Another airbnb house party makes the news...

[Dave52]

Mega "airbnb house party" in Sunnyvale, CA, hundreds of people, advertised all over social media, underage drinking, two shootings, one dead.

Don't know the back story but obviously not authorized by the host. 

Now the City of Sunnyvale is considering banning all airbnb's.

Meanwhile,  many hosts complain on the CC that airbnb does not back them up to stop parties.  Lets the guests get away with it and often sides with the guest over the host.    (ie revenge reviews allowed, not supported with damage claims, etc).

When will they learn.  

[Pat271]

After the Orinda shooting, Airbnb did implement a “no parties” rule and also implemented some checks and warnings to try to prevent these types of bookings. That is heading down the right track, but more needs to be done.  Here are a couple of ideas:

1) Have a checkbox that provides the option of setting the minimum age of the booking guest to 21. There are many hotels that currently do this, at least in the US. This would obviously not completely stop a 21-year-old from booking and then inviting 200 16-year-olds, but it would still curb some percentage of party bookers.

2) Require, or at least highly encourage hosts to install a Ring doorbell, door lock detection, and/or noise detection device. We hosts often encourage each other to do this, but I don’t see Airbnb openly encouraging it.

In the short term, these options might cause Airbnb to lose money, as either option might shrink the pool of potential guests, but that would clearly be preferable to an entire city banning Airbnb rentals altogether.

It could be argued that these options smack of discrimination or watchdogging, which may be another reason Airbnb and similar platforms haven’t endorsed either option.

This is a touchy issue and not easy to solve, but more serious changes need to be implemented, or we all run the risk of getting shut down.

[Dave52]

@Laura2592   Your party story is like tons of stories here.  Some of them are so crazy they sound almost unbelievable but they are true, get a kick out of reading them at first, but then feel bad for the host who had to endure it all, insult added to injury (and a bad review on top of all!) when airbnb CS blows it off like it's no big deal.

IF airbnb wants to go ahead and continue to ignore this party issue, they'll get more bad press and community backlash.  I know they don't want to be branded as a party house booking platform, but they are doing nothing to help hosts with it. I guess it's their call.

[Pat7985]

Unfortunately, guests complain about "security camera violations" when they are caught with the extra guests and parties. I've experienced this first hand. It's honestly illogical! First, Airbnb investigated and said the guests were in violation. Weeks later they "suspended" the host listings for "security camera violations" threatening to remove the host privilege if there was any other guest with a camera complaint. Chimpanzees are running Airbnb support, and getting paid quite well, I might add.

[Laura2592]

@Pat7985  guests always are suddenly very uncomfortable about cameras when the cameras catch them doing something they aren't supposed to. I never mention to guests that I see them on the camera. I just say "neighbors have reported" or "we were notified that" blah blah blah.  As soon as you say you have photographic proof  the guest is likely to file a claim that they are being spied on and your listing is shut down while ABB "investigates." So my advice to other hosts is get cameras, use them, but don't mention them to guests and CERTAINLY never message " I saw you on camera" in the ABB messaging feature.

[Anonymous]

@Pat271  From the Mercury News:

Sunnyvale police spokesman Capt. Hank Syu said the homeowner did not register the home as an Airbnb rental.

City regulations require homeowners to apply for a permit to rent out their homes through Airbnb. The homeowners must also be on site, with a maximum number of four people allowed in a rental. 

This is the problem that's not talked about enough in this particular topic. One frustration so many city governments have here is that even when they create a regulatory framework that gives Airbnb hosts a chance, Airbnb usually can't be bothered to cooperate with those laws and remove listings in those places that don't have a valid permit. As a consequence, unlawful listings become a nuisance and give all legit hosts a bad name, and some cities decide there's nothing left to do but ban Airbnb outright.

That's one concrete and plausible way that Airbnb could do better. But I fully agree with @Elaine701  below that the overwhelming majority of the responsibility for preventing these parties lies with the hosts, who can be tragically delusional about the risks involved. Airbnb has gotten a lot of mileage out of pulling in new hosts with its cuddly marketing rhetoric that insists you can just hand your house over to a stranger from the internet and if anything goes wrong, they've got your back. Yeah, right - like Craigslist totally has your back if you go alone to some guy's basement following a "LADIES WANTED" ad.  

The worst incidents seem to happen to hosts who think an Airbnb rental is just passive income, and not something they have to actively monitor and keep under control. There's a limit to how much we can blame the listing service when some of our fellow hosts have simply failed to do the job that they signed up for.

[Pat271]

@Anonymous I thought about adding a bullet point for monitoring for proper licensing, but I concluded that the correlation between unlawful listings and party-prone listings is weak - one doesn’t necessarily make the other more probable. Although it’s true that hosts who run unlawful listings might tend to be negligent in general, it could also be argued that unlawful hosts might tend to be super-cautious to reduce the chances of drawing attention to their listing.

Totally agree that the “We have your back” slogan is an empty promise. I surmised early on that a booking platform is not going to police my property, and that there would be extreme obstacles involved in trying to get any kind of monetary protection from them. The best defense is screening for the “best kind” of guest, although that not only is not foolproof, but walks the fine line between being cautious, and being discriminatory.

[Susan990]

You hit the nail on the head!  The first plank of this problem is running an ABB business without a business license or permit as required by local laws.  Don't expect the police or fire protection services to respond to an emergency call for a ' party' going on in a privately owned house occupied by 'guests' who got the key from the owner.  No crime as been committed from their point of view.  The only crime is the property owner who is running an illegal business operation in a city which results in danger and damages which impact the neighbors and community in general.

  Hello ABB.  When are you going to install a new section in the Listing platform which calls for data input of licenses and permits information OR proof that there are indeed none required by local laws ???

  This important Feature  should be displayed front page right next to the other important items like Super Host ,  COVID clean compliance, etc. Like a red flag it puts the public on notice that this property is run as a serious and legal business. 

  What I have done to protect myself is to include in my House Rules the following statement:  City of Redmond Business License reserves the same rights & protocols for timely departure/occupancy guidelines/legal uses as a Hotel, Motel or Resort in Oregon.

[Susan990]

Oh! Forgot to add~ do not expect your Residential Homeowners Insurance Policy to cover damages or fire caused by conducting a commercial business activity . 

[Anonymous]

@Susan990 That's the thing, and the reason I feel it's relevant here - if your hosting business is properly registered under the terms set by your city, it's at least in theory entitled to the degree of public protection and oversight that is afforded to other small businesses in the area. But @Pat271 , if a homeowner running an illegal Airbnb listing, wouldn't it be a waste of public resources if the police had to get involved to shut down their house parties? This sounds as absurd to me as a drug dealer calling the sheriff in for backup just in case the buyer doesn't bring enough money. 

Interesting idea that the unlawful hosts might be the super-cautious ones, but running an unlawful business on a highly visible global platform, with pictures of your house and evidence of your identity, does not strike me as something a super-cautious person would do. If you can forgive another analogy, that sounds like trying to sell cocaine on Ebay.

[Pat271]

@Anonymous  Yes, I think that anytime hoards of people enter a house against the owner’s will, and the situation quickly escalates out of control, the police should intervene, and it is not a waste of public resources to do so. This should be the case regardless of whether the owner is running a church or a massage parlor. People’s lives may be at stake, and it is never a waste of public resources to prevent crime. 

As far as your analogy of the drug dealer calling the sheriff, a better analogy is not of the buyer not bringing enough money, but rather the buyer slumps to the ground from a drug overdose. The issue is not the legality of the transaction; it is the fact that someone may die without medical intervention. 

By the way, Airbnb is now cooperating with the State of Hawaii to insure proper licensing.  A few months ago, after years of resistance, arguments about privacy, etc., Airbnb has agreed to provide the State of Hawaii with host and reservation info, as well as require hosts to publish their licensing info on their listing. Those of us with legal STRs have been posting our license numbers in our listing descriptions all along, but I believe Airbnb is actually going to implement a mandatory field. To activate a listing, a host will be required to enter the short-term accommodation license numbers. Here is a news clip on the agreement:

https://www.kitv.com/story/42961183/illegal-short-term-rentals-will-be-revealed-under-new-agreement

[Laura2592]

They do NOTHING.  I can atest first hand. 

A few weekends ago we had a Bachelorette party thrown at our place. At noon promptly our Ring doorbell caught footage of guests beyond the number booked unloading case after case of booze, pink gifts, decorations etc. Obviously a party was about to start. I called Airbnb and sent images from the Ring. They didn't count that as enough proof even though there were more guests than registered getting access to my space. They called the guest to alert her that I had complained and all it did was make for a very awkward conversation and low ratings by that guest. They threw a party. I knew they would.  Airbnb did absolutely zero except help tank my score. 

If they are truly serious about not allowing parties they need to start canceling stays when parties are reported and kick those guests off the platform.  They need to start a public awareness campaign about why parties aren't allowed at all...not small ones, birthday,  Bachelorette,  keggers, anything.  But they won't. They talk out of both sides of their mouth on this topic. 

[Jillian115]

@Dave52  posted the below in another post over the weekend. But basically this comes down to Airbnb providing necessary protections for hosts or their communities. It's terrifying. More needs to be done. A phone verification and form of payment is not enough to prevent this. We need more safety measures to prevent criminal activity. 

Communities are getting fed up with Airbnb and are retaliating by banning new listings. Try this search string on Google you'll come up with 10+ pages of results "City OR County ordinance OR Bans airbnb"

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/A-story-with-everything-Bad-guest-thousands-in-damages-crim... 

[Jillian115]

Also Click NEWS: 

[Pat7985]

I agree! Airbnb "Support" completely allows the parties and retaliatory reviews, leaving the hosts with the damages. If Airbnb was run like a legitimate business, they'd preserve the host relationship. Can't have guests without hosts. The outsourcing of Airbnb "support" is a joke!