The EU STR Regulation Should Prioritise Standardisation to Enable Seamless Data Sharing
eu travel tech strongly supports the EU Regulation on short-term rentals (STRs) and believes that the legislative framework is a great starting point to ensure greater clarity and transparency around the responsibilities of all stakeholders in the STR sector. We welcome the rapid progress of the negotiations on this proposal and look forward to its final adoption.
In our view, the effectiveness of the data sharing system established by the proposed Regulation hinges on a robust and standardized digital infrastructure. This is why, at its core, the Regulation must prioritize standardization of the Single Digital Entry Points (SDEPs) to ensure the prompt and effective implementation of the rules. A failure to clearly enshrine this in the legal text could result in the development of twenty-seven SDEPs with different technological requirements, which will lead to a lack of interoperability and higher compliance costs and complexity for all stakeholders.
The European Parliament rightly proposes to introduce a strict requirement for the European Commission to adopt implementing acts to provide technical guidance with regard to the technical specifications and procedures to ensure interoperability of solutions for the functioning of the SDEPs and the seamless exchange of data (Article 10, paragraph 5).
As negotiations progress, we strongly encourage all parties involved to support the European Parliament’s position on this matter. In addition, we look forward to starting the technical work with the Member States on the SDEPs. Early-stage technical consultations with STR platforms, focusing on standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), are crucial in this context. In this regard, we welcome plans to hold technical meetings before the Regulation adoption and look forward to providing our input to these discussions.
