Marketing platforms like Airbnb operating on Costa Blanca mean Alicante tourist apartment offer outstrips hotel places

THE holiday apartment offer in Alicante city outstrips the number of hotel places due to marketing platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway, according to Costa Blanca and Benidorm hotel trade association HOSBEC.
The latest HOSBEC report on the main marketing platforms’ activity reveals the accommodation offer in the provincial capital tourist apartments has reached a total of 16,400 places compared with less than 7,000 in the city’s hotels.
The association refers to what it calls the “hotelisation” of property, especially in the Playa San Juan and El Cabo Huertas areas, and reported five per cent growth in this type of accommodation in Alicante last year to an annual average of 3,799.
This growth was due in great part to an increase in the availability of entire houses, HOSBEC said, which now represent 77 per cent of the total.
HOSBEC also reported that 80 per cent of the apartments have a very flexible cancellation police, reflecting that “these kinds of businesses incorporate marketing strategies like that of the hotel sector.”
Also, that occupation levels average 60 per cent, translating into income in the region of more than €41 million.
According to HOSBEC “the romantic halo of Airbmb as an intermediary platform and of benefitting the collaborative economy in terms of accommodation has fallen away”, claiming that in fact that there are “large private capital business groups” hiding behind which market properties as tourist accommodation “without there being a permanent owner who lives or usually stays in the property.”