Sustainable Tourism Law

PRIVATE HOLIDAY RENTALS IN SPANISH LAW 191 undoubtedly lead to problems. Of course, this does not mean that all tourists who stay in apartments cause noise and problems, but many instances of conflict are likely to occur, meaning the argument is completely valid: in these situations, public authorities do not have to wait for problems and trouble to surface but should rather anticipate problems, plan for them and prevent them from occurring. b) The other underlying problem to the ability of renting apartments to tourists is the professional requirement (or lack thereof ) of tourism service providers. Since the introduction of the old 1965 Statute regulating tourist companies and activities, Spanish tourism regulations have always required suppliers of any tourism service to be a professional or company registered with the authorities and holding the corresponding permits or certifications, in order to ensure the quality of the services provided. This way, non-professionals aren’t able to legally provide tourism services, regardless of them having the material resources to do so. Of course, if the rental of apartments is allowed, the professional requirement for the provision of accommodation services will cease to exist, since the service would be provided by individuals who are not hospitality professionals (the owner of the flat or even the tenant renting the flat to a tourist), which would possibly lead to inferior quality of services when compared to that provided by hotels. In order to solve this problem, some regional legislators require the owner or operator of a tourist property to register as a tourist accommodation company/ professional, as we shall see below. b) legalising this type of rental represents a substantial increase in the number of accommodation places Legalising the number of homes for tourism use in multi-family dwellings could represent an increase in new accommodation places, which is hard to embrace in many tourist areas: the aforementioned example from Catalonia is clearly indicative of this. As a matter of fact, introducing thousands upon thousands of new legalised accommodation places to the market would likely represent not only a major blow for the prices charged at regulated accommodation establishments but also a step back with regard to the policy undertaken over many years in several