- On November 8, the Alda movement has occupied an Airbnb apartment at the Victoria Surf tourist residence in Biarritz. The police have come to the morning of 9 November, but Alda has not opened the doors to him. Activists have made it clear that they will remain there until the owners regulate the situation. As they have denounced, Aribnb does not comply with the Biarritz People’s House standard, which means that tourist accommodation cannot be advertised without registration number. This is the third apartment that has occupied for seven weeks and they have announced that they will keep the occupation until Airbnb regulates their houses and compensatory measures are put in place for the protection of rent prices, which are annual.
The Alda movement has explained that the occupied apartment is not the randomly chosen one. It is close to the Biarritz City Hall and the police station, so they have also been able to demonstrate that their announcement does not contain the registration number required by local regulations.
Its manager Margaux manages a total of 5 tourist sites, 2 in Biarritz and 3 in Baiona, none of which has a registration number. One of these floors is the one that Alda occupied last June, as there lived a young couple from Baiona who expelled them to transfer that accommodation to tourism in a totally illegal way: without authorization of change of use, without registration... The House of the People of Baiona issued a formal notice to its owner in August, but Airbnb continues to do so illegally, without registration number yet.
Tourism, hard to live
Aldako's spokesman Xebax Christy has denounced that "we have to put an end to the thousands of frauds being carried out in Euskal Herria by platforms like Airbnb." Airbnb brings together half of the advertising of Ipar Euskal Herria rentals, which can explain why the rental possibilities of people who want to live and work in Biarritz are so scarce.
Alda has asked the House of the People of Biarritz to demand the Airbnb platform because it repeatedly and deliberately breaches the law: "What other kind of company or citizens could deliberately and visibly infringe the law, systematically since 2017, without a single judicial proceeding against it being contemplated? How can people at the bottom admit this different treatment? ".
Demonstration on 20 November in Baiona
A hundred personalities and more than thirty social actors have called for a demonstration in Bilbao on 20 November. It will be in Baiona, from 15:00 hours. As reported by Alda spokesman Ainize Butron: "It is time to mobilize, to demand immediate measures to alleviate the real estate crisis in Euskal Herria. We call for compensatory measures to protect the entire year's rental stock, so that smaller citizens can live and work in it."
