French hoteliers to take on sharing economy after anti-rate parity success
After successfully opposing OTA price parity rules, the French hotel industry has decided to take aim at Airbnb.
Head of France’s hoteliers union (UMIH) Laurent Duc told The Local: “We haven’t even started with Airbnb yet. We have spent five years fighting Booking.com and Expedia to have parity and after all that we find we have unfair competition with Airbnb.
“We are going to go harder and harder towards the end of the year and try to get the government to include rules and regulations in its next Macron bill,” he added.
Paris is Airbnb’s largest market but there are currently no regulations in place demanding that the sharing economy service collect any taxes from its hosts or travellers.
Dic said: “We want the government to force Airbnb to give the state what it is owed, we want them to claim the taxes and the VAT from those who rent the apartments.
“We want the website to be controlled and those who put their flats online to be given a specific registration number.
“In the countryside, hotels are closing and the buildings are being divided up and their flats are being put on Airbnb instead,” he noted.
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