While there’s a popularity to short-term rentals across the globe, anyone who searches the Internet about them will also find their darker side: how destinations from Hawai’i to Lisbon and Rome are all experiencing housing crises that are at least somewhat negatively impacted by the dearth of short-term rental properties that are gobbling up space for residents to live (in Lisbon alone, 60 percent of the housing are used as short-term rentals—that’s significant, to say the least).
It’s a big part of the overtourism issue worldwide.
The fault isn’t just with short-term rental companies, of course. Governments have a responsibility to ensure affordable housing for residents; failing to do so now means that legislation will be needed in the future.
Indeed, some destinations are beginning the conversation to ban or at least significantly limit the number of short-term rentals in a given place, like Hawai’i, which just passed the legislation this summer, and the city of Barcelona has banned short-term rentals entirely, effective by 2028. Just this week, Lisbon announced it was moving forward with a plan to ban tourist rentals in residential buildings.
So how do we, as travelers, help resolve this issue—or at the very least, try not to make it worse?
Responsible travel isn’t simply a buzzword floating around the interweb. It’s a conscious decision to consider how you travel every time you travel.
This could be choosing to take a train instead of a plane to cut carbon emissions, choosing to stay somewhere less overcrowded by tourists to spread the economic benefits of tourism to more places or simply bringing a reusable water bottle instead of constantly purchasing plastic bottles wherever you go to cut down on single-use plastics consumption.
Responsible travel takes into consideration the impact you’re making on the planet and on the communities you visit.
It’s also about where and how you stay.
Hotels have been around since probably forever—or at least since the dawn of travel (whenever that was, probably several thousand years ago, when people began walking to and from different towns and cities in the search of…well, probably other people). But while their concept and approach is nothing new, the way you think about them might be.
So why might hotels be a better way to stay than a short-term rental, at least in destinations where they’ve become an issue for residents?
Let’s discuss.
First off, hotels were built to house travelers, unlike the cute apartments or grand villas you see on your favorite short-term rental site.
While rentals definitely have their perks, if we want to be a part of the solution now, then we should consider staying in a hotel instead— at the very least in a destination known for their issues with affordable housing due in part to too many short-term rentals.
Simply research the situation where you’ll be going, and if it’s anything like Lisbon or Barcelona or Rome or—you get my point, the list seems endless these days—perhaps choose a hotel instead. That way, you won’t be a direct part of the housing crisis in the destination you visit.
Second, hotels employ people, unlike most short-term rentals.
Rentals are typically owned by one or two individuals, but hotels staff hundreds, and provide opportunities to work for migrants from across the globe, provide training to younger generations and empower local communities with greater opportunities they might not have had otherwise. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that over 1.9 million people are employed in hospitality jobs in our nation alone.
Globally, Airbnb alone boasts 7.7 million short-term rental listings, but those listings are owned by four million hosts. That often means that they’re not simply offering a room in their own homes to stay when you’re in town: they’re in the rental business, earning a profit from homes they don’t actually live in.
Kinda like a landlord, right?
Third, many hotels are getting craftier, more unique and—more importantly for the topic of this discussion—more sustainable.
You’ll find some are going completely carbon neutral, some are being built with sustainability in mind, while many are also heading towards a greener approach with various sustainability certifications, like Green Key or WTTC’s new Hotel Sustainability Basics, which has already seen 5,000 new members in the first eight months of 2024.
Of course, hotels aren’t perfect, either, especially when there are too many of them: in April, the city of Amsterdam banned any new hotel construction unless they are directly replacing ones that have already closed in a bid to more evenly spread the lodgings across the city (and with rules about not adding more beds than the previous hotel, and increasing sustainability measures).
The bottom line: perhaps we need to rethink the way we choose our accommodations.
While I’m not advocating you boycott Airbnb in favor of hotels, I do think there’s a discussion we as travelers need to start having about what being a responsible traveler means: and how that impacts every decision we make about our trip. And we’ve certainly seen how too much of a good thing can become a source of hardship for many.
While hotels don’t offer a perfect alternative to that cozy, unique flat that allows you to imagine you’re a resident wherever you end up, they might just become more popular as travelers grow more aware of their impact on the places they visit.
Because in the end, where you go isn’t simply a destination: it’s also someone’s hometown.
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