The Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030 has initiated sanctioning proceedings against companies that manage tourist homes on suspicion that they could be incurring in misleading practices and other potential infringements of the General Law for the Defense of Consumers and Users.
According to a statement issued this Thursday, these sanctioning proceedings originate from the investigation launched by the department led by Pablo Bustinduy last December, from which information was requested from various companies operating throughout the national territory marketing hundreds of tourist accommodations for rent.
The data collected by the General Directorate of Consumer Affairs would confirm that these companies would be causing "damages or risks to the interests of consumers and users in a generalized way" by offering false information or that may be misleading.
That is, for example, indicating in the advertisement that the person managing a tourist accommodation is a particular person or several, when in reality it is a company.
The ministry considers that this would be a misleading practice likely to alter economic behavior, as defined in Article 5 of the Unfair Competition Law.
According to the legal precept, these practices can be classified as serious infractions, with fines of up to 100,000 euros, an amount that can be exceeded to reach between four and six times the illicit profit that each company has obtained for having carried them out.
These new procedures are added to the sanctioning file that Consumo opened two months ago, also in the field of tourist homes, to a platform dedicated to renting this type of accommodation.
In this case, the file was launched because said platform maintains thousands of advertisements for tourist apartments that were classified as illegal advertising, in the face of which the ministry requested that they be removed immediately, a requirement that the company did not comply with.