Barcelona's rental ban and the rise of booking platforms beyond Airbnb

By late 2028, short-term apartment rentals to tourists will be gone from Barcelona altogether. That is the final stage of a ban the city started rolling out in 2021, according to municipal authorities, and the platforms accused of squeezing the local rental market are the target.

Illegal subletting and rents pushed up by mega-booking platforms put the wider travel industry under fire in January 2025. Barcelona went further than most. Banning short lets outright, rather than tinkering with the rules around them, makes the city the sharpest example of a municipal pushback that is spreading across Europe.

Against that backdrop, a handful of smaller platforms have built business models designed precisely to dodge the same accusation. Fairbnb lists 2,000 properties across ten European nations and hands half its commission to community projects. The idea is to give something back to the neighbourhoods it works in instead of stripping value out of them.

Socialbnb runs the same logic at greater scale, with more than 400 lodgings worldwide whose bookings fund local social and ecological projects. Ecobnb looks to the countryside instead: 3,000 eco-certified rural stays in more than 55 countries.

Kindred is a different animal. Its home-swapping model opens up 80,000 homes, most of them primary residences rather than dedicated tourist lets. No rental transaction, no subletting problem.

Landfolk came out of Airbnb, founded by former employees, and now offers nature-focused Scandinavian holiday rentals in six countries. Its pitch is deliberately narrower than that of the giant it grew out of. Fewer listings, one region, a clear identity.

Over in the United Kingdom, Sawday's puts a cap on how many listings it will carry in overtouristed destinations, a blunt attempt to ease the strain tourism places on the communities it books into. Coolstays comes at it from the design side, pointing European travellers towards converted historical buildings and off-grid cabins instead of the usual apartment blocks.

On inventory, none of them come close to the mega-sites. Fairbnb's 2,000 listings and Socialbnb's 400 amount to a sliver of what the biggest booking sites carry in one city. For travellers thinking about Barcelona's example, though, and about the rent pressures that other city halls are watching very closely, these platforms offer a different deal: fewer properties, and a clearer account of where the money ends up. Barcelona's own deadline is late 2028.