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 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts STR Unpacked, a business show with 0 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  STR Unpacked

  Your Text Flow Just Broke

  Oct 1, 20262 min

  Booking.com stopped sending guest phone numbers to connectivity providers on Monday 28 September. If you run units through a channel manager or a property management system, it is worth checking today rather than next week. From Booking's own connectivity changelog: "The Reservations API no longer includes phone numbers of guests globally as of September 28, 2026." The migration guide, dated 23 September, is wider than that line suggests. From 28 September all new reservation payloads omit the number, including payloads for past-dated bookings, modifications and cancellations. Numbers already in your system are not deleted, but you cannot pull one again. Four things that matter operationally. It depends on your integration. On the OTA specification the telephone element is removed from the payload. On B.XML the element stays and arrives empty. Those are different failures, and an empty field is the shape that can overwrite a number you already hold. Ask your provider which specification you are on and what they tested. Less stops than you would think. Text messages, WhatsApp and phone calls stop. Guest messaging does not, and the guest email alias is still present in the very example payloads Booking uses to show the phone number gone. The replacement channel has a limit worth knowing about. Booking's own help page says PDFs and QR codes are not supported as attachments in the chat, and that to share a PDF you should use the email alias. If you deliver door codes or parking permits as a PDF or a QR image, that is the thing to fix this week. The number itself is a manual lookup now, in the Extranet or the Pulse app, one booking at a time. Two honest notes. This was short notice, not no notice: Booking published it to operators on 21 September and to developers on 23 September. And it does not touch you at all if you work only in the Extranet and take no connectivity feed. One open question I would like answered. Booking says only accounts with permission to manage reservations and to view guest contact details can see the number. The access rights article it links to does not list a guest contact details permission at all. Your check-in automation just moved to a channel that will not carry a QR code. If you are connected to Booking, open a booking your system took in since Monday, not an arrival for next week, and check the phone field in your own system. What did yours show?

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  STR Unpacked

  62 Days To Reprice

  Sep 30, 20263 min

  Spain ended the VAT exemption on short-term rentals this morning. Royal decree-law 26/2026 was signed on Tuesday 29 September and published in the official state gazette today, reference BOE-A-2026-20266. From 1 December a furnished let of 30 nights or fewer to the same guest is no longer exempt. It is taxed at 10%, the hospitality rate. The exemption was already lost where the landlord supplied hotel-type services, and that test survives word for word. What the decree adds is an alternative trigger and it is pure duration: a let whose duration in favour of a single tenant does not exceed 30 nights, unless it happens in the dwelling where the landlord actually lives. The opening words say any of the circumstances, so that carve-out escapes the duration limb only. Supply hotel services in your own home and you are still taxable. Four things worth acting on. A let of 31 nights or more with no hotel services stays exempt. The same decree caps a tourist letting at 31 days in the leases act. 30 nights for the tax, 31 days for the housing rule. An exempt let recovers no input VAT and a taxable one does. From 1 December you charge 10% and recover VAT on new spend. Assets you already own come back only through the capital goods adjustment, and a mixed portfolio goes into partial recovery. Hold your gross price and you lose 9.09% of the net, not 10%. None of it applies in the Canary Islands, Ceuta or Melilla, which sit outside Spanish VAT. Property tax. Councils in a stressed residential market zone can surcharge a tourist-use dwelling by up to 50% of the net liability, 100% at 2 or more, 150% at 4 or more. It needs a municipal ordinance and applies to tax periods beginning after 1 October 2026, so the first accrual is 31 December 2027. The new sanctions title in the leases act sets 1 million euros for failing to transmit data, upliftable to 2% of prior-year global turnover. Article 15(3) of the EU regulation permits penalties on platforms "and, where appropriate by hosts". Spain has named only the platforms, while expressly preserving every other authority's power over hosts. Article 15(4) required those rules by 20 May 2026, so this is 133 days late. One caveat. It is a decree-law. The lower house has 30 days from promulgation to confirm it, so by 29 October, and it can be amended as a bill meanwhile. Plan for it, do not bank it. 62 days to 1 December. Are your December rates quoted gross or net of 10%?

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  STR Unpacked

  The Duty With No Door

  Sep 29, 20263 min

  Munich has had a short-term rental registration duty since 1 August, with a 50,000 euro fine attached, and no way to register. Both come from the city's own documents. The change-of-use by-law of 9 July 2026 creates the duty at section 5a. The council resolved it on 1 July, it was gazetted on 30 July, and it came into force on 1 August. Section 14 makes failing to register before you list, or failing to display the number, an administrative offence carrying up to 50,000 euros. Munich's council guidance page, as of this morning, says no registration duty yet applies to holiday flats, and that the necessary by-law amendment is being prepared. That amendment is 90 days old. The same page then links an information sheet, dated July, which says the opposite in the present tense: registration with the city is required before you offer a unit online. Under how registration works it gives the portal link as "not yet known". In June the city blamed a delay at the federal agency and said it would join another state's software. The agency's data hub went into live operation on 1 July, the day the council passed the duty. On Thursday 5 municipalities are scheduled to connect to that hub: Munich, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Frechen and Tubingen. Two points of precision. The federal list says these municipalities "plan" the introduction and its column heading is "planned publication". And it is not 5 new duties: Tubingen has required a municipal number through an online form since March 2022, Frechen joins a scheme its state has run since 2022, and Regensburg has no registration provision in its by-law at all, which expires on 31 December. Two things for anyone holding German stock. Scope is wider than holiday flats but narrower than it first looks. Any furnished unit offered through a platform counts, whatever the guest is there for, so contractor and corporate stays are in. Hotels, guesthouses and campsites are out, and so is anything let for a year or more. Both the fine and the delisting power are conditional on the municipality having actually introduced a procedure, so in Munich today neither can land. The exposure is the morning the portal opens, because there is no transitional provision anywhere in that by-law and no grace period for an existing listing. Separately, if you hold Puglian stock, the filing deadline there is tomorrow. The extension to 31 December announced on 23 September still has no instrument behind it, and Monday's gazette carries no amending law. If you list in Munich, put it in writing to the housing office this week: is section 5a in force against hosts today, and through what procedure.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  STR Unpacked

  Slovenia's 31 October Problem

  Sep 28, 20263 min

  Koper's council sits tomorrow on a 270-day short-let cap, the most Slovenia's new law allows. It is still a cut, and Koper's own papers say so. Slovenia's hospitality act has applied since January. In May 2 ministers listed 14 municipalities where, for 2027 and 2028, the default falls to 60 days a year per dwelling. They include Ljubljana, Koper, Izola, Piran, Bled, Bohinj, Kranjska Gora and Radovljica. A listed council can substitute anything from 30 to 270 days. For that to apply from 1 January, it has to be adopted by 31 October, which falls on a Saturday, so the real deadline is the last council sitting before it. Koper proposes a flat 270 days municipality-wide. The analysis behind it mapped 3 zones, 90 days in Koper town, 120 in the wider urban belt and 270 in the rural hinterland, while also offering a uniform 120 to 270 option for the whole area. The proposer accepts its results, doubts the act will make housing more available, and asks for 270 everywhere, "which under the act is the maximum possible". Izola's paper has the arithmetic. On 2025 data, a 270-day threshold would directly reach 2 of the 432 establishments examined. At 180 days, 26. At 150 days, 51. At the 60-day default, 280. At 30 days, 387. So these councils are not choosing how hard to squeeze. They are choosing whether the default squeezes 280 businesses or 2. Even so, 270 is not generous: Koper notes companies and sole traders could let for 365 days under the old law. A natural person registered as a host is capped at 180 days nationally whatever the council decides, counted across every dwelling they operate. Izola took the same 270 figure on Thursday 17 September, at first reading only, with a new text and public consultation to follow. The moratorium operators expect does not legally exist. Parliament passed an act on 11 May touching these restrictions. It has never been published and is not in force. A public-sector union confederation lodged a referendum initiative on 18 May, parliament declared it inadmissible on 27 May, and the Constitutional Court annulled that on 24 July. Signatures restarted on 1 September and 40,000 are needed. Separate petitions against the letting provisions remain undecided, and nothing has been suspended. One rule outranks every cap. Letting in a building of 3 or more dwellings needs consent from co-owners holding over 75% of shares, plus every owner whose wall, floor or ceiling touches yours. It lasts 3 years and ends on any change of ownership. Consents under the old law run out on 31 December 2026. Which of the 14 are you in, and what is your council adopting?

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  STR Unpacked

  File It Anyway

  Sep 25, 20263 min

  Spain's hotels took 166.90 euros a night per occupied room in August, up 7.3%. Revenue per available room reached 133.10 euros, up 7.0%. Nights rose 1.4%. The price index rose 6.3%, not 7.3%, so part of that move is composition rather than pricing. Resident nights fell 1.1%, non-residents rose 2.8%. Non-residents are carrying this market, Spaniards are stepping back. And it is the hotel survey. Spain's statistics office has not published August for tourist apartments, so anyone quoting those figures at you is not describing short-term rental performance. Poland. The act started as a new tourist tax. That was dropped. What the lower house passed on 18 September, and the Senate sent on without amendments on Thursday, 59 to 30 with 1 abstention, rebuilds the existing local fee instead. It goes to the President now and it is not in the gazette. From 1 January 2027 the basic fee loses its climate limb, leaving landscape merit plus accommodation on offer. The government's impact assessment puts the number of municipalities that could levy it at about 1,500, against 234 today. Could, because each council still has to pass its own resolution and the landscape test is a Council of Ministers regulation nobody has written. You become a statutory remitter. Under the tax code that means liability with all of your assets for fees not collected as well as collected and not paid over, unless the failure to collect was the guest's fault. You keep a register per property with each guest's name and address of residence, and file monthly by the 15th. You may also refuse to begin the stay until the guest prepays the fee for the nights declared. Airbnb, Booking, platform, intermediary and portal appear in the text 0 times. I counted mechanically. Vienna went the other way. Its register act, due for a November vote, would let platforms list only Vienna flats with a registration number and pull the rest. Breaching the registration duty carries fines to 50,000 euros. Puglia has the clock on it. Tourist lets already operating at 30 September 2025 must file with the municipal single window by 30 September, 5 days away. The region said on Wednesday it is moving that to 31 December. I can find no law number and no gazette entry, and the region's own tourism page, published 20 July, still says 30 September. File anyway. Separately, and with no deadline attached, every Puglian tourist let now needs guest liability cover scaled to capacity. Poland loads the fee, the register and the liability onto the operator and says nothing about the platform. Vienna makes the platform delete the listing. Are you filing Puglia this week, or trusting the press release?

  ListenShow Notes

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.