Ms Solveig Mayer:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I am the director of corporate and government affairs at Expedia Group. Expedia Group is a global online travel business and Vrbo, which is part of the Expedia Group family, is our short-term rental, STR, business. STRs are an increasingly important part of the tourism sector. They represent almost one quarter of the total EU supply of tourist accommodation and this has been boosted by the emergence of online platforms. Not only do they represent an additional source of income for citizens but they also contribute to the economic growth of local communities and help promote alternative and sustainable forms of tourism, including by spreading tourism outside of urban areas and more generally distributing tourism flows. This has been the case especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when STRs contributed to shifting tourist demand and flows from hotspots to less well-known, rural destinations and communities. However, the sector currently faces a number of regulatory challenges across the EU, including a high degree of legislative fragmentation among and within member states, such as on registration schemes, taxes, night caps and so on, including disproportionate data requests and a lack of legal clarity on provisions related to professional and peer service providers. In addition, member states often approve and enforce national laws that do not comply with EU legislation on e-commerce.

Expedia Group supports simple, automated and online registration schemes and advocates for them to help monitor and regulate the market for STR properties. We have long been calling for an EU-wide initiative on STR addressing the regulatory fragmentation in Europe.

We therefore strongly welcome the European Commission’s proposal for a regulation on data collection and sharing relating to the STR services, which aims to make data sharing between platforms and authorities more efficient and provide the industry with much needed clarity. We are fully in favour of a maximum harmonisation of rules for registration schemes and data-sharing requirements concerning online STR platforms across the EU. We would thus ask the Irish Government to engage with the EU proposal and align the general scheme of this Bill with its provisions. We appreciate the desire to move swiftly to implement the Irish registration scheme, so we would encourage Ireland to position itself as a pilot country for the EU proposal, helping to shape the approach that will be taken across the EU. We would be more than delighted to work with the Irish Government on such an approach.

We have significant concerns with the general scheme of the Bill as it stands, the fact that it seeks to create obligations for intermediary services in respect of all visitor accommodation types rather than just STRs, and its interaction with existing and upcoming EU law. I will make two points on that more specifically. Firstly, the requirement to pre-verify registration numbers and proactively remove listings requires intermediary services to assess whether registration numbers on each listing are valid, reliable and complete, and to remove non-compliant listings. Where simple online registration schemes for vacation rental owners are implemented, online platforms are able to help inform STR providers of their obligations, display registration numbers and respond to delisting requests. That said, it is crucial that platforms are not required to proactively check the legality of a registration number or to proactively delist accommodation listings on the assumption that they could be illegal. To do so is in contravention of the hosting defence, as recognised in the e-commerce directive and confirmed by the Digital Services Act, and in the EU case law.

Second, while the Bill primarily creates a new register for short-term tourist lets, STTLs, the effect is to place a legal obligation on all visitor accommodation providers defined under the Tourist Traffic Acts to display a valid registration number on their online listings. It also creates a duty for intermediary services to ensure this number is displayed for each property, check its validity, and remove any properties that are found to be non-compliant. Imposing the same requirements on all visitor accommodation providers is a very significant extension of work outside the area of STTL. Traditional visitor accommodation is almost always operated as a business and is therefore already registered under the Tourist Traffic Act and visible to the Irish Government. It is not clear what additional benefits there are of having intermediary services require and display registration and minimum night information for these properties. We would therefore ask the Irish Government to limit the scope of the Bill to STTL properties.

I stress again that Expedia Group supports the introduction of a simple, online registration system and we stand ready to help the Government create such a scheme in Ireland. However, the proposal now before the Oireachtas is complex, burdensome and incompatible with existing and upcoming EU law. We would urge the joint committee to ask the Government to correct the issues set out in this submission and to enable a more sustainable approach to STTL regulation to be created.