Hi all,
Firstly, thank you for wealth of experience/opinions - such a huge help in us starting up (last month!) I haven’t felt I could contribute much, but I did spot this article today. Thought it might be the usual Airbashing, but there is a balanced argument put forward.
"Airbnb is the only platform that voluntarily works with UK cities to help hosts share their homes, follow the rules and pay tax.
“Share their homes” = leverage their investment properties
“Follow the rules” = ignore any/all zoning requirements in residential areas designed to deter business uses; allow investors to rent residential houses max. occupancy 4 to groups of 16; provide perfect Petri dish of furtiveness to allow innumerable scams to take place
“pay tax” – AirBNB does not really “pay” 1 cent of tax, it passes these through to its users as a sop to governments to not be ruled illegal. It collects taxes, big deal, which the investors shrug off and the homesharers can’t really swing (on top of Air fees, with taxes your $40 room can end up being $65 a night … to the consumer …)
Other platforms and providers need to step up and follow our lead," the company said.
God, please, no.
“[The platform] allows local families and businesses to benefit from visitors to their communities.”
The company shrewdly appropriates the real benefits provided by homesharing hosts to communities, and pretends the investor hosts (not local!! in a huge number of cases – see esp. New Orleans, Nashville) also provide these benefits.
Yes AirBNB is hollowing out communities – this has come up at two hearings I’ve attended, in our state capital, Annapolis, and largest city, Baltimore. Lawmakers who lived on streets near tourist hotspots woke up one day to the fact that they no longer had neighbors, they had transients with spinner luggage looking lost and/or partiers.
Thank you @Cafrin - we can usually rely on the BBC to give a balanced view. It’s interesting to see the Edinburgh peaks during the Fringe as finding accommodation at those times can be pretty tricky, especially for those of us who aren’t millionaires.
I could only read a few of the comments after the article though as so many commenters, predictably, are the types who don’t like or accept any sort of changes in society. It gets boring reading them after a while 
I didn’t realise that there was a comments section until you mentioned it. That’s 30 minutes of my life that I’m not getting back!!
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