Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
1–10 of 403 posts
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#2Doesn't discrimination end up hurting the hosts in the end? Having less demand drives the rental costs down.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#3Doesn't discrimination end up hurting the hosts in the end? Having less demand drives the rental costs down.
Probably not sharply enough or clearly enough to impact behavior.
The thought patterns around this sort of thing can be pretty insidious, too. Some might be thinking stuff along the lines of "I'd be doing better if all these black people weren't tying up my reservations calendar".
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#4Doesn't discrimination end up hurting the hosts in the end? Having less demand drives the rental costs down.
Not if there's sufficient demand that they are happy with the occupancy level.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#5Doesn't discrimination end up hurting the hosts in the end? Having less demand drives the rental costs down.
Not necessarily. Certain customers are problematic and can case damage, which is especially possible when you let them occupy your property (the host is the one who ends up paying for repairs, good luck getting it out of the customer).
Usually, in a hotel this problem is fixed by requiring credit card with a high security deposit it check in, such as needing a few hundred dollars for incidentals plus room and tax. This means anyone without a credit card, and anyone without $500+ of available credit isn't allowed to stay. In effect, this doesn't guarantee the hotel payment for any damages, but it keeps out the type of guest that typically cause problems.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#6I don't know if this is really a tractable problem.
At the end of the day, either airbnb lets hosts decide who stays or doesn't. If they don't let hosts decide, they'll likely lose a ton of hosts, since having someone stay in your home is a very personal thing and a huge risk. If they do, then they're going to have significant discrimination problems as long as people are discriminatory, i.e., basically forever.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#7Doesn't discrimination end up hurting the hosts in the end? Having less demand drives the rental costs down.
It might, but how would they know? They're so sure they're protecting themselves that they will never care that they're making less money than they could. You'll not convince them of that, because they'll just argue about the potential money lost to undesirable tenants.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#8well people should have figured out by now : Airbnb's aren't hotels. And people should be free to deny others staying at their place, for whatever reason. Airbnb can't have it both ways, they know it and this effort will be pure PR.
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#9[deleted]
Re: Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts
#10Very tricky. Who you allow to stay in your home is a very personal and grave decision and people want as much information about the potential guests as possible. If they were to take this a step further and remove guest pictures altogether, I suspect that you'd see a mass flight to a competing platform.
For people who are renting out their primary home (and especially if they'll be there at the same time as the guest), I don't think it's ever right to challenge their decision to accept or deny a guest.
But someone running a number of units as full-time rentals should be held to anti-discrimination laws.