Early one drizzly morning in Paris, a handful of metropolis officers make their method up a steep, slim avenue within the historic neighborhood of Montmartre, with a reporter in tow and the domed Sacré-Coeur basilica looming above. The group stops at an residence constructing that appears like every other on the block. It is just once they step inside the doorway corridor that something appears uncommon. Indicators pasted to the partitions declare that loud noise and nighttime gatherings are forbidden. And lots of the entrance doorways have steel lockboxes bolted to them, with residence keys inside. Each are telltale indicators that town employees have discovered what they’re in search of: unlawful Airbnbs.
Through the subsequent half-hour, as we climb stairs and knock on doorways, just a few sleepy residents emerge to complain—not about us, however to us. They describe how their constructing has begun to really feel like a vacationers’ crash pad, with rolling suitcases clattering on the pavestones in any respect hours, and the outside courtyard changing into a rowdy tavern on heat evenings. “A living hell,” one calls it.
These modest Montmartre properties are only one flash level in Europe’s rising Airbnb backlash. Whilst short-term residence leases have turn out to be a world journey norm, extra cities worldwide have blamed Airbnb and its rivals for his or her housing squeeze and affordability crises. In Europe, and in Paris particularly, the rising opposition has gathered actual momentum. Paris’s restrictions are among the many most inflexible, sharply limiting the variety of nights that any property will be made out there for short-term leases. The homeowners of these Montmartre flats might face fines of nicely over €100,000 if it’s proved they’ve violated the regulation.
“People are buying up properties, becoming a kind of hotelier, developing these businesses that are taking apartments out of the local market,” outgoing Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo fumes over lunch in Metropolis Corridor’s ornate eating room. Hidalgo, whose time period expired in March, describes how she, along with the mayors of Barcelona and Rome, spent years pushing the 27-country European Union to crack down on Airbnb. Starting this Might, a brand new EU regulation would require hosts to register properties on a Europe-wide database, aimed toward permitting cities to shortly test listings they believe flout native legal guidelines. “The problem is not just Paris,” Hidalgo provides. “It is all of Europe.”
Airbnb has assumed the function of villain on this saga, because it dominates the market, with about 44% of the short-term rental trade in 2024, in accordance with journey information agency Skift Analysis. There are about 9 million Airbnb listings globally, and Paris estimates about 75,000 short-term vacationer leases in its metro space.
75,000
Vacationer leases within the Paris space
44%
Airbnb’s share of worldwide short-term rental trade, 2024
~50 million
Variety of vacationers who visited Paris in 2025
Sources: Apur, Skift Analysis, Metropolis of Paris Tourism Workplace
When three twenty-something buddies launched Airbnb in 2008, villainy was hardly the destiny they foresaw. That they had forged their startup as a relaxed method for strangers to attach: Their thought was hatched once they plopped air mattresses on the ground of their San Francisco residence and charged individuals to sleep on them. “Back then, 100% of people were more than skeptical,” cofounder and chief technique officer Nathan Blecharczyk tells me. “They almost violently rejected the idea, saying, ‘How can you trust a stranger in your home?’”
The world bought used to the concept, in fact, and now Airbnb is a Fortune 500 enterprise with a valuation of almost $80 billion and listings in additional than 200 nations. Final 12 months it booked 121.9 million stays, incomes $12.2 billion in income, up from $11 billion the 12 months earlier than. Dictionaries outline “to Airbnb” because the verb for short-term renting—a catchphrase for the whole enterprise it invented.
Even so, Airbnb’s share value is about 10% beneath the place it was when it went public in 2020—and traders imagine that native pushback is an actual impediment to its progress. The corporate strongly rejects the concept it’s in charge for any housing shortages: Airbnb “just doesn’t move the needle in terms of impacting housing prices,” Blecharczyk says. Nonetheless, for its execs and traders, the query now’s how a lot they might want to change their technique going ahead—or whether or not the mannequin that constructed the corporate right into a journey big can endure.
At the moment many Airbnb listings are operated as full-time rental companies, relatively than by individuals permitting strangers to remain of their properties. That truth has solely stoked the sense in some cities that the hovering variety of short-term leases has robbed them of badly wanted housing inventory, whilst affordability turns into a pivotal political problem. As Motley Idiot inventory analyst Lawrence Nga wrote final September, “Airbnb’s most significant long-term risk isn’t competition. It’s regulation.”
The decision to rein in Airbnb is strongest in Europe’s centuries-old tourist-magnet cities. Throughout Europe, the variety of vacationer rental nights booked almost doubled between 2018 and 2025, to 398 million, in accordance with EU statistics. Locals accuse Airbnb of pricing them out of their neighborhoods and turning their communities into vacationer hubs disconnected from their cultural setting. Throughout Europe, partitions are spray-painted with graffiti studying “Airbnb out!” In Barcelona, one particular person has painted, “Your Airbnb was my home.”
Few cities have captured the sense of grievance as keenly as Paris—the world’s most visited metropolis, by some measures. Town drew almost 50 million vacationers final 12 months, with the one greatest group being People. There are greater than 1 million short-term rental listings in France—the trade’s greatest market exterior the U.S.—with Paris because the nation’s greatest hub. “Airbnb bears real responsibility in France’s housing crisis,” editors of French paper Le Monde wrote in November, when it revealed a damning six-part sequence on the corporate.
A poster in Paris denounces the flood of quick time period leases for vacationers.
DANIEL PERRON—Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Pictures
However the push by mayors like Hidalgo for a crackdown has borne fruit. In October 2024, Paris and several other different French cities, together with Mediterranean sun-traps like Good and Marseille, restricted short-term leases to individuals itemizing their very own properties, after which for less than 90 days a 12 months—a marked change from the 180-day rule it changed. Second properties, in the meantime, will be rented solely to college students or visiting businesspeople, and doing so entails intensive paperwork and better property taxes.
In January, France’s supreme courtroom dominated that Airbnb and different platforms have been legally accountable for listings that flout the brand new legal guidelines. And in February, two Paris property homeowners who did not register their Airbnb listings have been fined €80,000 ($93,000) and €150,000 ($174,500) respectively. “It’s the end for impunity,” one official mentioned on the time. “No more illegal Airbnbs.”
Paris officers admit that the regulation’s actual worth is to sluggish Airbnb’s funding property market to a crawl. “We won’t be able to sue everyone,” says Emmeline de Kerret, who heads Paris’s metropolis authority overseeing vacationer leases. “[But] we want to show that from now on, it is not a great investment.”
In Paris, that’s already clear, says Anne-Hélène Gutierres Requenne, a enterprise guide who put her one-bedroom residence close to Montmartre on sale in March, after two years of itemizing it on Airbnb. “The legal framework is more and more cumbersome,” she says. Her last Airbnb buyer was a professor from Cornell College spending a semester in Paris.
As the foundations have tightened, and as different markets threaten related actions, Airbnb has raced to adapt and broaden. The corporate’s progress markets—measured by nights booked—are now not in Europe: They’re middle-income nations like Brazil and India, the place flats lease for much less. Final Might it relaunched its “experiences” vertical after a two-year pause, and added “services”—corresponding to massages, guided excursions, even cooking courses—along with leases. Now, while you ebook an Airbnb in Paris, you’ll be able to add an Airbnb pickup from the airport, and Airbnb day by day itineraries with Airbnb tour guides, and have Airbnb store and ship meals to your rental.
The objective, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky informed traders in February, was to make Airbnb’s app a hub for an unlimited array of choices, a lot as Amazon turned an app for something that may very well be shipped in a cardboard field. “The unifying idea for me is the trip,” he mentioned. And the choices create new income streams for Airbnb with out requiring the corporate so as to add new residence listings or danger violating laws. Certainly, Parisians themselves are starting to order Paris options, with out reserving a spot to remain.
More and more, the corporate is negotiating with cities internet hosting main occasions just like the FIFA World Cup, which takes place throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in June and July. The mannequin for Airbnb was the 2024 Paris Olympics, when town suspended its rental laws to accommodate tens of millions of tourists; 700,000 of them stayed in Airbnbs, says chief enterprise officer Dave Stephenson. At essential moments when cities want further lodging, Chesky informed traders in February, the corporate goes from “a problem cities have to deal with, to a solution to the problem … Hotels cannot accommodate everyone.”
Stephenson argues that Airbnb company have a tendency to spice up the native economic system, maybe greater than conventional resort company. “The money stays with the host, in the community,” he says. “It gets spent in the coffee shops, in stores down the street.” In its allure offensive, the corporate has donated to the restoration of outdated church buildings and different buildings in France. (It has additionally eased situations for company worldwide, instituting extra versatile cancellation insurance policies and eliminating annoyances like cleansing charges and lists of checkout chores.)
As for rising rents and housing shortages, Airbnb execs argue that the larger issues are excessive inflation and folks’s growing need to dwell in thriving city facilities. They level to New York, Amsterdam, and Barcelona as cities the place, they are saying, rents have surged whilst new laws there slashed the variety of Airbnb listings.
That argument is just not prone to protect the homeowners of the short-term leases in Montmartre that we detected in February. Over espressos just a few weeks later, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing, Jacques Baudrier, tells me officers are nonetheless investigating who owns the flats which have key packing containers affixed to the doorways. “Eventually we will take back 20,000 apartments,” he says. “With the new laws, the illegal Airbnbs will be zero.”
This text seems within the April/Might 2026 problem of Fortune with the headline “Airbnb faces a European backlash—with Paris as ground zero.”
