Travel
Barcelona is increasing its tourist tax next week – here’s how much you’ll have to pay from April
The Spanish city first introduced an extra tourist tax in 2012 to attract ‘quality’ tourism.
Barcelona’s tourist tax is set to rise once again on 1 April.
Since 2012, the visitor hotspot has added an extra fee on top of the region-wide tourist tax.
In 2022, city authorities announced that the fee would be increased over the next two years.
The city’s surcharge varies depending on the type of visitor accommodation and is only levied on official tourist lodging.
Barcelona is Spain’s most visited city and continues to struggle with overtourism.
Visitors to Barcelona have to pay both the regional tourist tax and the city-wide surcharge.
The regional tax varies depending on the type of accommodation you are staying in. For four-star hotels it is €1.70, for rental accommodation like Airbnb it is €2.25, and for five-star and luxury hotels it is €3.50.
Cruise passengers spending less than 12 hours in the city pay €3 to the region, while those spending more than 12 hours pay €2.
The city tax, which applies to a maximum seven-night stay, has been steadily increasing. In April 2023, it rose from €1.75 to €2.75 for all types of stay. From April 2024, it will increase once again to €3.25.
What does that mean for accommodation prices in Barcelona in 2024?
As of 1 April 2024, visitors to Barcelona will have to pay €3.25 to the city on top of the regional tourist tax – an increase of €0.50 per night.
That means guests in five-star accommodation will pay a total of €6.75 per night – €47.25 per person for a week’s stay.
In rental accommodation, the fees add up to €5.50 per night or €38.50 for a week-long stay, on top of the nightly cost of the accommodation.
Cruise day-trippers will pay €6.25. The idea behind this is to encourage “quality” tourism over big numbers, according to the city mayor.
Why does Barcelona have a tourist tax?
Barcelona’s authorities have said the increased tourist tax aims to attract ‘quality’ tourism over big visitor numbers.
The city sees an average of 32 million visitors a year, many of whom arrive on cruise ships.
In 2022, the Catalan capital launched new measures to curb disruption from guided tours including noise restrictions and one-way systems.
The hike in the tourist tax, which is divided between Barcelona’s Generalitat and the City Council, will also bolster the city’s budget.
Authorities hope the fee will bring in as much as €100 million in 2024.
“The economic data for tourism in 2019 is already increasing, not in the number of tourists, but in the amount of income from tourism in Barcelona,” deputy mayor Jaume Collboni said.
“It was the objective sought: to contain the number of tourists and increase tourist income because our model is no longer mass tourism but quality tourism, which adds value to the city.”
The council said the proceeds would be used to fund the city’s infrastructure, including improvements to roads, bus services and escalators.
What other Spanish cities have a tourist tax?
Barcelona isn’t the only tourist hot spot in Spain taxing visitors to cope with their impact.
The Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera), charges a nightly fee of €1-4 for each holidaymaker aged 16. Known as the Sustainable Tourism Tax, it is used to promote better tourism practices and conserve the islands’ nature.
Valencia planned to introduce a similar measure at the end of last year, but it was scrapped following the 2023 elections. It would have seen travellers pay between 50 cents and €2 per night for up to seven nights.
Travel
A 4-year cruise or a €1 house in Italy: Inside the schemes helping Americans skip Trump’s presidency
Searches by Americans for moving abroad soared in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
Following the recent US election result, Google searches for ‘how to move to Europe’ increased by more than 1,000 per cent in some countries.
Searches by Americans for moving to Canada and Australia soared by 1,270 and 820 per cent respectively in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
The interest in leaving the States has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms.
A residential cruise ship is now offering Americans a four-year ‘escape’ trip while a Sardinian village has relaunched its €1 house scheme.
Cruise company offers four-year escape from Trump
Cruise firm Villa Vie Residences is marketing a four-year round the world trip to Americans looking to skip Donald Trump’s second term as president.
The Tour La Vie programme offers passengers a stay of up to four years onboard while visiting 140 countries – which doesn’t include the US.
The irreverently named packages include a one-year ‘Escape from Reality’ cruise, a two-year ‘Mid-Term Selection’ option, a three-year ‘Everywhere but Home’ cruise, and the four-year ‘Skip Forward’ trip.
Guests would join the Villa Vie Odyssey, a residential cruise ship which set sail from Belfast in September, several months into its voyage.
“We came up with this marketing campaign before we even knew who would win. Regardless of who would have won, you would have half of the population upset,” CEO Mikael Petterson told US news site Newsweek.
“Quite frankly, we don’t have a political view one way or the other. We just wanted to give people who feel threatened to have a way to get out.”
Prices start at a little under $40,000 (€38,000) a year. For those opting for the full four-year escape, single-occupancy cabins start at $256,000 (€243,000) while double-occupancy costs up to $320,000 (€303,000).
The price includes all food and drinks (alcohol only at dinner), WiFi, medical visits, weekly housekeeping service and bi-weekly laundry.
Sardinian village relaunches €1 house scheme for Americans
In rural Sardinia, the village of Ollolai has revived its €1 house scheme, now targeting Americans exhausted by the election.
The homes-for-the-price-of-an-espresso offer has been relaunched for US citizens “worned [sic] out by global politics” and “looking to embrace a more balanced lifestyle”, local authorities write on the village’s website.
“Of course, we can’t specifically mention the name of one US president who just got elected, but we all know that he’s the one from whom many Americans want to get away from now and leave the country,” village mayor Francesco Columbo told US news site CNN.
“We have specifically created this website now to meet US post-elections relocation needs.”
Those needs include slowing down and recharging with Ollolai’s dreamy Mediterranean lifestyle.
“Nestled in pristine nature, surrounded by incredible cuisine, and immersed in a community with ancient traditions in the rare Earth’s Blue Zone, Ollolai is the perfect destination to reconnect, recharge and embrace a new way of life,” the website claims.
Available properties will soon be listed online with prices ranging from €1 for houses needing substantial renovations to €100,000 for those that are ready to live in.
This is not the first time the village in Sardinia has put houses for a pittance on the market. In a bid to halt a steep population decline, Ollolai began selling off abandoned homes in 2018 to people willing to carry out $25,000 (€24,000) of renovations within a three-year timespan.
Travel
Catalonia’s holiday rental ban may not be allowed under EU law as Airbnb pushes back
Catalonia has said they want to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 holiday lets in the next 5 years.
Catalonia’s recent ban on Airbnb-style holiday rentals breaches EU law, according to a complaint filed with the European Commission by an industry group.
The European Holiday Home Association claims that the ban, introduced by Catalonia in June this year, breaches the provision of services directive.
The Spanish region announced that they wanted to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years. The city has not granted new licences since 2014 but this has not helped to stem a housing crisis, with locals saying they can not find places to live at affordable prices.
Why has Barcelona’s Airbnb ban been challenged?
“We are convinced that EU law has not been respected,” Viktorija Molnar, Secretary General of the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), said in a statement released on Wednesday.
“By submitting the EU complaint, we hope that the European Commission will take a step further and open a formal infringement procedure against Spain,” added Molnar, whose group represents short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Expedia’s Vrbo.
The move follows legal concerns raised by the European Commission itself that restrictions brought in by the Spanish region were disproportionate to the aim of tackling housing shortages.
EHHA argues that “unjustified, disproportionate and unsuitable” restrictions breach the EU’s Services Directive, which regulates a swathe of activities from hotels to legal advice. They also said that claims about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability are “politically inflamed”.
The lobby group may have support from the European Commission itself, whose officials wrote to Spanish authorities to protest the law in February according to a document seen by Euronews Travel.
“The Commission services consider that the restrictions laid down in [Catalonia’s] Decree-law 3/2023 are not suitable to attain the objective of fighting housing shortage and are disproportionate to that objective,” the document said.
Spanish authorities could have also considered less swingeing restrictions and hadn’t offered evidence that short-term rentals were responsible for housing market tensions, it added – noting that there were three times as many empty dwellings as tourist rental properties in Catalonia.
Barcelona is just one European holiday destinations trying to find ways to tackle overtourism.
Cities like Venice have banned cruise ships from stopping on their shores, Athens regularly restricts visitor numbers at the famous Acropolis and Amsterdam is moving its red light district out of the city centre to try and clean up its image.
How the European Commission is taking on holiday rentals
Brussels has already taken action to bring the sharing economy within the regulatory fold, offering new rights to platform workers and hiking value-added tax on short-term lets and ridesharing apps such as Uber.
But the issue could prove totemic for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – who has created the first-ever European Commissioner for Housing as part of her second mandate, set to take office within weeks.
She has told Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen to “tackle systemic issues with short-term accommodation rentals”, in a mission letter that handed him the housing brief alongside responsibility for energy policy.
A spokesperson for the Catalan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CORRECTION(20 November, 10:02): corrects spelling of Molnar’s name
Travel
Microsoft pitches AI agents that can perform tasks on their own at annual Ignite event
The move has been criticised by other tech companies who have branded Microsoft as being a “panic mode”.
In opening remarks to a company conference in the United States on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has set the stage for where the company is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) business.
AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.
But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.
Microsoft said last month that it’s preparing for a world where “every organisation will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous”.
Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors”.
Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers.
Microsoft criticised
The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.
Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.
But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user’s behalf.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.
“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.
-
EU & the World7 days ago
Alex Jones’ Net Worth: How Much Money the ‘Infowars’ Creator Has Now
-
EU & the World7 days ago
Jake Paul’s Girlfriend: 5 Things to Know About Jutta Leerdam
-
EU & the World7 days ago
Where to Watch the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Fight
-
Sports7 days ago
NBA: another loss for Dallas, Luka Doncic feels guilty
-
Sports7 days ago
Mike Tyson slaps Jake Paul: all set for the match
-
EU & the World7 days ago
‘Better Man’ Movie Starring Robbie Wiliams: Release Date, Trailer & More
-
EU & the World7 days ago
How Old Is Mike Tyson? A Look at the Boxing Icon’s Age Before Jake Paul Fight
-
EU & the World7 days ago
Mike Tyson Slaps Jake Paul at Weigh-in Before Fight: Video