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ARCHIVED - Malaga may begin taking tourist credit card details as insurance against damages and noise disturbances
Tourists who stay in short-term holiday lets in Malaga city may be asked to leave their card details in case of bad behaviour
Malaga City Council has come up with a new way to hold holidaymakers who rent short-term let apartments responsible for their behaviour – taking their credit card details and charging them for any damages after they leave, just like in a hotel.
Of course, while the vast majority of tourists who rent holiday apartments in Spain are respectful and well behaved, it’s not unheard of for some people on vacation to cause mayhem and damage the tourist lets where they’re staying, or create undue noise that breaks legal noise limits at night. But it can be difficult for the owners of those holiday rental apartments to get reimbursed.
That’s why Malaga is proposing to take tourists’ credit card details as insurance.
The main city on Spain’s Costa del Sol is offering more flights this year, with direct air connections to 119 destinations. On many occasions, the tourists who come to the city and who cause noise problems have already left for their home countries when a sanction is imposed due to “unpleasant behaviour” during their stay.
The new proposal, explains Malaga’s Councillor for Tourism, Jacobo Florido, is based on the system already used by car rental companies.
In this way, in the event of a problem, such as excessive noise – if it is verified by the local police and results in a fine being issued – a process could be initiated to charge the tenant.
However, the proposed solution goes even further, by suggesting that the owners and managers of tourist accommodation should be vicariously liable for the tenants’ behaviour, so that “whoever is in charge is jointly responsible” for the clients who stay in their property.
For his part, the president of the Association of Professionals of Tourist Housing and Tourist Apartments of Andalusia (AVVA PRO), Carlos Pérez-Lanzac, sees it as a good thing that there are mechanisms to be able to “control and penalise people who act badly”, although he believes that it is “more complicated” for the apartment manager to be “responsible for the acts of third parties”.
Since last July, more than a thousand properties in the city centre of Malaga have had a system of noise meters and night concierges who go to the properties in the event of any noise incidents or complaints from neighbours, through an agreement reached with the company Roomonitor.
The incidence of noise-related problems is very low in the city of Malaga, at around 0.05%, and it is the second city in Europe to have certified tourist dwellings that favour neighbourly coexistence via the weRespect seal.
A new decree is currently being negotiated for the regulation of tourist accommodation, which the Junta hopes to bring forward before the end of the year, and which will focus on the professionalisation of the sector.
It is not yet known whether or not this will include the much-debated ‘tourist tax’ which Malaga wants to bring in to charge tourists more for hotel and holiday rentals per night.
Image: Archive
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