Short-Term Rentals: How Much Is Too Much – Spatial Patterns in Portugal and Lisbon

Abstract

Purpose - This paper analyses the growth of tourism in Portugal and in the municipality of Lisbon, with a focus on short-term rentals. Design - The paper begins with the statistical background of the tourism boom that occurred in Portugal in the 2010s. The central part of the paper concentrates on an analysis of the spatial distribution of short-term rental properties, consisting of two parts: i) observation of spatial patterns in Portugal, by NUTS II region; ii) analysis of the municipality of Lisbon, which accounts for 22% of all short-term rentals units registered in Portugal. Methodology - The spatial analysis was carried out within GIS, using an approach based on spatial statistics, with research that involves geographic data and big data. Approach - This study combines a qualitative and quantitative approach. It begins with a theoretical review on the growth of tourism and short-term rental in the last decade, followed by a quantitative-spatial analysis to the case of Portugal and the municipality of Lisbon, and ending with reflections that combine the results of the practical analysis with the most recent literature on the impacts of tourism in Lisbon Findings - The paper ends with some reflections on the excessive concentration of short-term rentals in urban areas and their positive and negative externalities on urban life. The results suggest that the city center presents the highest concentration of short-time rentals, but not the highest concentration of beds. It also shows that the excessive concentration of short-term rentals units may cause serious negative externalities that affect the quality of life in its multiple dimensions. Originality - The results and the final discussion of this paper contributes to a greater knowledge of the spatial distribution of short-term rentals in Portugal and Lisbon and to debate the future of short-term rentals in cities that are among the world’s leading tourism destinations.

The touristification of urban spaces: measurement proposal

“…Similarly, Cerdá-Mansilla et al (2022) and Gil & Sequera (2022) apply them to the districts of Madrid, while Antunes & Ferreira (2021) use the parishes of Lisbon and Celata et al (2020) contemplate a 50x50 metre mesh in Florence. Castro et al (2023) consider the proportion of the total number of properties.…”

“…In these cases, a good part of the theoretical effort is focused on the identification of the thresholds, above which tourism is excessive. Therefore, there has been particular interest in elaborating indicators to apply on different scales (Antunes & Ferreira, 2021;Celata & Romano, 2020).…”

Touristification and Conflicts of Interest in Cruise Destinations: The Case of Main Cultural Tourism Cities on the Spanish Mediterranean Coast

“…Studies investigating the concentration of Airbnb listings at the city level are performed using different territorial units of analysis. For instance, it is common to find Airbnb listings assigned to districts [13] or city parishes [14], neighbourhoods [15], census tracts [16] and even statistical sectors [17]. The smaller the territorial unit, the more disaggregated the listings are.…”

“…Data compiled for Barcelona and Malaga are available monthly in text files called listing.csv throughout 2019. Although December was the month with the highest number of listings in 2019 (see Table 4), the data collected in summer are considered to be representative due to the high tourist activity, so the dataset collected at just before or shortly after the beginning of the month of August were used, as had been the case in previous studies for the months of July [14] and August [26,35]. Once the collection date had been selected, the Airbnb listing month in question was converted to a point layer using the latitude and longitude coordinates included in the spatial database in order for a sum of listings to be assigned to every census tract.…”