Six Things to Know
- Jamaica records strongest tourism half-year since 2019; STR demand surges in resort towns
- Airbnb posts record US$8.4 billion annual revenue and its first-ever full-year profit
- Scotland’s mandatory Short-Term Let licensing scheme takes effect October 2022
- New York City STR registration bill introduced; Caribbean hotel industry takes note
- JHTA renews call for regulatory parity as Jamaica’s Airbnb inventory tops 8,000 listings
- Rent Restriction Act reform resurfaces in parliament amid coastal rental cost surge
Jamaica’s Tourism Recovery Becomes a Boom
The second half of 2022 confirmed what the opening months of the year had suggested: Jamaica’s tourism industry had not merely recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic but was on track to emerge in stronger structural shape than before. The Jamaica Tourist Board reported that total visitor arrivals for the full year 2022 reached approximately 3.8 million when cruise passengers and stopover visitors were combined—still below the 2019 record of approximately 4.3 million total, but substantially ahead of the pandemic years and ahead of most Caribbean competitors on a proportional recovery basis. Stopover arrivals alone—the metric most closely watched by accommodation providers—exceeded 2.7 million, confirming that the island’s core hotel, villa, and short-term rental business was operating at levels not seen since the pre-pandemic peak.
The short-term rental sector contributed to the recovery in ways that the official statistics did not fully capture. Airbnb’s Jamaican active listing inventory, estimated by JTB market research at approximately 8,000 to 8,500 active properties by late 2022, absorbed a significant share of visitor accommodation demand, particularly in periods of peak demand when licensed hotel and villa inventory was fully committed. The platform’s Caribbean regional team cited Jamaica as among the fastest-growing markets for nights booked in 2022, and individual host income reports from Jamaican operators circulating in online STR community forums suggested that average earnings per active listing had improved substantially compared with both the pandemic years and the pre-pandemic baseline.
The strong tourism performance and growing STR income data did not, however, translate into meaningful regulatory progress. The Ministry of Tourism’s accommodation licensing policy remained under development, and no formal timeline for legislation had been announced by year-end. Several practitioners familiar with the consultations noted privately that the policy work was proceeding carefully, with the Ministry unwilling to publish a framework before completing further comparative research on Caribbean and international approaches.
Airbnb’s First Annual Profit: A Platform Matured
Airbnb’s full-year 2022 financial results, announced in the company’s February 2023 investor report but shaped by the trajectory confirmed throughout H2 2022, marked a landmark in the platform economy. The company reported revenue of US$8.4 billion for the full calendar year 2022—its highest ever—and net income of approximately US$1.9 billion, its first full-year profit since the company’s founding in 2008. The result was a vindication of the structural changes Airbnb had implemented during the pandemic years, when it reduced its cost base, cut marketing spend, and focused on its host community as the core asset of the platform.
For hosts in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, Airbnb’s profitability carried mixed implications. A financially strong Airbnb was better resourced to invest in platform improvements, host education, and regulatory engagement—all of which benefit responsible operators. But a highly profitable platform also has more to lose from restrictive regulation and more resources to deploy in lobbying against it—as the company’s sustained engagement with policymakers in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and North America demonstrated throughout 2022. Jamaica’s Ministry of Tourism can expect its own regulatory consultations to be met with similarly well-resourced advocacy from the platform as the island’s STR market continues to grow.
Scotland’s Mandatory STR Licensing: A UK First
Scotland became the first part of the United Kingdom to introduce a mandatory licensing scheme for short-term rentals when its Short-Term Let Control Area regulations took effect on 1 October 2022. The framework, developed by the Scottish Government in response to housing affordability concerns in Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye, requires all operators of short-term let properties in Scotland to apply for a licence from their local authority, demonstrating compliance with safety standards and, in designated control areas, obtaining planning permission for changes of use from residential to tourist accommodation.
Scotland’s framework is significant in the Caribbean context for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that mandatory licensing is operationally achievable at a jurisdictional level without destroying the market: the Scottish short-term rental sector, while disrupted by the compliance process, did not collapse as some operators had predicted. Second, the framework’s proportionality—different requirements apply in different area types and for different scales of operation—provides a design template that Caribbean tourism ministries, including Jamaica’s, have cited in their own research. Third, Scotland’s experience with enforcement—which has been patchy, with councils reporting capacity constraints—illustrates the gap between licensing legislation and effective compliance that Jamaica will need to address if it introduces its own framework.
The Scottish scheme also interacted with the broader UK government’s ongoing review of STR regulation in England, where a mandatory register—distinct from a full licensing regime—was still under development as of year-end 2022 following the consultation launched in January of that year.
New York City: The Registration Bill Appears
New York City’s approach to short-term rental regulation entered a new and more serious phase in 2022 when the city council introduced what would eventually become Local Law 18. The bill, introduced with the backing of housing advocates and the hotel workers’ union—both of whom had long argued that unregulated Airbnb operations were removing residential housing supply and undercutting union hotels—proposed a registration system for STR hosts with a co-presence requirement that would effectively prohibit entire-home short-stay rentals.
The bill’s introduction was treated by Airbnb as a direct attack on the company’s New York City business and the platform lobbied intensively against it. By the end of 2022, the bill had not yet been voted into law but its prospects appeared strong, with a council majority in favour and the de Blasio administration having been replaced by Mayor Eric Adams, whose position on STR regulation was more neutral than his predecessor’s. The vote, and the consequences it would trigger for Airbnb’s NYC inventory, lay ahead in 2023.
Caribbean hotel associations and tourism ministries followed the NYC bill with interest. The Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association shared briefing notes on the bill with member governments in late 2022, noting that if adopted, Local Law 18 would represent the most significant demonstration yet that major democratic governments were prepared to use licensing and operational requirements—rather than simply registration—to fundamentally restructure their STR markets.
The Rent Restriction Act and Coastal Housing Pressure
Jamaica’s Rent Restriction Act—the 1944 legislation that remains the primary statute governing residential tenancy—was the subject of renewed parliamentary discussion in the second half of 2022. A private member’s motion calling for a comprehensive review of the Act, tabled in the Senate by an opposition senator with a background in housing advocacy, attracted a full morning of debate and prompted commitments from the government bench to consider the matter. The discussion reflected growing public concern about rapidly rising residential rents in coastal communities and in Kingston, and about the absence of effective tenant protection in Jamaica’s legal framework.
The connection between rising rents and the STR market was explicitly noted in the Senate debate by at least one speaker, who cited reports from constituents in resort parishes of landlords converting residential properties to Airbnb use and declining to renew existing tenancies. Whether the Rent Restriction Act reform process will make progress in 2023, and whether any reform will address the STR-specific displacement issue, remained uncertain at year-end—but the political momentum for change was perceptibly stronger at the close of 2022 than at the beginning of the year.
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