Airbnb in our district - the system is broken

It was interesting to hear at the last ‘Meet the Candidates’ meeting, arranged by the tourism industry, that pledges to put more ratepayers money into the tourism industry were made. Although I have an investment in the tourism industry I do not agree with this approach. We cannot and must not burden the ratepayer with more costs.

The council needs to look at other towns and models, such as Queenstown to learn how to raise additional funds if it wants to promote the region further. Currently, in the last audited financials for 2023/24, Council has spent a combined $4.82MIL on business development, tourism marketing and events marketing.

The model Queenstown uses and we should look at is to add a targeted rate on houses that are used entirely for Airbnb purposes and are not available to the general rental pool. This is easy to achieve and has already been implemented elsewhere. These houses enjoy the same marketing benefits as hotels, motels and operators who are already rated on a higher rate to fund our tourism marketing. Our proposal will be to target a rate on full time Airbnb houses. A quick summary by our team estimates an additional 1.2MIL income to council if these houses were rated on a commercial level.

Additionally, we would NOT target family homes who use a sleepout or room for additional income to help with their cost of living.

As a side effect, some of the district Airbnb’s may revert back to long term rentals to help our residents with finding a home to rent. This issue is not unique to Taupo. If we do not deal with this we will have a backlash like you see in Barcelona, Venice and Queenstown where the working family cannot find a house to rent and the population will turn negative on tourism.

Under this model we could increase the tourism marketing spend with possibly lowering the burden on the ratepayers further. Controlling our costs and separating the nice to haves from the must haves is critical. Me must control our rate rises.

We cannot continue to do the same old same old and expect different outcomes.