Airbnb has evolved its offerings over the year with many professionals renting out their properties on the platform to either supplement their income or be all-out businesses. This move into more corporate offerings has seen an uptick in a variety of problems, however, with people caring less about the properties they are staying in, even when they are a normal person’s home. One such problem has been the breakout of Airbnbs being rented out to host massive parties, which themselves bring with them a whole host of particular problems. Airbnb moved to ban these types of rentals in 2019 and now looks set to implement ways of enforcing the ban.
Back in 2019, five people were killed in a fatal shooting that took place during a party at an Airbnb in California. Since then, the company has banned parties from taking place at Airbnb rentals and is now trialing anti-party technology in a bid to stop them from happening altogether.
The anti-party technology is not something that is installed at properties and blocks parties when they are detected. Instead, the technology, which is ready for testing in the US and Canada, will assess reservation requests against a series of factors and block the reservation from going through if it is suspicious. Furthermore, that user will then be unable to book a whole property and instead only have the option to book a private room. In the blog post announcing the move, Airbnb described the new anti-party technology like this:
“This system looks at factors like history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the listing, weekend vs. weekday, among many others. The primary objective is attempting to reduce the ability of bad actors to throw unauthorized parties which negatively impact our Hosts, neighbors, and the communities we serve.”
Airbnb recognizes that the new system won’t be perfect but it is a clear effort from the company to reduce problematic bookings. It remains to be seen just how successful it will be. In other recent Airbnb news, bookings have once again reached record levels as people are traveling more now that the lockdown confinements are over.
