Is the End Nigh for Airbnb?

In Spain, yes. Not because the company has done anything wrong, and not because tourists have stopped coming. Because the Spanish state has run out of houses and has decided where it is going to find some.

Spain has a housing shortage it cannot build its way out of. Rents in Málaga province now outstrip Madrid. People are demonstrating in the streets. Faced with a problem measured in hundreds of thousands of homes and a construction industry that delivers a fraction of that a year, the government reached the obvious conclusion: there are already enough houses in Spain. They are simply full of tourists.

So it is taking them back.

Barcelona is cancelling every tourist apartment licence in the city by 2028. Málaga has frozen new registrations across whole districts. The Canary Islands have set fines for unlicensed tourist use running into six figures. Tens of thousands of listings have been struck off regional registers. In Ibiza, short-term rental supply nearly halved in a year.

Since 2025, a community of owners can ban tourist lets in the building on a three-fifths vote — no unanimity required. Somewhere in Spain this week, an investment will end at a residents' meeting the owner does not attend.

Then there was the register. In 2025 the state required every short-term landlord to register nationally or vanish from the booking platforms. Some 340,000 complied, at their own cost. Last May the Supreme Court struck the entire thing down as beyond the government's powers. A year of fees and paperwork, bought and paid for, worth nothing.

The next instalment is a tax package: full standard-rate VAT on holiday flats, which for most owners have paid none at all, a surcharge of up to double on the annual property tax, and new penalties aimed at the booking platforms themselves. It faces a hard vote in the autumn and may lose it, as a similar measure did in April.

Anyone taking comfort from that has misread the situation. This is the second attempt inside twelve months. There will be a third. Governments that keep returning to a measure have already told you where they intend to finish.

What the policy leaves standing

Every one of those measures shares a characteristic that is easy to miss until you look for it. None of them applies to hotels.

Hotels keep the reduced rate of VAT. No property tax surcharge. No residents' meeting can vote them out of business. Municipal freezes on tourist flats do not reach them. The national register the Supreme Court demolished never covered them in the first place.

That is not a gap in the drafting. It is the design. The entire purpose is to move visitors out of residential housing and into purpose-built accommodation so that flats return to the people who live in the town. Hotels are not collateral damage in Spanish tourism policy. They are the intended destination.

Because the visitors are not going anywhere. Tourism is worth roughly an eighth of the Spanish economy and no politician of any party will lay a finger on it. Ninety-odd million people a year will keep arriving, close to a third of whom currently sleep in private apartments — apartments being withdrawn from the market region by region, city by city, building by building. Those people still need a bed. There is one kind of building left that is legally permitted to sell them one.

Where this is worth acting on

Not in Barcelona or central Málaga, where the politics are hottest and the price already reflects everything above.

Galicia. The green north-west, the Rías Altas, the Camino de Santiago — a region that missed the apartment speculation entirely and now finds itself short of decent rooms just as demand arrives. In 2027 Galicia holds a Holy Year, the Xacobeo, when St James's Day falls on a Sunday and pilgrim numbers rise sharply for twelve months. The last one drew visitors in the millions. Councils there are not fighting hotels. They are asking for them, because hotels employ local people and do not compete with residents for housing.

An operating, licensed hotel in that region can still be acquired for less than the cost of building the same walls today. The rooms exist. The licence exists. The guests are already walking past the door.

Participation in selected hospitality companies is available through qualifying private placements.

Private placements can open regional hotel ownership to qualifying investors seeking a direct stake in an operating hospitality company — the same buildings, trading income and long-term value, held through ordinary company shares.

Spain has spent five years telling the market exactly what it plans to do to holiday lets. It has not been subtle about it. The people who profit from a shift like this are never the ones who wait for the final vote — the vote is when the price moves.