Sustainable Tourism Law

DRAFT UNWTO CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION OF TOURISTS 385 (b)’Accommodation service provider’ means the tourism service provider or the natural or legal person who sells or supplies standalone accommodation services; For the purpose of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of this Annex, intermediaries facilitating the provision of standalone accommodation services are considered accommodation services providers” It is extremely relevant the fact that the draft Convention, for the first time in a regulatory instrument, declares that intermediaries facilitating the provision of standalone accommodation services are considered accommodation services providers. In fact, the statute of these intermediaries plays a key role in the balance of the entire market and its apparent unregulated situation distorts the market rules and significantly increases the potential of uncovered damages. II. THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF ACCOMMODATION Accommodation plays a key role in tourism. In fact, it is present at the heart of the concept of tourism, given the fact that usually a tourist trip implies at least one night out of the permanent residence, either for leisure or business. In the words of the draft Convention “Tourist means a person taking a trip which includes an overnight stay to a main destination outside his/her usual environment, for less than a year…” (Article 3a) It is usually said that the most important industry working in the accommodation part of tourism is the hotel industry, but… Is it so? All the data suggests that a significant amount of capacity has been provided by the sharing accommodation 2 and, most importantly, that this form of supply is very flexible. A study by The World Economic Forum and MIT using Airbnb data demonstrates that over the course of the 2016 Olympics in Rio, 48,000 active listings offered through Airbnb housed 85,000 of the city’s estimated 500,000 visitors. A substantial portion of these listings were created in the run up to the Olympics. For the city to have provided accommodation for this surge of visitors, it would have needed to build 257 hotels 3 . In fact, the numbers are impressive. Airbnb is one of the best known online platforms to rent accommodation: 640.000 hosts; activity in 57.000 cities and 191 countries. HomeAway, another 2 Also called home sharing. 3 The World Economic Forum and MIT, Understanding the Sharing Economy, 2016.