Spain: The business model frees HomeAway to give data to the Treasury

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

Home Away and Rentalia will not have to provide their clients' data to the Treasury, unlike Airbnb. All this, although they also offer tourist flats. And, the obligation to transmit this type of data to the Treasury is determined by the business model of each company.

In this sense, the platforms that intermediate and obtain a commission for this management, as is the case with Airbnb, are those that are obliged to send the data of their clients to the Treasury. Home Away or Rentalia, meanwhile, do not mediate between the landlord and tenant, because their business model is to expose the ads of individuals.

This is clear from the response made by the Directorate General of Taxes, an agency under the Ministry of Finance, to a query made by a federation of companies that rent homes for tourism purposes, as reported by Cinco Días.

Specifically, the General Directorate of Taxes clarifies in its resolution that Article 54 of the Royal Decree, which fights against tax fraud was approved on December 29, 2017, "obliges only the intermediary in the assignment of the use of housing for tourism purposes. . Therefore, only the collaborative platforms that provide the referred intermediation service are obliged to present the informative declaration. On the other hand, those collaborative platforms that perform a mere task of digital accommodation of advertisements for housing for tourist purposes without intermediating between assignor and assignee can not be subsumed under the subjective scope of the rule and therefore, will not be required to present the informative statement ".

However, some Home Away or Rentalia hosts offer the option of making online reservations, which requires an online transaction. In this case, both platforms would be obliged to provide information of these clients to the Treasury. Therefore, they have alerted their users that data transmission "only affects reservations made online, so if you publish without this functionality, we will not send that information to the Treasury".

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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