Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – Amid a historic boom in national tourism and rapidly rising demand for alternative vacation stays, the Dominican government has confirmed it will move forward with a landmark regulatory framework for short-term vacation rentals like Airbnb, centered on a new national property registry aimed at elevating safety standards for international visitors.
Tourism Minister David Collado made the formal announcement, taking care to draw a clear distinction between the new registry’s core mandate and unrelated tax policy. He stressed that the initiative does not aim to collect or manage taxes from private rental hosts; that responsibility remains exclusively with the Ministry of Finance and the General Directorate of Internal Taxes (DGII).
“The only objective of this program is to bring organizational structure to this fast-growing segment of our tourism industry, all for the sake of improved public safety,” Collado explained in his remarks. “Tax administration falls under the purview of our finance and tax authorities, not the Ministry of Tourism.”
Under the proposed framework, the national registry will allow the Ministry of Tourism (Mitur) to compile key operational data: it will catalog the exact locations of all active short-term rental properties across the country, and collect basic identifying information about guests staying at these locations. Collado noted that this centralized database will cut through the current lack of coordinated information, enabling emergency response teams to act far more quickly and effectively during crises, while also streamlining critical communications with foreign diplomatic missions when incidents involving international tourists occur.
“When a serious incident or tragedy impacts a tourist staying in a short-term rental, foreign embassies immediately reach out to our ministry for information,” Collado said. “Right now, we often lack the basic data to respond quickly. This registry will fix that gap, and help us build a more structured, reliable tourism sector that visitors can trust.”
The regulatory push arrives at a pivotal moment for the Dominican Republic’s $10 billion-plus tourism economy: the country is on track to post consecutive years of record-breaking visitor arrivals, with a growing share of travelers opting for private short-term rentals over traditional hotel accommodation. Industry analysts note that this unregulated growth has created unaddressed safety gaps, as authorities have had no systematic way to track where visitors are staying across the country’s popular coastal and island destinations.
Dominican tourism authorities say that formal regulation of the short-term rental sector will not only improve protective measures for visitors, but also create a consistent oversight framework for the hundreds of thousands of accommodation units that now operate outside the traditional hotel system.
Collado added that the short-term rental registry is just one component of a wider, multi-pronged government strategy to strengthen the country’s core tourism industry. Beyond the registry, the administration is advancing targeted territorial planning projects in the nation’s top tourist destinations, including Verón-Punta Cana, Puerto Plata, La Romana, Samaná, and Las Terrenas. The government is also rolling out a series of new policy frameworks focused on expanding sustainable tourism practices across the sector, as it works to balance growth with long-term environmental and community preservation.