Spain Built It First. Its Own Court Just Killed It.

The One to Be In the Room For

Next week in Brighton, the short-term rental industry holds its first conference dedicated entirely to AI. Two days, two events — SCALE With AI on the Tuesday, SCALE UK the day after. And if you can get there, go. Here's why I'm saying that. For two years, "AI for rentals" has mostly meant one thing — a chatbot answering guest messages a bit faster. Helpful. But hardly the revolution it was sold as. This is different. The agenda's built from operator feedback, not vendor pitches — and SCALE doesn't let service providers buy tickets, so the room is actual operators, not people selling to them. That alone makes it rare. You've got a beginner's guide for anyone who's nodded along in meetings without touching the stuff, a live demo of a real-time guest comms system, sessions on automating ops without adding headcount, and a keynote on the big one — AI becoming a new distribution layer. That's the bit that matters. Guests are shifting from searching and browsing to asking and delegating. "Book me four nights near the coast" — and the decision happens inside the model. Before your listing. Before the OTA. Before you're even in the conversation. That's not a messaging upgrade. That's the funnel changing shape. If you run a serious STR business, this is the one to be in the room for. Brighton, 9th and 10th. I'll see you there.

The Events Capital With No Beds

Next week the Pope arrives in Barcelona. But forget the Pope for a second. Look at the calendar behind him. Mobile World Congress: 109,000 people. Smart City Expo World Congress. The UIA World Congress of Architects. 142 international congresses in 2025 fourth most of any city on earth. Barcelona has spent a decade becoming the events capital of Europe. And it worked. Now here's the number nobody puts next to that one. Barcelona has ~39,000 hotel rooms. That number is frozen. Hotel room supply grew 0.5% in five years. Not per year. In total, 2019 to 2024. There is exactly one hotel under construction in the city right now. This isn't an accident. The building moratorium is designed to stop new hotels. So when 100,000 people land in the same week, the hotels can't conjure rooms. They're legally capped. Which leaves one type of accommodation that can actually flex to absorb a peak: Short-term rentals. The exact thing Barcelona is removing all 10,101 licences, gone by 2028. That's an estimated ~46,000 tourist beds (averaging ~4.6 per licence, per the city's own PEUAT census). More than Barcelona's entire hotel-room stock. So read those facts together: → A growing pipeline of mega-events → A hotel base frozen by law → More flexible beds than the city has hotel rooms being deleted You can freeze the hotels. You can ban the apartments. Pick one and you can still argue it. Do both while actively recruiting more events and you haven't managed overtourism. You've just guaranteed the city sells out, prices spike, and visitors get priced into the next town. The Pope is just the version of this story with a date on it.

Porto Just Killed 1,413 Listings With a Missing PDF

Everyone said 20 May was the day Europe's "wild west" of short-term rentals ended. Less than two weeks in, the first city to actually pull listings didn't touch the new EU rules. Porto cancelled 1,413 licences. Roughly 13% of its entire registered stock. The trigger? Not a night cap. Not a ban. Not the EU's new data system. A missing insurance document. 🔻 1,413 AL registrations cancelled no proof of civil liability cover filed 🔻 50–60% sit in the historic centre, where they can NEVER be reactivated 🔻 The EU "mega-regulation" had nothing to do with it So who actually loses? Not the platforms. Not the professional manager with clean files. The casual host who let a document expire. This isn't a war on short-term rentals. It's a clear-out of the amateurs and the pros just inherited the supply. Is your compliance file audit-ready? Or are you one missing PDF from a permanent cancellation?

Up 13.6 percent!

+13.6%. That's UK short-term rental demand for this summer, versus last. Italy: +11.6% France: +8.7% Across Europe's top 20 markets: 6.4 million additional guest nights already booked for June to August. Seventeen out of twenty markets are pacing ahead of last summer. This is after the EU regulation went live. After Spain's national registry got struck down. After Barcelona's 2029 phase-out. After Amsterdam, after Florence, after Paris. Now here's the bit nobody's reporting. Spain, the most aggressively regulated market in Europe, is up 1.9%. The slowest of any major market. Germany has gone backwards. So while politicians keep telling us short-term rentals are the problem, guests are voting with their wallets in the opposite direction. And the harder a market regulates, the slower the growth. The demand is there. The question for operators isn't whether the summer comes. It's whether you're compliant enough to capture it when it does. What do we think as an industry? Is the data finally going to shift the conversation, or will the housing narrative keep winning?

Built From the Front Lines: The STR Software Forged in Switzerland and Bali

I sat down with Reto from Elevate Software, and the origin story is what makes this one worth a listen. Reto and his team weren't software people who guessed at what operators need. They were running short-term rentals across two very different markets, Switzerland and Bali, hit the same operational walls every operator knows, and built Elevate Suite to solve them. That product is now what they take to market: software built by operators, for operators. We got into: → Operating STRs across two completely different regulatory worlds → How hospitality expectations differ between the Alps and the islands → Why being operators first shaped a sharper product → How automation is reshaping property management, and where Elevate goes next If you build or buy STR tech, the "built by people who actually ran it" test matters. This conversation is a good example of why.