The Chairman of the Local Accommodation Association in Portugal (ALEP), Eduardo Miranda, stated that as part of an awareness campaign regarding the obligation for local accommodation (AL) property owners to register civil liability insurance, “151 municipalities have already made this notification”.
“The last batch [of notifications] was in November,” and property owners yet to comply “should complete this process by the end of the year,” he added.
ALEP estimates that once the remaining councils proceed with notifications, expected “in January or February”, the process “could be completed by summer 2026”, leading to “between 40,000 and 45,000 cancellations” of AL, with “85,000 to 90,000” remaining active.
Eduardo Miranda spoke to the Lusa news agency from Óbidos, where he is participating in the 4th Local Accommodation Congress.
The ALEP president noted that the notification process for property owners to present their registration, which began in June, “is being conducted by groups of councils”, and of the approximately 126,000 or 127,000 registered AL, “78,000 have already been notified”. Once the ten-day registration period ends, municipalities “can proceed with the cancellation” of those who do not comply with this requirement.
Miranda further noted that the Lisbon City Council, part of the first batch of notifications, “should be the first to proceed with cancellations, especially as it has been used as a pilot due to its size to ensure the systems function properly”.
“In Lisbon, it is now well understood that, in this final phase, 7,000 registrations out of a total of 18,600 should be canceled,” stated Miranda, adding that “over a third of registrations are being canceled due to inactivity, indicating that all those figures used in public discussions in many parishes are completely wrong”.
During the congress, Miranda emphasized the need to adjust municipal regulations for local accommodation to the reality of each county or parish in the country, where “1.8 million homes are not used for housing”.
For Eduardo Miranda, “the ratios [regarding the percentage of AL that can be licensed] must be adapted to the specificities” of the territories, considering, for example, the reality of the Algarve, where “about 50% of homes are vacation homes”, affecting local tourism and the economy due to the suspension of local accommodation.
Speaking in a panel with mayors from various councils of the West, where all advocated for the growth of AL in their municipalities, Miranda stressed the importance of making concrete assessments of the number of properties and active AL indices to “determine when it is necessary to impose limits”.
