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I get the feeling that some of the newer members here disregard what I might say about a home-sharing situation because every time I refer to ‘our rentals’ these days, I’m talking about our two separate, fully self catering apartments.
However, for many years in the last century I had the fortune to live in a house with six bedrooms (three of them admittedly tiny) and only needed two so the property became a bed and breakfast establishment.
This was, of course, home share as we now know it. I was female, young, and had a small child. My husband was largely absent due to work. So I was basically an attractive and young single woman with a child sharing her home with (on almost every occasion) men.
The very idea of seeing a photograph before a guest arrived was impossible enough to be ridiculous. Most times I just knew their names and as there was no requirement to see ID, or anything of that nature, I had no idea if they were telling the truth or not.
Any single woman who is so precious that she needs to see accurate photographs of all guests before they arrive should think very carefully about why she is sharing her home with strangers and entering this business.
You can take your judgments elsewhere.
Yes, I am precious, my life is precious, that is my right.
I have a right to discernment about who I interact with.
If you don’t care, that is your right too, but you can keep your judgements of other people’s rights to yourself.
“Discernment” decades ago is why it was necessary to mock people like me in school with hyperactivity or have “separate but equal” or have separate fountains for colored people or that women weren’t good enough for certain roles, etc. Discernment is why a lot of people used to think it was fine to string up a minority from a tree because they didn’t need to bother with a trial.
There is nothing about a photograph that helps a person do anything other than discriminate against other people. The only value it has is determining that the person who shows up at the door is the same as the person who booked.
There is no reason to lock this thread @Klatchers .
It is not disgusting. It is debate around whether single female hosts sharing their homes (not you) feel comfortable about hosting (single guys) in their own home when they can’t see a photo of a guest before they book. Nothing to do with discrimination or intolerance. It’s to do with perceptions around safety.
Personally I see this as a ‘non-issue’ as if I wasn’t comfortable with a booking, purely on the basis of someone’s photo on booking, I would ask Airbnb to cancel, but appreciate there are other female hosts who don’t.
This actually is a strong rhetorical point. Speaking as someone who lives barely a block from where Billie Holiday grew up, who among us can forget the gut-punch impact of her haunting song “Strange Fruit,” which awakened us all to the equal horrors of lynching and hyperactivity.
I don’t have data to support this, but I don’t think Airbnb’s decision to hide profile pics is all about discrimination. They started off as an idea, built a following, and now they’re trying to standardize the offering.
First they removed host photos from the search results. This said to me the room is more important than the host. Definitely a step away from the warm and fuzzy home-hosting ethos.
Then they started pushing IB.
Now they’ve removed guest photos. (I only mind the inequality in information. If they’re going to hide guest photos, shouldn’t they hide the hosts’ too?)
Now they’ve identified the listings they believe are “on brand” enough to represent Airbnb: PLUS. In this scheme, hosts no longer control their listing descriptions or photos. Air’s design mavens tell you to replace your brown couch with a teal one. And add a fiddle-leaf fig to look like every other “curated” Airbnb PLUS listing.
I won’t be at all surprised when they remove guest reviews. In what other venue (besides eBay?) does the seller evaluate the buyer?
This is the direction things are going. You can hold out in protest, but your listing will drop to the back of search results.
Absolutely. The extent to which it creeps out female in-home hosts is far, far greater in intensity than the quote-unquote guest discrimination “problem.”
So, one must conclude there are no accidents, and female in-home hosts (the highest rated category) don’t fit in with the future of AirBNB, in the sense that we are generally 180 degrees from the investor model, i.e., quasi-hotels with standard practices.
I don’t think you can conclude that at all @PuppyLover
I know about 20 female in-home hosts single/single with kids. None of them are in the slightest bit concerned about airbnb changing things so that hosts now only see guest photos on booking. (we had a local host meet up where this was one of the issues discussed).
From chatter on host forums it looks like it is mainly couples who express concerns including those with whole listings.
None of the 21 one female hosts in my group were ‘creeped-out’ - it’s such a non-issue as I have said multiple times. If when you see the photo on booking there is something about it that makes you feel uncomfortable you can cancel free of charge.
I’ve had hundreds of guests over three plus years. Never had a situation where I have asked Airbnb to cancel purely based on someone’s photo.
Discrimination unfortunately is alive and well amongst STR hosts, you only have to read some of the disgusting comments that have been made on this and other forums to know that. Whether that is why Airbnb introduced this measure…who knows.
Ah, I don’t know I’d take it that far. Discrimination is a real problem on the platform.
I can’t speak for all female in-home hosts any more than you can, but the lack of profile photos doesn’t phase me. 95% of my bookings are IB anyway, so I only see photos attached to confirmed bookings.
Having dated a handsome sociopath, I know one thing for sure: you can’t tell a damned thing from a photo. Manipulators know exactly how to present themselves.
I’ll say here for the 1000th time: I was a single female hosting in my home the first 1.5 years. Zero problems. I didn’t use IB all the time because I was still working full time, I would turn it on and off depending on my schedule. And although photos were supposedly required at that time a majority of guests didn’t match their photo for one reason or another. I know from personal experience and 4 decades of study in related fields that I can’t tell anything about a person just from looking at them, via photo or in person.
Regardless of which people “can tell by looking” and which can’t, I can’t imagine that Airbnb isn’t going to continue down the path of
I agree @Allison_H that they don’t really care much about discrimination. As seen in a recent post on this forum, discrimination can also take the form of classism which is something Airbnb is actually promoting with Plus and trying to make listings uniformly “upscale.”
Interesting observation. I can’t think of an example and yet removing the reviews doesn’t seem like a good idea like removing the pictures does.
This really is the crux of the matter. And many are holding out for a new platform that will recreate the old Airbnb where you could just throw down an airmattress and a bagel and people would line up to pay you. I don’t have data to support this (to borrow a great phrase) but I’d be willing to bet that’s not a viable business model.
Hitler worked overtime to convince skeptical Germans to drive home that the Jews were an inferior race and should be exterminated.
Ask any African-American how many times they’ve been pulled over by the police simply because they were black.
The news stories recently where whites were harassing black residents of their own building why they were at the pool or why they were there.
You dont get it, so you keep joking and acting like it is nothing. If you were the butt of the joke or at the receiving end of discrimination your laughter would stop
A picture does nothing to tell you whether the person on the other end is safer. It is only excuse to practice discrimination.
You already can specify gender. You don’t need to drag this nasty practice on into the future.
Are you oblivious to the much higher cancellation rates of African American guests when the hosts saw the picture? What do you not get? It is relatively easy to assume you are not a minority or this drivel wouldn’t be coming out of you so freely.
@PuppyLover I am a 60+ widow, live-in host, and have been welcoming guests into my home for 3 years and have never felt unsafe with any of my single, male guests, or ANY of my guests. I can count on one hand the number of booking requests I have declined. I couldn’t give a rat’s behind about guest photos. And I use IB.
Posting photos from 20 years ago (as in a dating website) is not likely to happen much in my experience. People (especially young people) tend to post photos of themselves as how they’d like to be perceived…so, holding a beer, being scantily scad, sticking out their tongue showing multiple piercings, looking shy and bookish, scuba diving, in a Greenpeace T-shirt. None of these things is a predictor of how good a guest someone will be. However, how someone wants to be perceived is information for the host who is living in close quarters with the guest. We all have reactions to peoples’ appearance. The reactions can make us uncomfortable and make us err on the side of declining, but doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re bad people. Guests can be bad guests without being criminal or a threat to our safety. The lack of comfort goes both ways, too.
