Rentalia and HomeAway are exempt from transferring data to the Spanish Treasury

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

Rentalia, the vacation rental portal idealist, HomeAway or any business whose model is through advertisements (whether from individuals or companies), will not have to give explanations to the Treasury.

After Airbnb announced at the beginning of December that it had created a tool for its landlords to enter the data to make them available to the Treasury, the General Directorate of Taxes, under the Ministry of Finance, has expressed that only the data should be presented by the platforms that intermediary and they get a commission for that management. In contrast, subscription ads will be exempt.

The requirement, dated on November 28, was formulated by a federation of companies that leased housing for tourism purposes to know in what cases there was an obligation to present the model 179, the form designed by the Tax Agency to include all this housing data on tourist. Tributes are exempt from that obligation of portals that rely on advertisement to reel in their customers, unless they enable reservations through the web. Thus, platforms such as Rentalia or HomeAway will only have to assign the renters' data made through their website, but not those that are not made outside of them.

This consultation highlighted who was obliged to give this information "if the manager subleases housing through an online platform." The General Tax Office explains that it only "obliges the intermediary in the assignment of the use of housing for tourism purposes. Therefore, only the platforms that provide the referred inter-mediation service are obliged to present the informative declaration."

"On the other hand, the short-term rental platforms that carry out a mere task of digital hosting of advertisements for tourist uses without the intermediary between transferer and assignee can not be subsumed under the subjective scope of the standard and therefore, nor will they be obliged to present the informative declaration," the Treasury clarifies.

In this way, the large advertisement portals that rent out homes for tourists through advertisements, such as HomeAway or Rentalia, will not be obliged to transfer the data to the Treasury (of the owners of the property, the cadastral reference thereof, the identification of the Travelers, etc). The only exception that would force these companies to provide their customers' data would be in which case they enable a reservation service through their website, in which an online transaction occurs. Thus, these platforms will have to inform the treasury when they work as Airbnb, while they will be exempt when they function as a mere advertisement portal.

In fact, these companies are already sending messages to their customers reminding them that the obligation to transfer the data "only affects reservations made online, so if you publish without that functionality, we will not send that information to the Treasury".

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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