In order to manage the STL sector sustainably, Government needs to regulate it to ensure it has minimal negative impact on the provision of permanent housing; every property should be required, as a minimum, to be registered, to have planning permission and pay commercial rates, just like every other business.

We also need to avoid making this a ‘city’ versus ‘rural’  issue. It is patently untrue that cities suffer disproportionately, and bundling everything else in to ‘rural’ if it is outside a city or Rent Pressure Zone (RPZ) takes no account of the actual facts surrounding the sector and its impacts; coastal communities are demonstrably the areas impacted most. Fig 1 below shows the heat map of the geographic spread of whole house/apartments on the AirBnb platform.

We also need to knock on the head the tropes that its a) a small sector and b) is the purview of a few country women who are making a few extra euro for their holidays every year… this is patently false, and thankfully Eurostat have undertaken significant research work on understanding the numbers of bed-nights generated across the 4 main STL bookings platforms, AirBnB, Tripadvisor, Bookings.com or Expedia, its scale and value. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/w/DDN-20230109-1

The figures below shows the number of bed-nights to NUTS2 (regional) level for Q2 in 2022.