Filenews 19 February 2025 - by Angelos Angelodimou
The rate of registration of self-catering short-term rentals in the register of the Deputy Ministry of Tourism is increasing, according to what the competent deputy minister said yesterday, but the percentage of registered beds in relation to their total seems to remain at only about 30%.
Regarding the prospects of tourism for 2025, the Deputy Minister said that this is expected to be as good as in 2024 and that the big bet now is to extend the tourist season.
More specifically, speaking yesterday after the meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Tourism, where the implementation of the legislation regulating the operation of self-catering short-term rental accommodation was discussed, the Deputy Minister of Tourism, Costas Koumis, gave the picture in relation to the registrations of these accommodations in the Registry of the Deputy Ministry.
As he said, from April 2023 until last week, the registrations of self-catering short-term rentals in the register of the Deputy Ministry of Tourism have increased by 73%, with the number of registered accommodation amounting to 8,248. This percentage, he added, could rise to 99.8% upon completion of all pending applications, which currently amount to 1,275. He also stated that 1,170 applications are pending, due to the fault of the applicants.
About 1/3 of the registrations
The Deputy Minister of Tourism added that the improvement in the numbers of new registrations is due to the campaigns of the Deputy Ministry. Specifically, he said that on the basis of numbers, in April 2023, 4,765 accommodations were registered in the relevant registry, equivalent to 7,138 beds, while today the number of registered accommodations amounts to 8,248 accommodations, equivalent to 36,640 beds.
As it turns out, there has been a noticeable increase in registrations. However, if the figures given a few days ago by the president of the ACTE, Akis Vavlitis, are true, namely that today relevant estimates refer to the operation in Cyprus of about 80 to 90 thousand airbnb beds, about as many as the legal hotel industry has, it follows that only about 1/3 are registered, as they should, in the register of the Deputy Ministry of Tourism.
Mr. Vavlitis added that it took the hotel industry 50 whole years, from 1974 to 2024, to create its current stock of about 90,000 licensed hotel beds, while on the other hand short-term rental, as an economic business, took less than 10 years to have approximately the same beds.
Measures
In a journalist's remark that in other European countries the operation of short-term rentals stopped because they "hit" the hotel industry and created issues in housing, Mr. Koumis said that the side effects of short-term rental accommodation in each country or in each city are different.
He said that the first country to approach this issue rigorously was Spain, which transferred the powers to take action against this issue to local government. He added that almost no country has taken immediate action, explaining that Spain has taken decisions with long-term implementation, aiming to ban this service from 2028.
"As I have mentioned, each country approaches the issue differently, because each case is different. This, to a large extent, is also true in Cyprus. We expect the approach of the issue to be different in relation to the destination Nicosia and the approach to the issue is different in relation to a coastal destination", he noted.
He also said that the issue is characterized by a complexity, noting that this service has contributed to the tourism economy. At the same time, he continued, "it operates in a state of competition with the hotel industry and it is an issue that concerns us. We are concerned about what is called 'parahotels'", he noted and explained that each destination is judged by the overall image of the destination and by the first impression provided by the hotel industry.
Elongation the big bet
Asked to assess whether 2025 will be a good tourist year for the country, Mr. Koumis said that 2024 was undoubtedly a very good year, which resulted in a double record of revenues and arrivals. "For us, what is important is that in two years' time we achieved what we had aimed, to fully fill the big gap of the Russian market," he noted.
Over a two-year horizon, there has been an increase of more than 25% in both arrivals and revenues, he added. "We expect 2025 to be just as good a tourism year compared to 2024. The big bet now is to extend the tourist season", Mr. Koumis concluded.
