Last year the Balearic government sent a loud and clear warning to British tourists. If you misbehave in 2024, you will be sent home. The crazy ballcon sport could come with a price tag of £30,000. Some package resorts in Magaluf are now imposing a strict six-drink limit for British guests (under the ‘Law of Excess’), which could extend across all the islands. Last year, plainclothes officers patrolled resorts to keep things under control.
But tourism chiefs said this month that the Balearic Islands’ biggest problem, far bigger than the follies of a few drunken gentlemen from Braintree, is the issue of illegal holiday rentals that do not comply with local regulations or do not have the correct permits .
In October last year, Marta Vidal, the Balearic Islands Housing Minister, said there were as many as 235,000 unregulated holiday homes on the islands, as reported in the Mallorca Daily Bulletin. No one knows the exact figure, but what we do know from the most recent census is that there are approximately 26,500 legal holiday homes on the islands. Even someone who has just consumed their sixth allotted mojito can see that the balance seems a little off.
How did we get here? The Balearic Islands receive just under 14 million international tourists every year – that’s more than the whole of Egypt. The demand for holiday accommodation is high. The platforms to rent out your home are there. And with an affordable housing crisis and rising costs of living on the islands, some locals are trying to earn extra income during peak months. In other cases, the landlord is a non-resident who has purchased a property as a second home (there are 105,000 “unoccupied” properties spread across the Balearic Islands).
Regardless of who hosts, local protest groups say the uncontrolled surge in vacation rentals has led to a spike in car rentals on the islands, traffic congestion and a depletion of local amenities.
Mallorca’s tourism leaders have had enough. At last week’s Exceltur Forum, ahead of the Fitur tourism conference, Gabriel Escarrer, the CEO of Meliá Hotels International, said that “the uncontrolled growth of tourist rental properties” is Mallorca’s biggest problem.
Jorge Marichal, the president of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation, agreed. He said hoteliers have been unfairly targeted by local discontent: “I feel imprisoned for a murder I didn’t commit. Problems have arisen that are attributed to us, but are the fault of the holiday homes.”
Even Steve Heapy, the head of smiley Jet2 Holidays, Britain’s largest tour operator, stepped up and focused on one specific holiday rental company. “If governments were to knock on Airbnb properties door to door, demanding licensing and payment of fees and fining those who don’t comply, the problem would end immediately,” he said.
An Airbnb spokesperson said: “It is always disappointing – but not surprising – to see mass tourism companies complaining about new forms of travel that spread the benefits of travel beyond hotels to local families and communities. Around three in four landlords in the Balearic Islands share one home, and a third rely on the extra income to pay for rising living costs. We remind hosts to check and comply with local laws before listing their space on Airbnb, and we have been working with authorities to enforce local rules since 2017.”
Marga Prohens, the president of the Balearic Islands, has made the issue of illegal holiday rentals her top priority, announcing at the Fitur conference last week that the islands would work with Booking.com to tackle unlicensed accommodation.
“The illegal offer represents unfair competition for both hotel accommodation and regulated holiday rentals. It is detrimental to our quality as a destination and to our image for those who visit us and only contributes to a surplus of tourists without any control,” she said. The Balearic Islands Tax Authorities have also joined the fight and will provide information on tourist rentals to municipalities.
This is not the first time that the Balearic Islands have restricted holiday rentals. In 2018, Palma de Mallorca introduced legislation to ban almost all Airbnb-style rentals. In 2022, Mallorca’s council threatened a €40,000 (£34,154) fine for anyone caught renting out their property without the correct paperwork.
It is clearly a very complex issue. Should we, the tourists, bear at least some of the moral responsibility when it comes to where we stay?
“I’m not convinced that tourists fully understand the damage Airbnb causes,” says Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism. “Tourists are behaving like consumers and Airbnb has been quite effective in publicly opposing the mounting evidence of the harm it causes.
“Tourists want to buy the Airbnb narrative that this is a ‘sharing business,’ not the predatory real estate developer that rewards absentee companies to buy up entire neighborhoods, displacing locals, damaging the environment and increasing inequality,” added them to it.
Indeed, Airbnb has faced a global backlash in recent years, and the company has been working with local authorities to comply with new holiday rental regulations – last year strict measures were introduced in Florence, New York City and Scotland. Since 2020, it has been working with local authorities in Ibiza to remove illegal rentals.
The burden is clearly on local government to get the problem of unlicensed holiday homes under control. And that project will be further refined in 2024, according to recent statements. But there is an app, Holiday Rental Check Mallorca, that allows you to check whether your accommodation is OK. Who knows. If you use it, stick to your daily dose of six mojitos and don’t jump between balconies, you might be asked back.