Guides on legal short-term rentals and travel in Panama.
APATEL publishes an open letter defending the hotel industry against false accusations regarding interests operating outside the law
Read more →While Bill 301 remains stalled, a second bill — 31-26 — has already set a 15% ITBMS rate for vacation rentals versus 10% for hotels, exactly as APATEL requested. But neither that bill nor Bill 301 solves how to force platforms to cooperate — something Spain, Italy, and the EU have already achieved, and Costa Rica still hasn't.
Read more →President Mulino said it himself, before we'd even published Part 3: he doubts Proyecto de Ley 226 is fiscally sustainable — the same doubt that decides whether hospedajes can actually claim the Article 6 tax credit.
Read more →A bill just short of becoming law restores the tax credit hotels lost in 2020, adds hostales to the discount, and quietly closes the promotional-rate gap owners have relied on — with a specific 10% floor.
Read more →A four-article reform passed in December 2020 quietly stripped hotels of any way to recover the senior discount they're legally required to give — while restaurants kept theirs.
Read more →Ley 6 de 1987 names "hoteles, moteles y pensiones" — not hostales, not aparthotels. That wording is still the law today, and it is about to change.
Read more →A new EU law forces booking platforms to police sustainability claims worldwide, raising the question: can Panama actually make platforms enforce its own rental law?
Read more →Panama has roughly 13,000 short-term rentals online but only about 1,220 are legally registered — and someone always pays for that gap.
Read more →The first chapter in a series on Panama's short-term rental laws: how a 1973 housing statute created a legal vacuum that lasted decades.
Read more →Fifty years after the legal vacuum opened, Proyecto de Ley 301 finally names short-term rentals in law — but a close read of its actual text shows it mainly solves the state's tax problem, not the fairness or safety problem.
Read more →Ley 80 de 2012 tried to draw a hard line around short-term rentals in Panama City, but it mostly set off years of jurisdictional confusion instead.
Read more →How a 2008 air-mattress startup gave its brand name to a rental category that Panama's law had already been quietly describing for decades.
Read more →Between 1994 and 2008, Panama's tourism laws quietly built a vocabulary wide enough to describe short-term rentals — without ever naming them.
Read more →Panama's first legal answer to the 1973 rental gap only regulated hotels — never touching the short-term home rentals that already existed.
Read more →Panama's 1973 tenancy law explicitly excluded short-term rentals from its scope — creating a 50-year regulatory gap nobody filled.
Read more →ATP and MiCI both regulate Panama rentals, and both have different functions
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