Webinar: VACATION RENTALS ON CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
A vacation rental is the renting out of a furnished apartment or house, on a temporary basis to tourists as an alternative to a hotel.
Websites like VRBO, Home Away and Airbnb have specialized in facilitating vacation rentals online.
In 2021, the value of the global vacation rental market was estimated to reach 193.89 billion U.S. dollars.
Many countries are struggling with how to manage this fairly new and booming sector. The challenges are to:
- Create a level playing field with the hotel sector
- To get data about rentals
- To cash the right amount of tourist tax and other taxes
- To get the holiday rentals to adhere to safety and health standards
- To manage the amount of facilities to prevent over-‐ or under supply
- To secure the countries ambitions in offer, price, quality, image and markets
- To provide affordable housing
Many OCT islands are suffering to deal with the growing offer of holiday rentals in relation to the above mentioned challenges. Scrapes of websites like Airbnb show an offer that is much larger than the number of registered lodging facilities on the island. In general there are a lot of illegal, unregistered, unfair and unsafe vacation rentals on the OCT islands.
But we don’t know the challenges and solutions per island. Sharing knowledge and ideas can be an important step towards a solution. A webinar will be organized to gather this knowledge and best practices.
The idea is to have five islands present their views, ideas and rules on holiday rentals.
Each of the five islands are requested to put a government representative or someone of the Tourism department forward. This person has a lot of knowledge about vacation rentals in general and on the island in particular. He or she will prepare a 10 minute Powerpoint presentation in which the following topics will be discussed:
The local policy on vacation rentals (is there a policy and if yes what are the specifics)
- How does the island deal with taxes in regards to vacation rentals
- How does the island deal with data and intelligence in regards to vacation rentals. Is there a form of registration of the facility and the bookings?
- Does the island have a corporation with one of the OTA’s and if so what does the agreement entail?
- How does the island deal with rulings (such as hotel license and so on) in regards to vacation rentals with
- How does the island deal with health and safety rules in regards to vacation rentals
Any other vacation rental topics that are interesting to share with the fellow islands.
The goal is to gather as much information on four islands that are heavily confronted with holiday rentals. In order to save time and budget this meeting will be held online using a teleconference tool. The conference will last 1,5 hours and will be moderated by Mr. Rene van Schie from the Netherlands. He will start with a 10 minute presentation on vacation rentals in the Caribbean. After that five representatives of five islands will present their case one by one in the live video.
All the participants will be able to see the video presentations on their screens and are able to ask written questions and chat at the same time.
The conference will be fully recorded but not shared. All that is discussed will be presented in the form of a report describing the market and how the different islands deal with the challenges and opportunities that come with vacation rentals. The PDF document will be sent to COSME who can then distribute it to other interested OCT islands.
The webinar for ALL OCTs will be held on:
June 26th, 2018 at 10 AM (for approximately 1 hour)
The goal is to help OCT islands to deal with the challenged subscribed and to manage holiday rentals in such a way that a professional new lodging type can be added to the sector in such a way that safety, a level playing field with (condo)hotels, the provision of data and the payment of taxes are guaranteed.