Interesting perspective on hosting with today’s AirBNB.
Very interesting. So Mrs B started renting out her spare room and found it to be ‘life-enriching’. So ‘life-enriching’ in fact, that she was making so much money that she could afford to give up her regular job.
But now she doesn’t like the regulations, collecting taxes, getting permits or being ‘urged’ by Airbnb to posh up her bathroom! I love this bit too:
But interviews with more than two dozen hosts showed that many felt pressured to comply
My goodness - over two dozen hosts. now there’s a representative sample. 
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Article says:
“Airbnb said that it soon hopes to collect and remit municipal taxes in Denver, as it does in most cities.”
Should say:
“Airbnb said that it soon hopes to collect and remit municipal taxes in Denver, as it does in a few cities.”
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I was interviewed for this article but nothing I said was in the article unfortunately. I gave this site a shoutout if she wanted to brush up on what REAL hosts deal with.
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Unfortunately, many journalists already have in mind what they want to write about Airbnb and only then carry out interviews and seek out statistics to ‘prove’ their original idea.
It’s rare to read an article about Airbnb from a long-time guest though. It’s even rarer to read an article from a truly experienced long time host. But then, writing about Airbnb is a good bet - articles are almost guaranteed to get hits. And this all adds to the public’s misconceptions about the service.
I suspect that a large percentage of the articles about Airbnb that we see online are written by people who have no or little experience as a guest or a host. But it’s just the cool thing to write about right now…
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She was really cool to talk to, she told me the story about the dog, it sounded terrifying. I’m not sure how much experience she had in total, but for the story she stayed with some hosts locally in NYC. Doesn’t look like that got incorporated into it either.
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Journalists, pollsters, scientists, evangelists, humans…it’s called confirmation bias. Someday computers will write the news and it will be much less biased. We will hate it.
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