Kathrin Anselm, General Manager for Central and Eastern Europe at Airbnb    

1. Why are you involved as a Berlin-Partner?  

As a Berlin Partner, we want to help guests from around the world discover Berlin in all its diversity, including areas beyond the city’s best-known neighborhoods. To ensure that tourism benefits the entire city, close cooperation with Berlin’s public administration is essential.

For example, we provide all Berlin districts with access to the Airbnb City Portal. This digital tool offers insights into aggregated tourism data at district level and supports local authorities in enforcing short-term rental regulations. Already eleven out of Berlin’s twelve districts use the City Portal.

As a Berlin Partner, we want to continue along this path and contribute to strengthening Berlin as an international destination and business location.

2. What is currently driving your company and what are you working on? 

People come to Berlin for many different reasons: to travel, to work, or to study. At the same time, housing remains scarce. Finding a way to balance these needs is one of our key priorities.

To help protect housing stock in the long term, we support compliance with local regulations. Airbnb supports the registration requirements established under Berlin’s Act on the Prohibition of Misuse of Residential Property (Zweckentfremdungsverbot-Gesetz) as well as the new EU regulation through a dedicated technical solution that only allows registration numbers in the correct format.

Listings that do not meet these requirements cannot be offered for short-term rentals on Airbnb. This makes Airbnb a pioneer among travel platforms.

At the same time, we are demonstrating how flexible accommodation can serve purposes beyond tourism. For the 2026/27 winter semester, we are expanding our housing scholarship programme in cooperation with the Technical University of Berlin and opening it to all first-year students who have recently moved to Berlin.

We are increasing the programme’s funding to €400,000, enabling up to 250 students to receive a voucher towards booking temporary accommodation through Airbnb in Berlin. Such temporary housing helps bridge the gap between arriving in the city and finding a permanent place to live.

3. What do you value about Berlin as a business location? 

What we value about Berlin can be summed up in three words: vibrant, diverse, and welcoming. This applies across all parts of the city.

Berlin’s arts and cultural scene is one of the city’s defining assets and is characterized by a unique diversity that attracts visitors from around the world. Tourism is an important economic driver for Berlin: around 3 million guest nights in 2023 generated more than €530 million in direct tourism spending through short-term rentals. Short-term rentals in Berlin support approximately 8,730 jobs, accounting for €312 million in wages.

The vast majority of Airbnb hosts in Berlin are private individuals who occasionally share their home or a private room, often to help offset rising living costs. Seventy percent of hosts in Berlin rent out only one property.

For guests, Airbnb provides an affordable and inclusive accommodation option, particularly for families and students.

4. What distinguishes your company in Berlin when it comes to collaboration and community? 

For us, collaboration means addressing the challenges facing cities together. We take concerns about the protection of housing very seriously and work closely with cities such as Berlin to implement regulations that effectively protect housing while still allowing individuals to occasionally share their homes.

At the same time, collaboration also means supporting initiatives that strengthen social cohesion and democratic values. In 2025, Airbnb was a partner of Berlin Freedom Week and the Berlin Freedom Conference. This year, we are reaffirming our commitment by once again sponsoring a platform that highlights Berlin’s role as an international hub for dialogue on freedom, human rights, and democracy.