earlier, I spoke to the travel writer John Davenport, and I began by
asking him how important Airbnb is for Ireland's tourism sector.
It's hugely significant, particularly in big urban places like
Dublin, where it has been a dominant player in the market.
I mean, it's the sole, biggest provider of bed
nights in the state for a number of years.
Um, and so for that reason alone, I think Amanda Couples
his comments today are quite significant.
And, dare, I say, long overdue.
Is Airbnb seen as being a cheaper alternative now to hotels in Ireland?
I mean, yes, I suppose that many people see it as because there's greater options.
So you can you can rent literally.
You know, the box room if you want, or you can rent a whole apartment.
So, really, it's not so much as it's a cheaper option, but it's
the one with the greatest amount of variety, and so as a result,
you get a far bigger choice in price bracket.
However, as it works out because Arab maybe generally operates on a dynamic
pricing model, it doesn't work out to be that much cheaper than hotel.
And particularly in recent years, now up to Covid.
And there was a lot of mid range and budget hotels opening up in
Dublin, which we're taking a slice of the Airbnb market.
Why do you owners of properties choose to use Airbnb
over the more traditional rental roots?
Well, I guess it's easier there's a greater chance for profits,
and so you're not locked into rental agreements.
Short term letting is managed properly is a is A is a hugely profitable
enterprise and until number of years ago went largely unregulated.
And so, um, landlords were able to say, you could rent it, you could
rent a property or a room for cheap enough in February.
Become the summertime, he said.
You could rent it for an astronomical fortune.
And so, for that reason alone, is that it became a much more
attractive option for landlords than long term rental.
Rather,
um, Lonely planet.
Today they issued a warning to tourists thinking about coming to visit Dublin.
What exactly did they have to say?
It wasn't great, was it?
Well, no, I mean, it was a list of eight things.
You really need to prepare yourself for a visit to Dublin and the media picked
up on two of them, which is one is that hotel prices are exorbitant.
Now we know this, and we've been talking about it in Ireland for a number of weeks.
It's frighteningly high.
We have TV sleeping in cars because they can't get a hotel.
We have basic rooms going for multiples of what any
reasonable person would expect them to go for.
Um, so that's a huge problem coming into the summer.
As as Tourism returns to Dublin after the 2.5 years of college, the second
issue was car rental, and that obviously is a national problem.
And it's not sorry.
It's an international problem, but it's hitting us quite a lot here.
We had some very high profile cases on radio and in the media in recent weeks of
of American visitors who are being charged $10,000 to rent a car for a week.
Um, now that is an exaggeration.
Inasmuch as that's not the kind of high prices,
however, it's for a regular small car.
To get it for 78 €900 week is not uncommon, and that's that's
that's incredibly expensive for car rental in this country.
So there are the two broad things.
So, basically, is look.
Dublin is a very expensive city to come at the best of times.
It's much more expensive, and you're going to struggle to find a hotel room in summer,
which is not really great advertisement of the city for international tourists.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Thank you for your contribution.
As always, Fionn Thanks.
So, Paul, that's a pretty eminent travelguide.
Many people will be familiar with that many people will refer to it.
Ireland has spent a number of years, I think, trying to build up its death.
You know its reputation as it is a good place for tourists to visit.
We have worked hard to be seen to be more competitive than
maybe we were in the passport you'd have to miss.
That reputation is now under threat, and that's why it's so important that whatever
steps we take around Airbnb that were not reducing the supply of accommodation,
that might be, for example, informal BNB type accommodation.
But actually what we're doing is we're tackling accommodation that's being used
as a kind of more informal or unregulated version of long term mental.
That's what we need to target if we're if we're going to deal with Airbnb.
But the reality is Paul is that if you bring in these regulations, the whole
idea, I presume, is to ensure that not so many properties are available on
Airbnb, which means there's going to be more demand for hotel prices.
And those prices are going to go up.
Surely, of course, and and look, you only have to look to some of the
protests in Dublin City over the last few years around the call for us
having communities rather than locations where hotels gather.
And that's a That's our community, saying we don't want our cities
to be places only for tourists and just how do you do both?
That is, that's the job of a government job of government is to balance the boat.
But I'm saying to hear that what we want to do is take out
those people who are using Airbnb for long term rental.
That has to be the the impact of the intervention.
You have to prioritise here.
There's a housing crisis.
A crisis normally happens for a short period of
time and we've had it going on for decades.
At the moment, the government must focus first and foremost in housing.
And it's actually pushing up the cost of houses at the moment because
the more rents that can be achieved on a monthly basis from these homes
actually shoots up the investment value of the property.
Adrian, most of the Airbnb s available are outside of Dublin.
Is that correct?
I mean, I put many of these points to Aaron because that is
the discussion we're having in this country about it.
Now.
They came back to me with some figures, and they said, Well, number one.
The vast majority of Airbnb states are actually outside Dublin,
so mostly it's in rural areas or holiday spots.
They also claim that two out of three Airbnb states are actually Irish people moving
from one part of the country to another to go on holidays or for a weekend.
And that's not to fully explain, uh, the housing crisis.
But it is worth noting that it's not primarily a Dublin or cork or Limerick,
despite the figures, uh, fairly damning figures that we have.
And they did also say, Paul, that Airbnb are not responsible for
the housing shortage or the housing crisis in this country.
And yet they're being asked to be part of the solution.
Or the homeowners who use Airbnb are being asked.
But you can't have.
You can't have the president, the country calling the housing situation the disaster
and then not look at every corner of society to try and see how we can solve it.
And, as I say, the issue of vacant vacant homes, the issue of fair
deal and the issue of Airbnb they're all small supply streams.
But to collectively, along with the public housing building
programme, they will help address the problem.
The fact is you're saying that it's a very small at each one of these
measures brings in a small supply we actually don't really know.
That's like the full figures.
We don't still have the vacancy, um, numbers about how many properties the Paschal
Donohoe hasn't released that from the the property register, the property tax.
We still don't know that the Airbnb we still don't really
have a proper grasp on how many of those properties.
So to say that actually, just some of these things are just small measures.
When you actually add them all up.
They could have a huge impact on the housing crisis.
I was just wondering, What do you say?
Um, Paul and Peter in the middle of a cost of living crisis when
people are really struggling and perhaps trying to take in other
income streams and are using something like air B N B A.
What do you say to those people this evening to repeat a point made earlier?
If somebody is letting out a room in their home and it's effectively in
the in form of B and B, that's what the platform is designed for.
And I don't think anybody has an issue with that.
And that will never convert into a long term home, perhaps
maybe for student accommodation, but it's unlikely to.
What we want to do is tackle those people who are using it for long term
rentals and are effectively doing it with two sets of people here.
One.
They are subject to rent pressure zone and limiting
the amount of rent they can increase.
The other older learners using Airbnb for longer term rentals that don't
have that same regulation that's not fair to bring, bring a degree of fairness
to that should it apply to people who have holiday homes?
Well, look, I think it's OK for people to have other properties, and we saw
with the vacant home tax that I hope we will see in this in this budget.
Once pattern, Paschal releases figures, uh, there's a subtlety in all of
this one person, one person holiday home is another person's home that
they use for some sometimes work and sometimes that we have to.
We have to build in these sort of subtleties into
into any new scheme just very quickly.
I want to get into Adrian because they know ageing Europe with us.
For part, two other cities have had to tackle this Airbnb issue head on.
What have they done and what's been successful well in a number of other
countries France and the Netherlands, Portugal, one or two others, they
have done something similar to this idea of a national register.
There's a lot of outrage in France with a lot of heat in France, in particular,
because that was at the vanguard in the early days of homes being used
for Airbnb and led to quite a significant housing crisis.
The local councils there, there took action.
So what you have seen is a type of national register being set
up typically a city by city town by town, and Airbnb has complied
with those with those administrative measures.
And does it mean that some of those properties came
back onto the traditional rental market?
Uh, yeah, I ultimately it did.
Ultimately, it meant that they couldn't go on to Airbnb, so
they had to go through the proper routes to change their property
if they wanted to rent it out for longer yet.