May 2020
There’s a lot going on in the holiday/vacation rental sector right now as various locations come out of lockdown.
Here are some short term rental news stories that caught our eye in the last few weeks.
Here are some short term rental stories that caught our eye in the last few weeks.
Why the cost of your hotel or Airbnb could double after coronavirus
Skift CEO Says The Biggest Thing To Save The Hotel Industry Is A Coordinated Response
Refunds from Airbnb, Expedia and Booking.com in doubt, warns travel expert
What will post-pandemic travel look like?
Portugal’s Airbnb owners resist push to low-rent housing
Edinburgh council to buy or rent empty Airbnb properties off desperate landlords
France to Build Online Platform to Rival Airbnb, Booking.com
Why the cost of your hotel or Airbnb could double after coronavirus
Due to occupancy restrictions and increased cleaning costs, it’s predicted that travel accommodation costs could double or even quadruple.
Holidays could double in price once lockdown is lifted because of a raft of new safety measures being imposed on hotels.
Travel accommodation providers could be forced to increase cleaning budgets, leave rooms vacant between guests and install expensive equipment to prevent the spread of coronavirus when holidays resume. Some hotels in Spain have been told they can only reopen if they keep occupancy at 30pc or below.
Skift CEO Says The Biggest Thing To Save The Hotel Industry Is A Coordinated Response
He also predicts that STR guests will be traveling with their own cleaning products
Refunds from Airbnb, Expedia and Booking.com in doubt, warns travel expert
With all the initial talk (and outcry) that the online travel companies would refund travelers, it appears that this may not in fact be the case.
According to this article from RSVP, “Expedia are currently facing a €5 billion refund bill, Airbnb’s is about €2 billion, Booking.com is about €1.6 billion”
Many travellers use ‘middle men’ to get a cheap price on their flight, hotels and accomodation. However, in light of the global pandemic, the travel industry is on its knees from top to bottom.
The point being: if you thought it was hard to get your money back from airlines, just try getting it from the company between you and the airline.
“Intermediaries are in real trouble because they’re really messing people around,” says Irish travel expert and journalist Eoghan Corry.
What will post-pandemic travel look like?
The travel industry has been one of the hardest hit during this pandemic. With much of the world in lockdown, passenger airline traffic is down 95 percent, hotels are nearly empty, and tour operators are unemployed. The industry will rebound eventually, as the urge to travel is hardwired into many humans, but it’s unlikely to look exactly the same as it did before 2020.
Treehugger predicts that, among other things, road trips and rural destinations will be the hot-selling ticket items in the coming months as people start to regain their thirst for travel.
Portugal’s Airbnb owners resist push to low-rent housing
Meanwhile, in Lisbon and Porto the government are offering to take short term rentals back into the long term marketplace by offering 2 to 5 year leases in order to free up housing stock and potentially help holiday rental owners through these difficult times.
LISBON (Reuters) – As reservation calendars at Portugal’s 90,000 holiday homes were wiped clean amid the coronavirus outbreak, councils in its biggest cities swooped in with offers to rent up to 2,000 properties to sublet as low-cost housing.
Edinburgh council to buy or rent empty Airbnb properties off desperate landlords
This is also happening in Scotland…
Hundreds of short-let properties normally crammed with tourists at this time of year are standing empty, but councillors have launched a scheme to return them to their ‘proper use as a home’.
Edinburgh landlords and holiday let owners left with empty homes due to coronavirus are being encouraged to lease or sell them to the council.
France to Build Online Platform to Rival Airbnb, Booking.com
The French government has announced that they plan to build a listings portal for the country. This could make a lot of sense as they could then control properties that are listing in the grey area of legality, especially in Paris, along with policing things like minimum stays, licensing and taxes.
They may have underestimated the costs and complexity of such a task though.
The French government will join forces with the tourism industry to build an Internet site aimed winning back customers from U.S. online travel giants such as Airbnb Inc. and Booking Holdings Inc.
The initiative is part of government-led stimulus package to revive tourism in one of the world’s top destinations as hotels, restaurants, theme parks as well as travel sites and tour operators are among the hardest hits by lockdowns and restrictions to fight the global coronavirus pandemic.