Chile: Court ruled against using Airbnb as hosting platform

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 online hosting platform Airbnb just suffered a setback in Chile. The Supreme Court of that country rejected an appeal for protection filed against a building in Santiago, which prohibited apartment owners from using the service to share their homes with outside users.

According to the Chilean law, a residential building can not be used as a hotel because it lacks a series of requirements, such as having a 24-hour reception, parking, telephone, air conditioning, among others.

In addition, as indicated in article 7 of the Commercial Code: "The owners must offer regular accommodation services (...) scheduled in advance and maintained over time, in contrast to the occasional lease per hour or a number less than 15 days."

The failure and the answer

Therefore, the Third Chamber of the Court determined that "the owners violate the character and housing destination of the building, attentive to the provisions of the co-ownership regulation of the property that explicitly prohibits the destination of the various departments or units to the turn of Apart Hotel."

However, despite the ruling, the Federation of Tourism Companies of Chile remains alert because platforms such as Airbnb have encouraged informal accommodation to reach 16,000 offers. "Around 70% are informal, so we are already getting closer to that, for every formal available room, there is an informal one," Helen Kouyoumdjian, executive vice president of Fedetur said.

Meanwhile, the owners of the building are organizing to update the Co-Ownership Regulation. "All of us who live here run the risk of not having any idea who gets in and who goes out, what they are going to do in the department, so I think it's fine. For the safety of all of us," said one neighbor.

This last case in Chile highlights the disruptive impact that technology is having in some countries. In the middle of last year it was learned that Uber had caused a similar situation in Mexico, to the point that in the state of Veracruz, drivers who use this application could be punished with up to 9 years in prison.

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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