5 Steps to Take Before You Rent a Villa in Ibiza

Renting a villa in Ibiza goes smoothly for the vast majority of guests, and a few careful checks before you commit are usually all it takes to keep it that way. The five steps below focus on details that are easy to verify and hard to fake: the official tourist licence, the website you're actually booking through, how you communicate with the operator, how you pay, and what you get in writing. None of them take long. Run through all five before you send any money, not just the ones that feel most relevant to your booking.

Step 1: Check the tourist licence in the official register

Every legal holiday rental in the Balearic Islands must carry a tourist licence number, shown on the listing and in any advertising for the property. The exact format depends on the island and the type of accommodation (you'll typically see something starting with ETV, ETVPL/, or APM, or ending in ME), but in every case it's meant to be a real, checkable register entry, not just a code the host wrote in.

Take the number from the listing and paste it into VillaVerify, a free tool that reads the official per-island registers directly. Ibiza has its own register, and so do the other Balearic Islands. You can also search by island through the villa lookup. A match shows you the island, municipality, capacity, and a "data as of" date, so you can see how current the record is. If the number comes back as not found, that isn't automatic proof of anything (registers can lag behind reality), but it's a clear reason to ask the host directly before you go any further.

Step 2: Make sure the website URL is the real one

Scam listings often live on domains built to look like a well-known platform or a real local agency at a glance: something like airbnb-ibiza-villas.com, with an extra word or hyphen slipped in. Other warning signs include a domain that was only registered a few weeks ago, no https padlock in the address bar, and photos that turn out to be lifted from another listing entirely.

Run the site through VillaVerify's URL checker (the URL tab) before you rely on anything it tells you. It's also worth comparing the domain letter-by-letter against the operator's own listing in the Ibiza operator directory. A single swapped letter or an extra word is exactly what a lookalike domain is built to hide.

Step 3: Communicate only through the official channels

A genuine operator emails you from their own company domain, not a free address like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com, and the phone or landline number they give you should match the one on their website's legal notice (aviso legal), alongside their CIF or company registration number.

Be cautious if a host suddenly asks to move the conversation off the platform you booked through ("my messages aren't coming through, email me directly") or insists on WhatsApp as the only way to reach them. That pattern is common precisely because it removes the paper trail a platform provides. If you're unsure whether you're actually talking to the operator, look them up in the operator directory and contact them through the details listed there to confirm the booking is real.

Step 4: Pay the safe way

Pay by card or through the platform's own payment system, never by direct bank transfer to a private individual, and never outside the platform you booked through. A deposit followed by a balance closer to arrival is normal practice for villa rentals; what isn't normal is being asked to send that deposit to an individual's personal account rather than the company's.

Refuse to pay by cryptocurrency or a wire service such as Western Union under any circumstances; legitimate operators don't ask for either. Treat urgency as a warning sign in itself: a "cancellation deal" or a price that's only available if you pay within the hour is a pressure tactic, not a genuine bargain.

Step 5: Get it in writing before final payment

Before you send the final payment, get written confirmation that names the operator's legal name and CIF, the property's address, the tourist licence number, your dates, the total price, and the cancellation terms. A verbal promise or a friendly WhatsApp message isn't enough. You want something you can point back to if a dispute comes up later. Keep everything: the confirmation itself, your payment records, and any correspondence.

If the licence number on that written confirmation matches what you already found in the register in step 1, that's about as strong a signal as this process gives you. A scammer can copy a listing's photos and description, but matching a real licence number to a real, current register entry is much harder to fake.

The bottom line

None of these five steps takes more than a few minutes, and running through all of them costs far less time than untangling a booking that's gone wrong. If a listing or operator doesn't hold up under this kind of scrutiny, you can report it so others can be warned. If you want to understand the scam patterns behind these checks in more depth, read how to avoid getting scammed renting a villa in Ibiza.

VillaVerify is a free independent tool; automated checks can be wrong, so always do your own due diligence.