Sustainable Tourism Law

COMPETITION LAW VERSUS SPATIAL PLANNING 307 environmental impacts and allows for the existence of both the right to decent housing and the right to financially exploit a residence. Some regulations – like, for example, Barcelona’s Special Urban Plan for Tourism Accommodations ( Plan Especial Urbanístico de Alojamientos Turísticos ) ratified on 27 January 2017 or Law 6/2017 of 31 July modifying Law 8/2012 of 19 July on tourism in the Balearic Islands and the commercialization of vacation rentals in residences – put emphasis on the principle of sustainable and urban spatial development, as well as the connection between urban planning, housing and tourism, concretely, on the need for urban and spatial planning instruments to set the limits of areas apt for tourism commercialization. That is to say, they ensure that these instruments and their classic urban planning techniques (such as zoning) are used for planning in urban areas to confront the explosion of collaborative accommodations. But they can do more than just this. Along with these traditional instruments, they make use of other instruments from different areas of administrative interventions that deal with housing policies or general involvement in economic activities, such as establishing capacity limits, demanding the provision of domestic services (individual meters for water, electricity or gas), requiring owners’ boards of apartment buildings to reach an agreement to allow for the commercialization of vacation rentals, prohibiting the offer of vacation rentals in dwellings that are less than five years old or prohibiting the creation of contracts to market rooms for these kinds of stays. All of these measures imply, to greater or lesser degrees, restricting access to the commercialization of dwellings for tourism purposes, and they could lead to a clash between the principle of freedom of enterprise, the right to own property, competition laws and the guarantee of market unity, as has been pointed out by the competition authorities and Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, which in many of its reports 2 asserts that similar issues can lead to unjust and disproportionate restrictions that are neither in line with the Services Directive nor transposition law, reasons for which it suggests self- -regulation or deregulation. 2 See the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV, by its Spanish initials): Estudio sobre los nuevos modelos de prestación de servicios y la economía colaborativa , of March 2016 (preliminary results E/CNMV/004/15); Informe económico sobre el Decreto 113/2015, de 22 de mayo, por el que se aprueba el Reglamento de las viviendas vacacionales de la Comunidad de Canarias –CNMV LA/03/15. From the Catalan Competition Authority (ACCO, by its Catalan initials): Nota sobre la aprobación inicial del Plan Especial Urbanístico de Alojamientos Turísticos (PEUAT) de Barcelon a, ref. no. OB 26/2016; Transacción entre iguales (p2p). Un paso adelante , May 2016, ref. no. ES 10/2015. And see Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness: Informe sobre el proyecto de modificación de la Ley 8/2012, de 19 de julio, de turismo, relativa a la comercialización de estancias turísticas en viviendas, de las Islas Baleares , from 24 May 2017.