STR Unpacked

STR Unpacked is a short-term rental industry podcast that reviews the key news stories of the week alongside an invited sector expert, providing commentary, insight and practical interpretation of how current developments are shaping the market.

STR Unpacked is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 141 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts STR Unpacked, a business show with 141 episodes published.

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  STR Unpacked

  You Already Pay To Rank

  Sep 15, 20262 min

  Paying to rank is not new. It is arriving at the one big channel that never sold it. On 1 September, Expedia Group launched Vrbo Sponsored Listings globally, one of 12 products announced that day. Expedia's own words: a "pay-per-booked-night advertising solution" that "offers no upfront risk and helps partners secure premium placement at the top of relevant Vrbo search results". It is an auction. Expedia's partner guide sets the minimum bid at $5 per booked night, and you pay only "when a guest who clicks on your ad actually books". Self-serve, through the Expedia Group Advertising platform. Then on 8 September, at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, Brian Chesky was reported by PhocusWire and shorttermrentalz as calling sponsored listings "a pretty easy straight shot to $1 billion incremental high margin revenue", and comparing Airbnb to Amazon, Alibaba and Etsy, which "take a huge margin on the supply side". To be clear, because a lot of posts this week are not being clear: Airbnb has announced nothing. shorttermrentalz states that Airbnb "has not confirmed plans to launch sponsored listings or provided details about how such a product could operate". That is a CEO describing an opportunity to investors, not a product. Now the part that changes how you should read all of it. Booking has sold ranking for years, and most of us are already buying. From Booking's own partner help pages, not from a vendor blog: The Visibility Booster is a commission slider. Booking says it can "place your property higher in rankings", and you can target it by check-in date and by the booker's country. The Preferred Partner Programme gives "greater visibility to the top 30% of our partners" in exchange for what Booking calls a small increase in commission. So the question is not whether to start paying for placement. For most operators that decision was made years ago, inside a commission percentage, without ever being called advertising. One lever worth using. Article 5(3) of the EU platform-to-business regulation requires that where payment can influence ranking, the platform sets out "a description of those possibilities and of the effects of such remuneration on ranking". If you let in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, that duty applies to your channels now. Make them show you what the money buys before you bid into a new auction. Your ranking has had a price for years. The only new thing is that it now has a price list. What are you actually paying, across every channel, for placement you cannot see the mechanics of?

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  STR Unpacked

  Ice Hockey To Y Combinator - Sit down with Jan from Trellis

  Sep 14, 202651 min

  Jan Sahagun turned down the chance to start Trellis. He was in a job he believed in, he needed the stability, and he said no. So his co-founder applied to Y Combinator anyway and put Jan's name on the application. Jan found out afterwards. He went. That is roughly how his whole career has gone. He played hockey at a high level, then collected three master's degrees because he had no idea what he wanted to do. An investment banking internship bored him so completely that he flew to Australia to think, and very nearly stayed to work in the mines. He came back, fell into procurement buying software, and worked out that tech sales was the closest thing to sport he was going to find in an office. Short-term rentals found him by accident after that. He had barely set foot in a hotel growing up. His family travelled on a budget, so he stayed in other people's homes without knowing there was an industry attached to it. Which is why the thing that actually animates him is not the software. It is that people save for years to travel, then arrive somewhere with no Wi-Fi and a host who tells them to go and buy a SIM card. That happened to him a few weeks ago. His verdict, and it is a good line: short-term rentals have been professionalised out of existence. He is building agents that run operations for property managers now, which is a longer conversation. The short version is that he has probably spoken to more operators about this than anyone in Europe, and he is at GuestyVal in Madrid this week, 16 to 18 September. If you are going, find him. He and I are also doing a fireside chat at SCALE Fest in Barcelona, 23 to 25 October. I want to push him properly on the question this episode only glances at, which is whether any of this makes the stay better for the person paying for it. Come and heckle.

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  STR Unpacked

  Uncapped

  Sep 14, 20263 min

  England's tourist tax will not be capped. Neither will the number of nights it applies to. The government published its response to the visitor levy consultation on Wednesday 10 September. Most coverage has led on the missing rate cap. For anyone running longer stays, the night cap matters more. No cap on the rate. "The government does not intend to set a cap on the visitor levy rate, however, this is a finely balanced issue and government will continue to consider the case for doing so." So it is uncapped for now, and the government has left itself room to revisit that. It is charged as a percentage of the accommodation price rather than a flat fee per night. No cap on the nights. Section 5.3.7: the government "does not intend to allow local leaders to place a cap on the number of nights for which the levy may be charged, locally, as this would be operationally and administratively burdensome". Edinburgh's scheme has been live since 24 July at 5% of the accommodation only portion, net of VAT, capped at 5 consecutive nights. England is not copying that. A 14 night stay would be levied on all 14 nights. If your average length of stay is above a week, model this at a rate you have not been given yet, over a night count with no ceiling. The duty sits on you, not the guest and not the platform. Accommodation providers "would be legally responsible for calculating and collecting the levy, and for paying it to the relevant levying authority". Add notifying the levying authority, filing self-assessed returns and keeping records. There is a de minimis threshold, but the response says it is intended to exempt only occasional informal providers. Scope is "all types of short-term, commercially let accommodation". The House of Commons Library briefing published the same day names self-catering properties and short-term lets specifically. The honest caveat: none of this is law. The Overnight Visitor Levy Bill was announced in the King's Speech on 13 May 2026 and has still not been introduced. There is no rate, no commencement date and no draft legislation. The government's own marker is local leaders setting out spending plans by March 2028. An uncapped rate is the headline, but no night cap is the number that hits a long stay business hardest. What is your average length of stay in England, and what does a 5% levy on every night of it do to your net?

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  STR Unpacked

  Enforce Or Don't Restrict

  Sep 11, 20263 min

  Three things happened in European short-term rentals this week, and one of them has been badly under reported. The Affordable Housing Act, published Wednesday, gives compliant operators something to argue with. Article 10(1)(e). Where an authority restricts short-term rentals to safeguard housing affordability, the measure only stands where that authority "applies and enforces Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 in the relevant geographical area", including "orders requiring the removal or disabling of listings without a registration number". Plenty of places restrict while barely enforcing. Under this text that is a defect in the measure, and you can cite the article. Article 11 gives affected operators effective judicial review, "including the possibility to challenge the assessments carried out by the competent authority". Article 12 caps any measure at 5 years. Article 14 is the limit. The Regulation "shall not apply to measures adopted before" entry into force, so everything already on the books sits outside it. And none of this is law yet. It is a proposal, COM(2026) 599 final, now with Parliament and Council. Airbnb's 15.5% fee, and a correction. If you operate professionally you have been on the single 15.5% fee for months. Airbnb's rollout put Germany and the UK on 22 June, and hosts on property management software moved earlier still. The 13 October date in circulation is for hosts not yet on it. For most of this audience it is not a deadline. The part worth your time is VAT. Airbnb's Help Centre says "VAT is charged on the Host service fee for a reservation", across roughly 60 countries including the UK, Ireland and Spain. Hosts who give Airbnb a valid VAT number "may not be charged VAT on Airbnb service fees". Without one, 20% VAT on a 15.5% fee is 18.6%. If you manage for individual owners, check which of them has a number on file. Google is removing the vacation rentals unit from Search across the EEA. Reported by PhocusWire and shorttermrentalz from an email Google sent partners. No public Google post exists, so treat the wording as second hand. If your channel manager feeds it, look at what that traffic did this week. The driver is the Digital Markets Act. The Commission fined Google 890 million euros on 23 July, 460 million of it for self-preferencing on Google Search, and Google "is required to comply with the Commission's decisions within 60 days". That is 21 September. Two of those three went the operator's way, which is not how most weeks go. An authority that will not enforce its own register may find it cannot lawfully restrict you either. Is the authority where you operate actually enforcing the register it already has?

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  STR Unpacked

  No Grandfathering

  Sep 10, 20263 min

  Brussels published the Affordable Housing Act yesterday. The most important line in it is not about caps. Article 3(1): short-term rental restrictions taken on housing affordability grounds "shall not be subject to Directive 2006/123/EC, including the notification obligation laid down in Article 15(7)". That notification duty is what puts a proposed restriction in front of the Commission before it takes effect. On affordability grounds, it is gone. What replaces it is a real test. A city has to show a price-to-income ratio of 8 or higher, that ratio rising across 10 years, and that short-term rentals specifically damaged affordability for at least 3 years. Less restrictive options ruled out. Measures capped at 5 years, then reviewed. And the one operators should be using. Under Article 10(1)(e) a city may only restrict where it already "applies and enforces" the EU registration regime, including taking down unregistered listings. Plenty of cities restrict while barely enforcing. That is now a proportionality failure with a citation attached. Now the part almost nobody has reported. Article 14: the Regulation does not apply to measures adopted before it enters into force. Barcelona's 2028 phase-out. Paris. The Athens freeze. No 8x test, no 3-year evidence burden, no 5-year sunset. Every safeguard in this Act is prospective. And a correction to Tuesday, which is mine to make. I said the leaked draft opened the door to grandfathering for existing operators. The published text uses that word once, in recital 25, and recital 25 is about property acquisition. Recital 26, the short-term rental one, has none. What hosts actually get is Article 10(2), "appropriate transitional arrangements". A duty on the city, not an exemption for you. Two figures from the Commission's own Q&A. Activity across the 4 main platforms grew 93% between 2018 and 2024. Central Madrid has around 40 short-term rentals for every 100 homes in the long-term rental market. The caveat: this is a proposal, COM(2026) 599 final. Parliament and Council next, and the Commission has given no timetable. The safeguards start when the Act does, and the rules you are already living under are not covered by them. If your city restricts you tomorrow, your first question is whether it is actually enforcing the registration regime it already has. What is the answer where you operate?

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