This forum is dedicated to connecting hosts with other hosts. Sign up to get the latest updates and news just for AirBnb hosts! Note that we are not affiliated with Airbnb - we are just passionate hosts!
Looks like in order to appear like “a good guy”, Airbnb has started a pilot program which is giving local authorities access to an awful lot of data.
Airbnb is unveiling a new pilot data portal that will give regulators and tourism officials in a select group of cities access to information about its rental listings in their communities. The City Portal will give authorities in Seattle and San Francisco access to a compliance tool that will show them the addresses of Airbnb listings in those cities, with the ability to ask Airbnb to block listings for reasons such as noise code violations, fire safety issues, or expired registrations.
A wider range of about 15 cities and tourism marketing organizations, including officials in Buffalo, Calgary, New Orleans, Palm Springs, and Sacramento, will get access through the portal to aggregate information about Airbnb use in their communities. That can include data such as statistics on where Airbnb guests are coming from and the demographics of hosts, but not currently the individual locations of rentals.
Personally, I’m not fussed. The Junta de Andalucia has all our info as it’s them who granted us our tourist licences.
It’s not clear exactly how much data is going to be shared, one article I read suggested that Seattle and San Francisco are not the only two with direct access to listing, and that the data available will include booking history. I closed that tab and can’t find it now
I have no problem with this. In my city, hosts are supposed to be licensed (it is NOT an onerous process), but it’s estimated that only about 1/6 are. The city having access to information about who is hosting will either cut down on my competition or result in more hotel tax for the city - a win for me either way.
I would love it if Air would share guest origination information aggregated for all the Air hosts in my city with our visitor bureau, of which I’m a member. That would really help me to figure out how to target some of my marketing and what to highlight in my listing. It would also help the bureau determine what Air’s market share is here, where there were never enough summer hotel rooms until this year.
As the lull continues here, I’m going to try to contact all AirBnB hosts here and see if we can have at least one virtual get together for an hour or two just to get acquainted, so when we see each other in the TP stacks at Costco we can say hello.
I realised, some time after posting this, that the Junta and Airbnb have been sharing data for some time now.
We have a scenario here where there are very few “bad guys” now, thousands were delisted across Andalucía a few years ago as a licence is now required when listing.
That said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, trading with a temporary licence and I wouldn’t mind seeing a purge on some of them.
