COMPETITION CHALLENGES IN THE ACCOMMODATION SHARING 683 This multiplicity of business models involved in this ill-titled sharing economy6 makes it difficult to understand the phenomenon and create appropriate regulation in many sensitive areas. Directive 2006/123/CE of the Parliament and the Council, 12 December 2006, on services in the internal market, also known as “Bolkestein Directive”, was the turning point which allowed the development of all kinds of sharing economy manifestations, with the provision of the elimination of bureaucracy on the licencing procedures and streamlining of access to service provision activities. The Directive applies to all service providers established in any Member State, both natural and juridical persons and to all service provision activities, except the ones expressly excluded. The transposition of the Directive allowed the change of the Member States’ internal legal regimes regarding the access to touristic activities of service providers and the commercialisation of activities of touristic services. This change has enabled the emergence and development of sharing economy activities in the accommodation area. 2. SHARING TOURISM AND ACCOMMODATION The tourist market is one of the economic areas where the sharing economy has had the highest development. We can find sharing economy activities related to tourism in areas such as mobility and transportation, as well as marketing of experiences (i.e. gastronomy, guides, culture and so forth). Precisely, one of the areas where there has been a major development of the sharing economy is accommodation. In order to have a clear image of the dimension of the sharing economy in the accommodation market, we can take the example of data released by Airbnb about hosts in the municipality of Lisbon7. Just one online platform intermediates 22,242 properties in one city, marketed at an average price of 96 €. Airbnb is, today, one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world, with activity in almost every country. Nevertheless, the business of online 6 Although recognising that, currently, the designation “sharing economy” does not represent the significant part of the economic activities related to this phenomenon, for the sake of clarity, we will use that term in this article, as it is the most widespread and well known. 7 Source: http://insideairbnb.com/lisbon/, consulted on 1 August 2019.
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