From 20 November, Airbnb limits checkout chores and guest data: what it means for Sardinia

What Airbnb is changing

The new rules are set out in two Airbnb help pages, article 4168 on reasonable house rules and article 4169 on host-imposed contracts and other requirements. Both say the policy applies to reservations booked on or after 20 November 2026, not to stays that start on that date. Airbnb's Italian resource page, dated 20 October, confirms that the policy «entrerà in vigore il 20 novembre 2026». None of the pages contains a note specific to Italy or the European Union.

On checkout, Airbnb's guidance is specific. Guests "shouldn't be asked to wash and put away dishes, but you can ask them to put used dishes in the sink". They "shouldn't be asked to remove sheets from the bed or start a load of washing", nor "to take rubbish off-site", nor to avoid a listed amenity such as air conditioning, though hosts can ask them to switch it off when they leave. Sorting rubbish into indoor bins remains allowed. More broadly, hosts may not set tasks "that require significant effort or time", charge fees for an advertised feature that are not in the price shown at booking, or "impose fines or other penalties on guests".

Separate contracts are now limited to four cases: where they are required by law or by building or community rules, for an optional amenity such as a golf cart, for stays of 28 nights or more, and for Airbnb Luxe listings. Airbnb says it does not help enforce such contracts or require guests to sign them.

The data rules are the part Italian hosts need to read closely. Article 4169 says that "with limited exceptions, hosts may not solicit personal data at any point during the booking process or stay". The list of what they may not ask for includes "identification details or documents such as a guest's passport, driver's license, social security number, or photo" and "biometric or health data, such as fingerprints, facial recognition, or medical records", as well as phone numbers, email and home addresses. Hosts "may physically check a guest's ID to verify identity in person at check-in" but "may not, however, retain a digital or physical copy of the ID". The exceptions are to "comply with applicable law or a documented community association rule" or to facilitate an allowed contract. Where one applies, "the host must clearly disclose what information is required of guests, and why", "may not collect more data than the law or rule calls for", and is responsible for "securely storing and disposing of any sensitive data". Hosts also "may not require use of a third-party app or registration on another website to gain entry to a listing", and "must provide an alternate access method if requested by the guest".

Enforcement runs through the listing: "educating the host", "issuing warnings", "a notice on the listing page flagging the issue to guests" and "reduced listing visibility in search". Airbnb's guidance says guests may see an alert such as "includes cleaning requests" if an issue goes unresolved.

Why Airbnb says it is doing this

A spokesperson told Newsweek: "House rules help guests understand what hosts expect, but we've heard from our community that they can be confusing. So we've redesigned them to make them easier to discover and clearer to set." Airbnb has not publicly linked the change to any regulator. Dennis Goedheid of the property manager Casiola told Rental Scale-Up: "Guests pay a cleaning fee and then get a list of chores. That never felt like hospitality." Others were angrier: a Yorkshire hotel told Newsweek it was "frustrated and honestly... disappointed", and two French hosts quoted by Technext said they might leave the platform.

The check-in question in Italy

Every host in Italy is bound by article 109 of the public security code (TULPS). Accommodation providers «possono dare alloggio esclusivamente a persone munite della carta d'identità o di altro documento idoneo» and must send each guest's details to the Questura within 24 hours through the Alloggiati Web portal. Article 19-bis of decree-law 113/2018 extended these duties to anyone letting a home for less than 30 days.

The law requires the data to reach the police, not a stored image of the document. In a statement of 29 April 2026 the data protection authority, the Garante, said that the duty to identify guests «non legittima la conservazione, da parte delle strutture, di fotocopie o immagini», that copies «devono essere immediatamente cancellate o distrutte», and that only the receipt confirming the transmission may be kept, for five years. It specifically criticised photographing documents on smartphones or asking for them over WhatsApp. How the identity check is done has also been fought over. The Interior Ministry's circular of November 2024 required guests to be identified in person; the TAR Lazio annulled it in May 2025, but the Consiglio di Stato reversed that ruling on 21 November 2025, finding purely remote check-in unsatisfactory while accepting identification by live video at the entrance.

That is where the practical friction sits. Many self check-in homes in Sardinia use online systems that collect guests' documents before arrival and send the data to Alloggiati Web automatically. Vikey, one such service, describes a process in which the guest receives a link by email, uploads documents and photos of them, can be asked for a real-time selfie with the document, and is checked by what Vikey calls «verifica biometrica basata su intelligenza artificiale», after which the data go to the police portal. Collecting the details the Questura needs falls squarely within Airbnb's "applicable law" exception. A biometric face match is a different matter: Italian law requires that a guest be identified, not that their face be matched by software, so on Airbnb bookings made from 20 November such a step can no longer be compulsory. Hosts who rely on it will need to state the legal requirement in the listing's requests, collect only what Alloggiati Web needs, and offer an in-person or live-video check for guests who decline the automated route. Vikey has published nothing on the new Airbnb policy so far.

Separate rental agreements matter far less in Italy than in the United States. The Agenzia delle Entrate's guide to short lets notes that «per i contratti di locazione di durata non superiore ai 30 giorni non vi è l'obbligo di registrazione». One change discussed in the trade press does not yet apply here: Airbnb's temporary phone numbers, which hide guests' real numbers, are "currently available to a limited number of users in the United States and Canada", and reservations elsewhere "work as-is".

What it means in Sardinia

Sardinia's short-let market is large and mostly in private hands. The Bank of Italy counted 47,217 homes used for tourist lets at the start of the second quarter of 2026, 96% of all tourist accommodation on the island and about three for every hundred residents, the highest ratio in the South. The Region's tourism observatory lists 43,952 private lodgings registered as not run as a business in 2025, against 1,165 registered as businesses. Compliance is uneven: only 31.77% of private lodgings in Gallura sent their guest data to the regional statistics system for 2025, the lowest rate of any province, against 83.77% of Gallura's hotels.

Ownership is not the whole picture. Federalberghi, analysing Inside Airbnb data for August 2026, says 67.5% of Italian Airbnb listings belong to hosts who manage several units, and a 2025 Politecnico di Torino study found that 1.3% of hosts held a quarter of all listings. No such breakdown exists for Sardinia. What can be said is that the island's homes are overwhelmingly privately owned, often informally run, with a professional management layer of unknown size. The new rules will be felt most at the informal end of the market, by hosts who leave a chore list on the fridge, ask for a passport photo on WhatsApp, or send a door code with no other way in.

Booking.com under EU investigation

On 21 October the European Commission opened formal proceedings against Booking.com under the Digital Services Act. It is examining whether Booking has properly assessed and reduced the risks from fraudulent and non-compliant listings, such as properties that do not exist, and from phishing scams that exploit the reservation and guest data the platform shares with accommodation providers. It is also examining whether listings whose providers paid for higher placement are clearly labelled as advertising. "If proven, these failures would constitute infringements of Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA", along with Article 26(1) on advertising transparency. Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said: "Europeans should be able to book their holidays without fear of being scammed. The Digital Services Act sets clear responsibilities on platforms to address these risks, and we must ensure that the leading booking platform in Europe takes those responsibilities seriously." Opening proceedings does not prejudge the outcome. Under Article 74 of the DSA, fines can reach 6% of worldwide annual turnover. Booking told TheJournal.ie it is "cooperating fully" and that "security, trust and the protection of personal information are top priorities at Booking.com."

The case does not transfer automatically to Airbnb. Booking.com has been a designated very large online platform since April 2023 and a Digital Markets Act gatekeeper since May 2024. Airbnb is neither: it reports about 42.2 million average monthly users in the EU for February to July 2026, below the 45 million threshold, and does not appear on the Commission's list of designated platforms. The general DSA rules and European consumer and data protection law still apply to it.

A record of fines and settlements

Both platforms have faced European regulators many times. For Booking.com, the main cases include:

Italy, November 2023: a 94 million euro settlement with tax authorities over unpaid VAT for 2013 to 2021, against about 153 million euro originally claimed.
Spain, July 2024: a 413.24 million euro fine from the competition authority CNMC for abuse of a dominant position. Booking appealed and the Audiencia Nacional suspended the fine in early 2025.
Hungary: a fine of 2.5 billion forint, about 7 million euro, in 2020 for misleading pressure selling, followed by a further 382.5 million forint in 2024 for failing to comply.
European Union: consumer-protection commitments on price display agreed with national authorities in December 2019, a September 2023 ban on its purchase of Etraveli, upheld by the General Court in September 2026, and gatekeeper designation in May 2024.
Italy, April 2026: the competition and consumer authority AGCM opened an investigation into how Preferred Partner properties are ranked and labelled.

For Airbnb:

Italy, December 2023: a 576 million euro settlement with Milan prosecutors over tax not withheld on rentals from 2017 to 2021, after a seizure order of about 779 million euro.
Spain, December 2025: a 64,055,311 euro fine from the consumer ministry over 65,122 listings, which the Madrid High Court refused to suspend in March 2026; the main appeal is pending.
Barcelona: fines of 600,000 euro announced in 2016 and 2017 for advertising unlicensed flats, before a deal with the city in July 2017.
Australia, December 2023: a 15 million Australian dollar penalty for showing prices in US dollars without saying so.
European Union, 2019: changes to how prices and terms are displayed, agreed with national consumer authorities.

A note on the figures

Airbnb's policy quotations come from its English and Italian help pages, which carry the old and new versions side by side. The Garante's April statement names hotels, B&Bs and guesthouses; that it applies equally to short lets is our reading, based on the shared article 109 duty. Whether a particular check-in setup complies with Airbnb's exception depends on its configuration, which we have not audited. The Region's split between business and non-business lodgings is a registration category, not a measure of who actually manages a home, and the Federalberghi and Politecnico figures are national. The CNMC fine on Booking was suspended pending appeal and we found no ruling. The 6% ceiling comes from the DSA itself, not from the Commission's announcement.

Opinion: good hosts lose nothing here

This section is opinion, written by the editors of Sardinia Blog. Sardinia Blog is published within the Rental12 ecosystem, an owner-operator in Olbia and Golfo Aranci that lets homes it owns on Airbnb and Booking.com rather than managing them for others, so it has a direct interest in these rules. Rental12 uses Vikey for guest check-in, offers check-in at its office as an alternative, and has been the subject of a Vikey case study. Read this with that in mind.

Most of this changes nothing for a host who was already doing the job properly. A guest who has paid a cleaning fee should not be stripping beds, running the dishwasher or carrying rubbish to the street. Good hosts stopped asking years ago, and many never started. The checkout chore list was a sign of a host cutting costs at the guest's expense, and if Airbnb's rules push those hosts out or make them raise their standards, the market is better for it. In Sardinia, where most short lets are run by private owners and many still sit outside the statistics, that shake-out could be large.

The contract rule is an American answer to an American problem. In Italy a short let of up to 30 days does not even need a registered contract. Few serious European hosts were asking holidaymakers to sign separate paperwork, so the restriction will barely be felt here.

Identification is the point that matters. No host in Italy should be keeping copies of passports, and the Garante has said so. But every host in Italy must identify each guest and get their details to the Questura within 24 hours, and that is not optional. Italian law comes first, and Airbnb's own text accepts it by exempting what "applicable law" requires. The test is whether the exception works in practice. If Airbnb's automated checks flag a host for asking for the data the police require, or lower a listing's visibility because its check-in system collects a document the law obliges the host to verify, the platform will be penalising compliance. That would be a problem Airbnb should fix quickly, and one regulators would be right to look at if hosts can document it.

Is Airbnb taking a risk? Yes, though not mainly with regulators today. Its rules move where European authorities have long pushed: prices shown in full, no surprise fees, less data collected. It is not, for now, subject to the extra scrutiny Booking.com faces. The risk is with its hosts, and with enforcement by algorithm, decided and reviewed inside Airbnb, in a market full of small operators who have no account manager to call. A platform that writes detailed rules for hosts will be judged on whether it applies the same care to scams, illegal listings and its own fees. Where Airbnb goes next will show whether this is about guests or about control.

Sources: Airbnb, help article 4168 · Airbnb, help article 4169 · Airbnb Italia, articolo 4169 · Airbnb Italia, resource page, 20 October 2026 · Airbnb, temporary phone numbers · Airbnb, company details and DSA figures · Newsweek, 22 October 2026 · Rental Scale-Up, 21 October 2026 · Technext, 22 October 2026 · Garante Privacy, 29 April 2026 · Garante Privacy, note to trade associations, 29 April 2026 · Art. 109 TULPS · Consiglio di Stato, judgment 9101/2025 · TAR Lazio, judgment 10210/2025 · Agenzia delle Entrate, guide to short lets · Vikey, online check-in · Bank of Italy, L'economia della Sardegna, June 2026 · Regione Sardegna, Osservatorio, Consistenza 2025 · Regione Sardegna, Osservatorio, Movimento 2025 · QualityTravel on the Federalberghi dossier, October 2026 · Politecnico di Torino, FULL report, March 2025 · European Commission, IP/26/2223, 21 October 2026 · European Commission, list of designated platforms · European Commission, DMA gatekeepers · TheJournal.ie, 21 October 2026 · AGI, 10 November 2023 · Hosteltur, 2025 · GVH, July 2024 · European Commission, CPC actions on accommodation booking · Punto Informatico, April 2026 · Il Post, 13 December 2023 · Spanish Consumer Ministry, March 2026 · Público, November 2016 · ACCC, December 2023