Anyone who has tried to book a vacation rental in a major city lately has probably noticed something odd. Listings that once numbered in the tens of thousands have quietly vanished, prices have crept upward, and hosts are grumbling about paperwork that didn’t exist a few years ago. This isn’t a coincidence. From Southern Europe to the Pacific, cities that once welcomed Airbnb and its rivals with open arms are now actively trying to push them out, or at least rein them in dramatically.
The reasons vary from place to place, but the pattern is strikingly similar. Locals feel priced out of their own neighborhoods, housing stock keeps shrinking, and residents are tired of living next to what amounts to an unregulated hotel. Here are six destinations where the backlash against short-term rentals has moved well beyond angry op-eds and into real, enforceable policy.
1. Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona has arguably gone further than any other major city in the world. Mayor Jaume Collboni announced that by 2028, the city will ban all short-term tourist rentals, effectively ending the Airbnb era that helped turn Barcelona into one of the world’s most popular destinations. The city isn’t issuing any new licenses, and no new tourist licences have been issued in Barcelona since the 2014 moratorium, and all existing HUT licences will expire in October 2028 and will not be renewed, a decision Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld in March 2025.
What makes Barcelona’s case notable is how legally settled it now is. The ruling reshapes the short-term rental landscape, signaling a shift toward mid- and long-term rentals, and it dismissed claims that the ban violates private property rights, granting the city full legal authority to eliminate its 10,000 licensed tourist apartments. Airbnb has fought back with alternative proposals, but so far the courts have sided entirely with the city, and hosts caught operating illegally after the deadline face fines that can run into the hundreds of thousands of euros.
2. New York City, USA
New York didn’t bother with a slow phase-out. Instead, it effectively rewrote the rules overnight with Local Law 18, which requires hosts to register with the city and imposes strict conditions on who can legally rent out a space. A combination of New York State law and NYC’s Local Law 18 creates a tightly regulated system where the only legal path for short-term stays is a narrow exception, a host-present rental where the permanent resident remains in the home.
The results have been dramatic and immediate. NYC’s Airbnb and VRBO listings plummeted approximately 70% after enforcement began, from over 22,000 active listings to fewer than 3,000. Even now, the fight isn’t over. Short-term rental companies like Airbnb and VRBO have been urging the city to reduce the restrictions enacted by Local Law 18, which requires rental hosts to register with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement. City officials, backed by hotel industry unions, have shown little appetite to loosen the rules.
3. Venice, Italy
Venice’s problem has always been proportion. A city with a shrinking full-time population is squeezed by millions of annual visitors, and short-term rentals have become part of that equation. Venice is tightening regulations on short-term rentals, limiting them to 120 days per year and imposing strict operational rules, including designated rubbish bag use and mandatory in-person guest check-ins.
The city has also become a symbol of the broader regional protest movement. In June 2025, the Southern Europe Against Touristification network coordinated simultaneous protests across Barcelona, Mallorca, Venice, and Lisbon. Even Venice’s much-discussed day-tripper entry fee, which brought in real money, hasn’t fully quieted critics. Venice’s 2025 pilot collected €5.42 million from over 720,000 payers, but crowd levels on fee days weren’t dramatically lower than on free days. Residents argue that short-term rentals remain the deeper structural issue, since they convert scarce housing stock into tourist beds year-round.
4. Lisbon, Portugal
Lisbon has become something of a cautionary tale for what happens when a housing market and a tourism boom collide without enough guardrails. Portugal’s housing crisis context is severe, with property prices in Lisbon jumping from roughly 3,000 to 3,500 euros per square meter in 2020 to 5,642 euros per square meter by June 2025, while median rents climbed 53 percent since 2017. Researchers have tied a meaningful chunk of that increase directly to short-term rentals. Academic research found that a one percentage point increase in Airbnb’s share of housing led to a 3.7 percent increase in house prices on average, and over 30 percent in the historic centres of Lisbon and Porto.
The city has responded with what regulators call containment zones. In November 2025, Lisbon approved a new regulation establishing absolute containment, meaning no new licences, in any parish where short-term rentals exceed 10 percent of housing stock, with six central parishes including Santa Maria Maior and Misericórdia falling into that category. Enforcement is catching up with compliance problems too. Nationwide, approximately 45,000 short-term rental licences face cancellation by summer 2026 due to non-compliance with insurance and registration requirements, and in Lisbon specifically, roughly 7,000 of 18,600 licences face revocation.
5. Maui, Hawaii
Maui’s backlash carries an extra layer of urgency because it’s tied directly to a housing emergency triggered by tragedy. Following the devastating 2023 wildfires that destroyed Lahaina, local leaders pushed to convert vacation units into homes for displaced residents. Maui Mayor Richard Bissen signed Bill 9 into law in late 2025 after the Maui County Council passed it in a 5-3 vote, phasing out short-term vacation rentals in apartment-zoned areas across the island, roughly 7,000 units.
The timeline gives owners a runway, but the direction is unmistakable. The timeline requires West Maui units to cease operating by January 1, 2029, with the rest of the island’s apartment-zoned rentals following by 2031. Owners aren’t waiting around for the deadline either. No automatic removals happen in 2026 or 2027, but owners are already pulling units off the market in anticipation, with about 60 percent of affected units in South Maui and 36 percent in West Maui. Legal challenges are ongoing, but the county has shown no signs of backing down.
6. Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam has been chipping away at short-term rentals for years, and 2026 marks its most aggressive move yet. On top of hotel restrictions, Amsterdam is tightening the rules on holiday rentals, cutting the current 30-night annual cap down to just 15 nights in the city centre and the Pijp district starting April 1, 2026. Rather than capping the number of permits, the city chose a different lever entirely. Rather than introducing a quota system setting a fixed number of rental permits, the city chose to reduce the number of nights allowed, reasoning that a quota would take away the right to rent out a home entirely for many residents.
Airbnb has pushed back hard, arguing the numbers don’t support the crackdown. Airbnb pushed back, saying its rentals make up just 2% of city center stays, compared to 90% in hotels, nearly half located in the same area. The company points to independent data showing that more than 90% of tourist accommodations in Amsterdam are owned by large hotel chains, while hotels accounted for 96% of the growth in overnight stays in Amsterdam between 2021 and 2023. The city, however, has signaled this is only one step in what it calls an escalating enforcement plan, and further restrictions in additional neighborhoods remain firmly on the table.
What ties all six of these places together isn’t a single villain or a single policy. It’s a shared recognition that unregulated short-term rentals, left unchecked for a decade or more, can quietly hollow out the neighborhoods that make a destination worth visiting in the first place. Some cities are choosing outright bans, others are shrinking the number of nights allowed, and a few are simply enforcing rules that already existed but went ignored for years. Travelers booking trips for the rest of 2026 and beyond should expect this patchwork of restrictions to keep tightening rather than loosening, and it’s worth checking a listing’s legal status before handing over a deposit. The era of the freewheeling vacation rental market, at least in these places, appears to be winding down for good.
