Paris is ground zero for Europe’s backlash against illegal Airbnbs

Early one drizzly morning in Paris, a handful of city officials make their way up a steep, narrow street in the historic neighborhood of Montmartre, with a reporter in tow and the domed Sacré-Coeur basilica looming above. The group stops at an apartment building that looks like any other on the block. It is only when they step inside the entrance hall that anything seems unusual. Signs pasted to the walls declare that loud noise and nighttime gatherings are forbidden. And many of the front doors have metal lockboxes bolted to them, with apartment keys inside. Both are telltale signs that the city workers have found what they’re looking for: illegal Airbnbs.

Recommended Video

During the next half-hour, as we climb stairs and knock on doors, a few sleepy residents emerge to complain—not about us, but to us. They describe how their building has begun to feel like a travelers’ crash pad, with rolling suitcases clattering on the pavestones at all hours, and the outdoor courtyard becoming a rowdy tavern on warm evenings. “A living hell,” one calls it.

These modest Montmartre homes are just one flash point in Europe’s growing Airbnb backlash. Even as short-term home rentals have become a global travel norm, more cities worldwide have blamed Airbnb and its competitors for their housing squeeze and affordability crises. In Europe, and in Paris in particular, the growing opposition has gathered real momentum. Paris’s restrictions are among the most rigid, sharply limiting the number of nights that any property can be made available for short-term rentals. The owners of those Montmartre apartments could face fines of well over €100,000 if it’s proved they have violated the law.

“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 City Hall’s ornate dining room. Hidalgo, whose term expired in March, describes how she, together with the mayors of Barcelona and Rome, spent years pushing the 27-country European Union to crack down on Airbnb. Beginning this May, a new EU law will require hosts to register properties on a Europe-wide database, aimed at allowing cities to quickly check listings they suspect flout local laws. “The problem is not just Paris,” Hidalgo adds. “It is all of Europe.”

Airbnb has assumed the role of villain in this saga, since it dominates the market, with about 44% of the short-term rental industry in 2024, according to travel data firm Skift Research. There are about 9 million Airbnb listings globally, and Paris estimates about 75,000 short-term tourist rentals in its metro area.

> 75,000

Tourist rentals in the Paris area

> 44%

Airbnb’s share of global short-term rental industry, 2024

> ~50 million

Number of tourists who visited Paris in 2025

Sources: Apur, Skift Research, City of Paris Tourism Office

When three twenty-something friends launched Airbnb in 2008, villainy was hardly the fate they foresaw. They had cast their startup as a relaxed way for strangers to connect: Their idea was hatched when they plopped air mattresses on the floor of their San Francisco apartment and charged people to sleep on them. “Back then, 100% of people were more than skeptical,” cofounder and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk tells me. “They almost violently rejected the idea, saying, ‘How can you trust a stranger in your home?'”

The world got used to the idea, of course, and now Airbnb is a Fortune 500 business with a valuation of nearly $80 billion and listings in more than 200 countries. Last year it booked 121.9 million stays, earning $12.2 billion in revenue, up from $11 billion the year before. Dictionaries define “to Airbnb” as the verb for short-term renting—a catchphrase for the entire business it invented.

Even so, Airbnb’s share price is about 10% below where it was when it went public in 2020—and investors believe that local pushback is a real obstacle to its growth. The company strongly rejects the idea that it’s to blame for any housing shortages: Airbnb “just doesn’t move the needle in terms of impacting housing prices,” Blecharczyk says. Still, for its execs and investors, the question now is how much they will need to change their strategy going forward—or whether the model that built the company into a travel giant can endure.

Today many Airbnb listings are operated as full-time rental businesses, rather than by people allowing strangers to stay in their homes. That fact has only stoked the sense in some cities that the soaring number of short-term rentals has robbed them of badly needed housing stock, even as affordability becomes a pivotal political issue. As Motley Fool stock analyst Lawrence Nga wrote last September, “Airbnb’s most significant long-term risk isn’t competition. It’s regulation.”

The call to rein in Airbnb is strongest in Europe’s centuries-old tourist-magnet cities. Across Europe, the number of tourist ren