LUCERNE. This city has lived with a cap since 2025. Homes in Lucerne may generally be offered on platforms such as Airbnb for no more than 90 nights a year, and every listing must be registered with the authorities. Other Swiss cities have since introduced similar restrictions, and the debate over what booking platforms are doing to the housing market has now arrived, with unusual force, in the Alps.
The growth of short-term rentals is putting measurable pressure on housing markets in Swiss cities and tourist hotspots. Tenants’ groups and hoteliers are calling for tighter rules, while homeowners warn against disproportionate restrictions on property rights. The argument is no longer whether platforms have changed the market. It is how far the state should go in pushing back.
The Valais Alarm
The loudest alarm now comes from the mountains. Valais is the canton with the highest number of registered short-term rentals, and its hoteliers are demanding a level playing field between hotels and other tourist accommodation. Olivier Andermatt, president of the Valais Hoteliers’ Association, argues that commercial short-term lets should meet the same requirements on fire safety, employment law and tourist taxes that hotels carry as a matter of course.
His second demand goes further: a strict registration system run by the communes, so that authorities know at any time which apartment is a home and which has quietly become a business. Behind the demand sits an acute shortage of housing for local residents, the waiters, lift operators and teachers on whom resort economies run, priced out of communes where entire chalet floors now turn over weekly for tourists.
Tenants’ organisations in the cities tell a parallel story. Every apartment that leaves the long-term market for the platforms is one fewer home in a market with almost no slack, a dynamic visible in the record asking rents in Zurich and in the fight over tenant rights in Lausanne. The platforms respond that most hosts rent occasionally, that tourism income sustains mountain communes, and that hotels and platforms serve different guests.
Bern Turns to Data
For once, the two sides agree on something: reliable nationwide data is essential. No one knows precisely how many Swiss apartments are offered commercially, for how many nights, or where the line between a hobby host and a de facto hotel lies. The House of Representatives has now backed a proposal to collect nationwide data on short-term rentals, a measure that must still pass the Senate.
Supporters of the data collection say it will show where action is actually needed, and where it is not. Registration data in Lucerne and the other cities that have acted has already changed local debates, replacing anecdote with counts. The property lobby suspects, not incorrectly, that a national register is the infrastructure for national rules, and has begun to argue its case in those terms.
Switzerland would not be the first to move. Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona all cap nights and license listings, with mixed results that Swiss officials study closely. The Swiss discussion has its own accent: direct democracy means cantons and communes will shape the outcome piecemeal unless Bern sets a frame, and the hotel industry’s weight in alpine cantons gives the issue a constituency most housing debates lack.
The Senate takes up the data proposal in the coming weeks. Whatever it decides, the direction is set. Registration is spreading from the cities to the resorts, the platforms have begun adapting their compliance tools to Swiss requirements, and the homeowners’ warnings about property rights guarantee that any national frame will be fought clause by clause. The 90 night question, first asked in Lucerne, is now being asked in every valley with a view.