Prague is going to war with Airbnb, according an interview the city’s mayor Zdeněk Hřib gave to British publication The Observer. Hřib said the online housing platform had turned the Czech capital into a ‘distributed hotel’ and that it was eating the city from inside. The city is now looking to impose strict regulations that would ban entire flats from being rented out, unless the person living it left it temporarily. The new rules would allow people to rent out individual room in flats they lived in. As the number of tourists visiting the city swells, the feeling that Czechs are being pushed out of the center of their own city has grown. “In the past, you could limit the number of tourists in the city simply by approving a certain number of hotels of certain capacity during the process of building permits,” said Hřib. “Now in Prague there is no possibility for the city to limit the accommodation capacity for tourists. The numbers are really critical.” In 2018, 8 million people visited Prague. From 2016 to 2018, the number of Airbnb outlets rose from 5,537 to more than 13,000, according to The Observer.
