The New York Hoteliers released an attack ad against AirBnB.
“Airbnb allows illegal listings on its site, and refuses to hand over the addresses to law enforcement,” the ad reads. “Are you at risk?”
The answer to this question, HANYC suggests, is yes.
Mic.com
This was AirBnB’s response,
Your ad is misleading, plays to xenophobic fears, and is beneath the dignity of the hospitality industry. It is an affront to the victims of terrorism, and its shock and abhorrent xenophobia is only equaled by the irony of it being paid for by hotels, where, as the New York Post recently noted while covering your ad, “lots of terrorists have stayed.” Given that you are supporting an ad about terrorism in lodging, do your hotels have a perfect record on this?
Mic.com
Generally, I couldn’t give two shits what corporate conglomerates and their advocacy organizations have to say about pretty much anything. But reporting on this ad campaign and the full-throated rejection that AirBnB levels at the ad misses a few points which are worth enumerating so that everyone understands what is actually going on here.
Any rental property stands the chance of being rented for nefarious reasons. It is the nature of property ownership and leasing that this can happen to anyone who owns and rents property. Pointing at any one facet of an industry like hospitality and claiming “you promote terrorism” is wrong on its face. All use of property by anyone other than the owner incurs this risk to the property owner, which most of them are quite aware of if they are in the the hospitality business.
Therein lies the heart of the problem. Airbnb, like Uber does for car ownership, profits from the risk of property owners without being exposed to any risk themselves. AirBnB (or any other property renting app) breaks rules imposed on hospitality organizations for valid reasons of safety, security and sanitation, and they get away with these violations by claiming that they aren’t renting property, the owner of the property is. This legal sleight of hand may keep them from losing court battles, but it doesn’t excuse them from the fact that they are taking advantage of a need to pay bills by people who own property but can’t afford to keep it without leasing rooms via a handshake agreement.
If anything happens on the owners property while someone else is renting it, that owner pays for the damages to the renter as well as for the damages to the property. Slip and fall. Cuts and lacerations from broken glass. Illness from improperly maintained bathrooms and bedrooms. Heaven forbid there is a pool on the premises and alcohol to go with it. Most people don’t think about these potential liabilities. They just want to keep their property and they have to occasionally rent it out in order to do that. They are, most of them, one accident away from financial ruin and they don’t even realize it.
I’m not crying for hotel chain owners or tenement landlords who blatantly profit off the backs of the unsuspecting and the poor any more than I’m going to shed tears for taxi services that get rules put in place to limit their competition so that they can charge more for their service. What I am saying though is that the “sharing economy” doesn’t seem to be doing much in the way of sharing the profits from these new-found ways of getting around onerous rules, and they aren’t sharing much of the risk, either. Seems like the property owners should probably ask for more than just the rental cost from AirBnB. They should have some kind of financial assurance that they won’t be driven out of their homes if the unthinkable happens.
This was reblogged on my now-deleted TUMBLR account and shared to Facebook. the-future-now: “ Airbnb responds to “fear-mongering” ad suggesting short-term rentals aid terrorism that account still exists but has no content on it any longer. Tumblr has definitely fallen on hard times. The article on Mic.com was the basis for the post.
