Spain wants to replace affordable holiday rentals with luxury hotels

Authorities in Spain are encouraging the expansion of luxury hotels as they crack down on a surge in holiday rentals that has triggered anti-tourism protests in places like Barcelona or the Canary Islands.

The hotel sector has faced local restrictions on expanding but is now seen as a beacon for the high-end tourism officials seek to lure.

Spain is the world’s second-most visited country after France and estimates point to a record of around 95 million visitors this year, or double Spain’s population.

Local people have staged protests this summer blaming booming short-term holiday lets for soaring costs of housing and overcrammed city streets, prompting a thorny debate about how to limit one of the economy’s main drivers.

Barcelona – the Spanish city most visited by foreigners – and Tenerife in the Canary Islands announced earlier this year a ban and stricter rules on tourist apartments, respectively, aiming to sharply reduce supply.

Although Barcelona will keep its ban on building new hotels downtown, existing establishments can upgrade their classification, and it will support a plan to open 5,000 new hotel beds in other areas while it shuts all of its 10,000 tourist apartments by 2028, Mayor Jaume Collboni told Reuters.

“We can do little about demand, but we can act on supply,” he said.

To better attract “quality tourism”, he wants to reduce overcrowding and prioritise culture-and gastronomy-driven visitors, and international conferences.

Collboni said hotels can guarantee quality and labour rights better than short lets, which have curtailed local people’s access to housing. Rents rose 68% and house prices 38% in the past decade.

In Tenerife, authorities plan to add 1,000 beds in new luxury hotels near an area in the island’s busy southeast that already has the largest concentration of five-star hotels in Europe.

“We want to compete not as a low-price destination, but as a quality destination,” said local tourism chief Lope Alfonso.

Timing appears favourable. Spain has surpassed Britain as Europe’s top market for hotel investment, particularly upscale, a recent survey by real estate group CBRE showed. Madrid ranked second and Barcelona sixth…