Interesting article on London Airbnb scam, particularly the European Court of Justice ruling that Airbnb is an “information society service”, not a real estate agency.
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Long read but worth it. Very disturbing. Airbnb has a lot of “housecleaning” to do. Wish they would concentrate on that and suspend expansion into other areas until they get their ducks in a row with what they should do best.
I’m not that sure Airbnb are overly bothered about large scale hosting companies. All the more (badly needed) revenue for them.
We’ve seen it here over the past year, foreign money buying/leasing properties and “hosts” having twenty odd listings. Doesn’t sound much, but we’re a small city and have gone from under 200 listings to well over 300 in a fairly short period of time.
What is interesting is that these folks concentrate on Airbnb, very few of the listings are on with HA or BDC.
JF
That was fascinating!
I have never worried about booking Air rooms in smaller US towns and cities, or in rural areas, where I can check out locations and see the neighborhood on Google Maps, or where I know the city like I do Seattle and Portland. Note that most of this flagrant fraud is happening in large urban areas that attract a lot of tourists.
The problem is that for those of us that live in small towns, Air is the best and least expensive way we have to advertise and book, and this kind of fraud and resulting publicity puts off a lot of potential first time Air guests.
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