Hotel sector bound to be the main investor in tourist housing

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

“The hotel sector is becoming and will be the main investor in tourist housing. Giants such as Marriott, Hyatt or Accor or Hotusa or B&B, Room Mate and Grupo Piñero are entering the Spanish market,” said Tolo Gomila, President of the Spanish Federation of Housing Associations and Tourist Apartments (Fevitur), in an interview with Cinco Días.

The President of the Federation, composed of 23 associations and represents 186,000 houses, considers that the main challenge of tourist rental homes is that the regulations be normalized, as was done with other sectors of the industry such as the aviation when the 'low cost' entered the market.

“The main change in Spain occurred between 2007 and 2008 with the disruptive phenomenon of entry into the Spanish market of platforms such as Airbnb or HomeAway. This way an unpublished, digitized and intermediate model was launched. It was actually very similar to what happened when the ‘low cost’ such as EasyJet or Ryanair arose and the flag airlines encountered a permanent threat that did not exist before. What happened in the latter case is that the user put each one on their site: flag airlines were transformed, especially in the design and operation of their short and medium-range routes, ”said Gomila.

On the other hand, it should be noted that Spain has made history by exceeding one million tourist apartments offered. Airbnb controls half a million floors, followed by Booking, with 410,000 ads. In the last place is Vrbo, the new brand under which Expedia unified all its accommodation brands (among which Home Away, bought in 2015) (Spain already exceeds one million tourist apartments offered on Airbnb, Booking, and Expedia).

However, it seems that Spaniards prefer to stay in hotels than in tourist rental apartments. 81% of Spanish families opted for hotel establishments to stay away from home in 2018, where they spent an average of 930 euros, according to the report prepared by the consulting firm AIS Group.

Navarre families were the ones who spent the most money staying in hotels, with a total of 1,340 euros. They are followed by Catalan and Asturian homes, which on average spent about 1,260 euros. Then, the Aragonese, with an average of 1,250 euros, and then the Valencian, Basque and Cantabrian families.

The households that made the lowest average expenditure in hotels were those in the Balearic Islands (350 euros), Murcia (just under 650 euros), and those in Madrid (around 730 euros).

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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