Couldn’t agree more. As an occasional Airbnb host myself, I’ve found Airbnb’s arrogance breathtaking.
I’ve been to a few of their Sydney functions for hosts. These purport to be all about educating hosts for the benefit of hosts, but from my experience it’s all about how hosts can line Airbnb’s pockets and help Airbnb grow fat on the sweat of hosts. There’s an awful lot Airbnb Koolaid dispensed at these propaganda rallies and their very obvious purpose is to recruit hosts to become Airbnb’s foot soldiers in the battle against regulation. Any host who dares to raise a voice in dissent or even attempts to put forward facts that don’t suit Airbnb’s ‘alternative facts’ is bullied and shut down very quickly.
Airbnb’s clumsy attempts to promote themselves as the saviour of the battling homeowner and their ridiculous branding of their local lobbyist cells as ‘Home Sharing Clubs’ is sickening. I don’t begrudge Airbnb their right to build their business, but there’s something so fundamentally gutless, cowardly and manipulative about their approach. Airbnb seem oblivious to the Orwellian doublethink needed to promote the company line. As an example, in their Sydney Home Sharing Club forum, one host is expressing dismay that Clover Moore proposes limiting STR in residential zones to 100 days a year. The host describes it as “a disastrous position for anyone who wants to rent their whole home out.” Why? Surely if it’s ‘their whole home’ they’d want to live in it themselves? I would have thought renting out your actual ‘home’ for 100 days a year was about 80 days more than most homeowners would want or need! No one legitimately renting out their primary residence would think 100 days was a bad deal.
To describe Airbnb as greedy is almost too kind. Hosts are treated as a disposable input to production and there’s a feeling that we are being constantly pushed to do more and more for less and less. Any host who’s had a problem caused by a guest and has sought assistance from Airbnb will know that if there’s any benefit of doubt to be awarded, it will go to the guest and not the host. My observation from talking with other hosts, is that many hosts are reliant on Airbnb income and don’t dare object to the exploitative treatment for fear of being punished by Airbnb by their instrument of collective control, the dreaded ‘search algorithm’.
Make no mistake, whilst there are many hosts who still harbour warm, fuzzy feelings towards Airbnb, there are also many who long for the day that some viable competition emerges.