The Ile d’Oléron in western France is seeking nearly €30m from Airbnb for not collecting tourist tax in 2020 and 2021, the latest disappointment for the apartment rental platform in France.
The island’s municipal community has criticized the tourist rental platform for failing to make a “declaration on tourist tax” the first year and an “incomplete and erroneous” declaration the next year, in a subpoena to court consulted by AFP on Monday.
Airbnb Ireland (the company’s European headquarters based in Dublin) is being summoned to appear in La Rochelle court on April 25, where the community of local authorities is asking the platform to pay four civil fines totaling £29 .7 million euros to be condemned This was revealed by the newspaper Le Figaro on Sunday.
This amount corresponds to the maximum penalty for non-payment of the tourist tax provided for by the Municipal Code, i.e. 2,500 euros, multiplied by the number of stays affected during this period (almost 12,000).
The municipality of Île d’Oléron had already asked Airbnb to pay more than 400,000 euros for unpaid taxes in 2020 and 2021, a sum the platform paid last September after a first arm wrestling. .
But the community of municipalities does not want to stop there. “Airbnb cannot be satisfied with making a payment when it is due,” says his attorney Me Jonathan Bellaïche. “It does not sanction non-collection and non-declaration,” he adds, while “the law provides for sanctions” in this case.
“The problem is due to a technical error and was fixed last year as soon as we were informed. All identified uncollected amounts have already been paid, with statutory interest on arrears,” she responded in an Airbnb press release on Monday.
With this summons, which the platform has allegedly not yet received, the community wants to set an example, because according to its president Michel Parent, their case is not an isolated case. “Several municipalities have asked us to find out how we were able to recover the sum from previous years,” he explains.
On January 17, following a summons from the same elected officials from Oléron, another tourist rental platform, Booking, was ordered by the La Rochelle court to communicate the number of nights reserved by its agent on the island for 2020 and 2021. The community also accuses him of similar shortcomings.
On Jan. 13, Airbnb announced that it paid €148 million in tourist tax to French municipalities in 2022, an amount that increased by 60% compared to the previous year.
Earlier in January, French courts upheld Airbnb’s conviction in the crime of a Parisian tenant who had illegally sublet her accommodation.