Business lobby to fight proposed Airbnb regulation
A business lobby group says it is considering legal steps to challenge a new bill meant to regulate short-term home rentals, including those on online platforms such as Airbnb.
Last week the government published the Tourism Amendment Bill for public comment. Should it be signed into law, short-term home rentals will be regulated under the Tourism Act. The minister of tourism could then specify “thresholds” in terms of Airbnb rentals in SA. This could include limiting the number of nights guests can stay or how much money an Airbnb host can earn. According to the department of tourism, this would ensure that “everyone gets their fair share”.
Echoing calls to regulate ride-share platform Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry worldwide, local tourism industry players have long called for Airbnb to be regulated.
The Federated Hospitality Association of SA argues that unregistered accommodation establishments marketed via Airbnb should be under the regulations applied to the official tourism sector.
Lobby group Sakeliga said it objected to the bill as it could “seriously harm” small-scale, short-term home rental businesses enabled by online services such as Airbnb.
“The bill is ostensibly aimed at promoting the tourism industry, but really it is about intervening in the business of smallscale, short-term home rentals and the services offered by companies like Airbnb,” said Gerhard van Onselen, senior analyst at Sakeliga. “The minister is not going to promote the tourism industry, he is going to artificially drive up prices and interfere in an industry that regulates itself much better than government can.”
An increased supply of short-term rental units results in healthy competition, he said. “Market innovations help to weed out poor service providers. At best, government is reinventing the wheel and at worst it’s letting the air out of the tourism industry’s tyres.”
Sakeliga legal analyst Daniel du Plessis said the bill seeks to amend the Tourism Act to expand the minister’s regulatory powers to include limits and thresholds imposed on shortterm home renters.
“Despite the potential infringement of these thresholds on ownership rights, they may well be entirely superfluous,” he said. “It is not entirely clear that such regulation would be necessary in this sector.
Market innovations are producing its own solutions to concerns over substandard, short-term rental accommodation. Innovations in mutual ratings provide rental consumers with rich information on offerings. Moreover, short-term rental providers and clients are rated, which leads to a higher trust marketplace.”
Sakeliga said these regulations may have knock-on effects on the country’s tourism economy and that the government should consider the impact before implementation.
“Walking back the counterproductive visa requirements was an expensive lesson. Let’s not hamper the industry again.”