Short-term lettings: tourist accommodation is taking space away from 304,000 residents

Short-term rentals, the form of tourist accommodation that has transformed Italy’s major cities in recent years, have displaced 304,000 potential residents. This estimate is contained in the study on ‘Toxic tourism’, which suggests that Italian tourism is failing to translate 12.6 billion a year into stable growth for the country and for its destinations.

Short-term lettings are one of the six distortions of tourism identified by Raffaele Rio, former president of the Demoskopika Institute, alongside high prices, overtourism, the marginalisation of inland areas, criminal infiltration and digital platform rent-seeking.

Rio, who is also the author of the essay *Tourism is not destiny. How to give regions back control of their own future (FrancoAngeli), has broken down each of the six items: the cost of living accounts for 4 billion euros (equivalent to 31.6% of the total); criminal infiltration accounts for 3.3 billion (equivalent to 26.1%); short-term rentals account for 2 billion; marginal areas represent 2 billion in untapped wealth; overtourism accounts for 0.8 billion; and revenue from digital platforms amounts to 0.6 billion. The total cost, as mentioned, is 12.6 billion. This corresponds to the share of wealth that is lost ‘when prices, rents, regional imbalances, illegality and pressure on housing increase’.

In terms of tourist flows, this loss equates to unrealised potential of 15.2 million arrivals and 44.3 million overnight stays: tourist demand that the Italia system could have captured, retained or distributed more effectively between established destinations and peripheral areas. These are not tourists omitted from the official statistics, but potential flows that do not translate into actual overnight stays due to distortions that reduce accessibility, competitiveness and the capacity to redistribute growth.

To measure the impact of short-term lettings, the study – based on Istat indices – examined the top 147 municipalities at potential risk of tourist overcrowding and calculated the number of properties used for short-term lettings: a stock of approximately 145,000 properties which, again using official statistical parameters, corresponds to a potential loss of housing capacity for permanent residence amounting to 304,000 people.