Letting a furnished tourist rental in Val d’Europe

These come first, because they alone can make the project impossible. The co-ownership rules to begin with: they may prohibit furnished tourist letting or restrict it, through a residential-use clause or a ban on commercial activity. They should be read before you buy the furniture.

Then home insurance. A standard policy does not necessarily cover short-term letting, and a claim arising during a stay may be refused. The extension exists and costs little, but it has to have been asked for before the first guest.

Finally the lease, if you are a tenant. Short-term subletting requires the lease to allow it expressly and the landlord to have given written consent. A verbal agreement protects no one, and unauthorised subletting exposes you to termination of the lease.

Putting a furnished tourist rental on the market requires a declaration to the town hall of the commune where the property is located. In the communes that have introduced it, that declaration produces a registration number which must appear on every listing.

That number is not decorative. Airbnb and Booking.com block publication when it is required and missing, and a listing already online can be pulled without notice if the number is absent or does not match the property. In an area where most of the revenue turns on a handful of school-holiday weeks, a listing pulled at the wrong moment costs a season.

The requirement and the procedure vary from commune to commune, and they change. Your own town hall is the authority — not what is said about the neighbouring commune. We check which regime applies before anything goes live.

If the property let is your main residence, short-term letting is capped at 120 nights a year, and some communes may lower that ceiling. The platforms apply the count automatically and close the calendar once the limit is reached.

In Val d’Europe that cap is reached faster than elsewhere: school holidays, weekends and the parks’ busiest periods nearly suffice on their own. That changes the trade-off — a main residence gains from concentrating its nights on the best-valued periods rather than leaving the calendar open throughout.

A second home is not subject to that limit. It may, however, fall under other local formalities, including a change-of-use authorisation in the communes that have introduced one.

This is the simplest formality, because the platforms handle it. Airbnb and Booking.com collect tourist tax on the price the guest pays, then pass it to the local authority. You do not advance it and you have no return to file for nights booked through the platforms.

The rule changes for direct bookings taken outside a platform: collecting and remitting then falls to you. That is worth building in if you accept direct bookings, for example through your own booking engine.

The amount depends on the commune and on the rental’s category. An official tourist-rental classification, which is optional, changes that amount — and has other effects, tax ones in particular, on which an accountant is better placed than we are to advise.

Income from furnished letting falls under industrial and commercial profits, most often under non-professional furnished landlord (LMNP) status. The choice between the micro-BIC and the actual-expenses regime depends on the level of receipts, the costs genuinely incurred and each owner’s situation.

We stop there deliberately. We are not tax advisers, the rules applying to furnished tourist rentals have changed recently, and approximate tax advice costs far more than an hour with an accountant.

What we do systematically, on the other hand: go through the three potential blockers with you, put together the town hall declaration, and make sure the registration number is on the listing before it is published.