General questions about the Airbnb Community Commitment

But it's the wrong way to go about it. The right way would be to make the initial negotiation phase blind...no pictures or names, just profile information like star ratings and how long they've been an AirBnB member. Hosts that back out of agreed upon reservations too often could be punished. A vague "I promise not to discriminate" agreement with no details about how discrimination is reported, dealt with and and how disputes are handled could cause more problems than it solves.

At the end of the day, despite the BS line that AirBnB gives about people sharing their homes, the majority of the hosts are operating a small business, and one that's beholden to a single provider for business. There will be hosts that lose 100% of their income stream because of this and not all of them will be the problem hosts that are causing this controversy. Innocent hosts who just happen to have accidentally chosen incorrectly a few times will get caught. Or, more likely, hosts will live in fear of being accused and start discriminating in favor of minorities.

They can do that when the host will be protected against abuse of by law as well. Hell, it even wouldn't be needed. If you as a host knew, you would be compensated by any ill means done by the one renting - meaning AirBnb would claim responsibility - this clause wouldn't be such an issue.

Because here's why this happens: people start declining to certain others based on experience. Some hear about others experience and don't want to even go down that road in the first place.

Modern "PC" way of thinking caters to the minorities. Rights, rights, rights and so on. Businesses market on that. Media gets clicks and views based on that. But the modern western societies have forgotten that rights are only one side of the coin, there have to be RESPONSIBILITIES too.

Responsibilities are harder, long term gratification and can cause non happy feelings. But no one can enforce rights without them, or we get to see the extreme effects as we do now.

I am not familiar with OyoRooms. What is their solution?

Airbnb can do whatever they want in property they own/lease. However since they 'share' (funny word that) people's private homes they will have to live with the fact that those people will refuse guests for whatever reasons they feel like, this is the flip side of the coin of not having a relationship where they are in control (employer, employee, owner of the premises).

Airbnb wants to have its cake and eat it too, on the one hand not to own the premises and the goods stored in there but to pretend that they own it and set the rules about who can and can't come there.

Nobody is going to admit to discrimination, even if they do agree, people will come up with alternative reasons for not allowing the people they do not wish to stay in their private homes, so nothing will change but Airbnb will look good.

After all, what proof will they use to tell a host they are discriminating.

If Airbnb wants to be able to dictate the terms at that level they should build a nice large building with a front desk with people they employ and a bunch of rooms they let out aka a hotel.

"I agree to the terms and conditions."