With just one month to go before the Paris Olympics, residents who thought they could make ends meet by renting out their homes to tourists at exorbitant prices are becoming disillusioned and are lowering their prices or giving up altogether.
“We already saw ourselves with wads of cash to go on vacation,” Giulia laughs. But this 28-year-old Parisian, who rented her apartment on Airbnb for the Olympics, did not see the lucrative reservation fall through.
In January, this employee of a real estate group, who lives in a working-class neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement, in the north of the capital, asked for an “exorbitant” rate of 550 euros per night.
“Afterwards, it went down to 350, then to 250, and still no one…” It was when she lowered her rate to 160 euros, compared to 130 normally, that a reservation came in, an American who will stay 14 nights while she is accommodated at her parents’ house.
“It’s a plus, it will allow us to have a great vacation,” she is satisfied.
Adrien Coucaud, an advertising executive who lives in the 12th arrondissement in the east of the capital, has not had as much success.
For the “greed of gain”, he tried to entrust the apartment where he lives alone to a concierge, so that he could welcome tourists during his holidays.
The experiment turned sour.
The concierge service was absent, and the prices set were far too high to attract reservations during the Olympics (July 26-August 11).
Even after he took back control of his ad and lowered his prices to 166 euros per night, it was impossible to find a host for the period, so he preferred to give up. “I’m ending the adventure here, I’m disgusted,” he confides.
– “A little saw it coming” –
“As anticipated, the increase in supply available during the Games regulates prices,” acknowledges Airbnb in a statement sent to AFP, without revealing precise data on the prices charged.
Despite these difficulties, “Paris 2024 is on track to become the largest event in Airbnb history, with more travelers staying with local hosts on our platform than at any event before,” says the tourist rental giant.
“The number of nights booked in the first quarter for stays during the Games period was more than five times higher than in the Paris region during the same period the previous year,” adds the American platform.
“We had seen it coming a bit,” notes Barbara Gomes, elected official responsible for regulating furnished tourist accommodation in the City of Paris. “There was an inflation phenomenon at first, with a lot of fantasies about rental prices that could be made during the Games,” then “a drop in prices,” explains the communist elected official.
She attributes this phenomenon to Parisians going on holiday, taking advantage of the opportunity to rent out their accommodation, combined with the abundance of hotel accommodation.
“It’s never bad news to be able to be accommodated at a lower cost,” she believes, saying she has “no problem with someone going on vacation wanting to put a little butter in the spinach (…) It doesn’t take away housing from anyone.”
The elected official adds that she is “attentive” to respecting Parisian regulations, which make it very difficult to rent accommodation that is not a primary residence.
“For everything that is low-end and mid-range, there is no goose that lays golden eggs,” says Raphaël Lorin, president of Archides, a group specializing in luxury tourist rentals, “since out of 15 million tourists there are 13 million French people.
French people attending the Olympics are in fact more often staying with relatives, he says.
“On the other hand, foreigners can be people with very big budgets and consumers of very high-end hotels,” says Raphaël Lorin.
