«Bed and breakfast remains a kind of family and non-business reception». This is the guiding principle of a law just passed, thumb on which much has been said but inappropriately, namely more for the alleged implications on the reception of migrants in Lombardy – land of the Northern League! – than for a meritorious and advanced political choice it takes: regulating, without strangling, another so-called «disruption» of the Internet economy, bed and breakfast.
In short it is a law that reorganizes and supports tourism, backed by councillor Mauro Parolini and governor Maroni, which sets out three principles. First, that of «family reception» which translated means that in homes where rooms are rented to tourists the person or family who leases «should» continue to live in it, otherwise it would become a real hotel although «disguised» as bed and breakfast. Then, although it isn’t a hotel, also the manager of a house adapted as «b&b» should record the documents of the guests and pass them to a police station, as hotels do, for an obvious security need. Finally, it should ask to its guests the residence tax, in the municipalities where it is required.
Why is this law smart? Because it is the right way to hold together the «good» of a great new social-economic phenomenon as that of b&b, exploded thanks to the Internet, and delete the cunning or frankly fraudulent component almost always implicit in these «disruption»…
Considering that currently, in Wall Street, Airbnb – the portal that is world leader in the industry and is also widely used in Italy – has a 25.5 billion market value, that is more than Marriott and Starwood or Accor, hotel giants with tens of thousands of rooms, it soon becomes clear that we must be cautious about this issue: intervening to regulate doesn’t mean trampling on the free and marginal economic initiative of some industrious family and creative young man but quelling the neo-monopolistic ambitions of a few huge subjects that have nothing «disruptive» except what usually unfairly upsets the competitors’ applecart.