Short-let apartment owners will be required to display their details outside their properties and submit a waste management plan before obtaining a licence under new rules coming into force in June.
The changes come following a public consultation launched late last year.
Over the years, residents in several of Malta’s tourism hotspots have highlighted the disruption caused by short-let apartments in their midst, including tenants’ unruly behaviour and littering.
Initial plans to introduce a measure requiring Airbnb owners to obtain approval from their neighbours were quickly scrapped, but authorities say the new rules published on Wednesday will introduce more stringent requirements that owners will have to follow.
According to the reform, anybody running a short-let property will have to publicly display their licence number outside their front door, alongside the contact details of a person who must be available 24 hours per day.
This will ensure that residents can directly report instances of disruption at any time of day, authorities say.
If the property is in a shared block, the owner will also be obliged to notify the condominium administrator in writing that they are renting out the property for short-let accommodation.
Owners will also have to submit a waste collection management plan, outlining what measures they have put in place to dispose of waste without littering.
The rules also place new limits on the number of people who can stay in a property, setting a maximum cap of 10 persons, with no more than two persons per bedroom.
In practice, this means that a three-bedroom apartment can only host a maximum of six tenants at any one go, while a two-bedroom property will be capped at four persons.
This maximum 10-person cap does not apply to properties which do not have a shared entrance, such as farmhouses and villas. Nonetheless, these will also be restricted to a maximum of two people per bedroom.
The new rules also bar sofabeds, hoping to prevent landlords from circumventing these limits by hosting additional tenants in rooms other than a bedroom. Bedrooms in basements will also be forbidden.
Short-let owners will also be forced to install air conditioning units in their properties, with authorities also aiming to improve the quality of accommodation by not licensing properties that “have not been finished to a high standard”.
Anybody caught operating a short-let property without a licence will be barred from applying for a licence for a further three years, the law says.
Tourism authorities say further rules to short-let accommodation are likely to be introduced over the coming years, after pilot projects currently being run in Valletta and Swieqi are concluded.