park "

A tool that will adopt the Strasbourg municipality to help in its control of the rental of tourist furniture. "The idea is to make a general point, be it Airbnb, Booking, Abritel or even The right corner," says the Deputy in charge of tourism Paul Meyer, who refuses that "Strasbourg becomes an amusement park , where cohabitation begins to go wrong, as it can be the case in Barcelona, ​​Berlin or Bordeaux. This observatory gives us an objective view of things: we are fighting for information from different sites, but it is very difficult. As is often the case with digital, there is a lot of opacity. "

Thus, this platform indicates that, according to its last statement (June 2018), Strasbourg (overflowing somewhat on the neighboring municipalities of the Eurométropole) counted 4,704 offers on Airbnb, or more precisely 1,341 rooms and 3,363 whole homes.

As many advantages as cons obviously. "It can be an badet: we must be able to find a complement to hotel activity during tourist peaks. It's a different offer that also attracts younger tourists, says Paul Meyer.
But there are also abuses, with multi-owners who buy five, six, seven properties for rent and which are the industrialization of Airbnb. With the risk of creating a complete deregulation of tourism structures. "

" It takes less mbad tourism and more quality tourism, sustainable, with people who stay longer and who spend locally.

Clearly, we must be able to control this phenomenon so that it remains useful. You could tell us that Strasbourg had already taken steps to frame the supply of tourist furniture. And you would be right to do so, since their rental is actually already framed: for example, when the unit is rented more than 120 days a year, the activity then becomes commercial and its owner must apply for a change of use authorization to the town hall. "Strasbourg has a very strict regulation that has allowed us to contain the rental already, and has a constructive dialogue with all actors," said the deputy.

But still it is necessary to be able to fully implement the regulations. Paul Meyer indicates that only one agent will be hired at the beginning of the school year to control the hirings of tourist lodgings. "But how do we know what we are going to control? Are we going to check the offers one by one? "Asks the person who announces besides a work with" hosts Airbnb "for the drafting of a charter of good practices in Strasbourg.