[geezerjay]

The only way that investments in domestic rentals targetting the touristm market can compete with large-scale industrial offers provided by hotels is if the lodging market has been stifled by regulation. Housing in Barcelona is far from cheap and buying an apartment to rent out as a pseudo hotel room is only a remotely viable investment if supply is kept artificially low by rejecting any proposal to build sorely needed hotels.

This sad political state of affairs only serves the interests of incumbent hotel operators and real estate speculators by ensuring that their past investments remain exceptionally proffitable and no competitor can enter the market to pick up the slack. Radical anti-tourism anarchist groups play the role of useful idiots to help preserve this state of affairs, but the real source of the problem is quite obvious, and so is the solution: allow the construction of new high-capacity hotels and provide incentives to maximize hotel occupancy, such as taxing vacant hotel rooms, so that repurposing apartments as pseudo-hotel rooms ceases to be an attractive investment.

Until this problem is actually understood, instead of blindly swallowing political propaganda, it won't simply go away,no matter how much noise and publicity stunts anarchist groups make regarding this issue.