The Hoover City Council on Monday night is scheduled to consider an ordinance that would prohibit rental of properties for less than 30 days in single-family residential neighborhoods unless the rental is for a special event in the city and for seven days or less in a calendar year. Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato said the goal of the ordinance is to protect residential neighborhoods from problems that sometimes come with short-term rentals, such as loud parties, excessive numbers of vehicles, and high turnover of unfamiliar people coming into neighborhoods. Many short-term rentals are listed on we ..read more

An Airbnb guest says he found out the host did not have the authorization to sublet the apartment on the platform after receiving an eviction notice from the complex. Aura reports that nearly a quarter of all complaints with Airbnb rentals are due to scams, or renters selling stays to customers when they don’t have the authority to do so. This could either be a violation of their leasing agreement, someone who gained access to an apartment that they don’t legally own, or a variety of other fraudulent bookings that often leave paying guests out in the cold. Read more here. The po ..read more

On October 30, three American tourists were found dead at their Airbnb rental in Mexico City. The bodies of Kandace Florence and Jordan Marshall, both 28, and Courtez Hall, 33, were found in La Rosita, an upscale neighborhood close to Santa Fe. Sadly, the visitors had come to Mexico City to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Marshall and Hall were New Orleans teachers, while Kandace Florence was a small business owner from Virginia Beach. Florence was speaking to her boyfriend on October 30, and said she felt unwell. The call dropped. The worried boyfriend called for a welfare check, and ..read more

An ex-casino worker shocked the internet after revealing he found a half-hidden camera at the Airbnb he was staying at with his girlfriend. In a post shared on Reddit on Sunday, the man, under the username u/_Atoms_Apple explained that he only discovered the camera when it clicked right after he came out of the shower with his girlfriend, saying it is possible it also filmed them while being intimate. He said: “[I] felt super violated. Took a bunch of pics of it, unplugged it, reported to [Airbnb], and got a hotel room instead.” Read more here. The ..read more

A big part of planning a vacation is choosing the perfect place to stay. More and more people are choosing Airbnb — an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation rentals and tourism activities — as an alternative to hotels. When someone arrives at their vacation rental, they expect it to be clean, comfortable and resemble the photos they saw on the rental’s website. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for TikTok user Paige, a.k.a. @paigeunavailable, when she arrived at a rather disgusting Airbnb rental featuring dirt and debris everywhere. Or ..read more

A woman from Florida went to stay at an AirBnB in Tulum and hoped to have a fun vacation. Instead, it was fraught with tension starting on arrival. The main guest, Amber Jackson, and her friends believed they were about to become sex trafficking victims. First, there were the mystery splatters of paint on the door which Jackson thought looked like blood. She contacted the concierge and was told there was no cause for alarm, as it was actually paint. That didn’t allay her fears at all, but she and her friends decided to stay at the rental home as planned. Next, Jackson noted that ther ..read more

By Bloomberg News Lauren Kassirer, a 35-year-old New York City high school teacher, was found naked, bruised, and near death in an Airbnb rental on the Yucatan Peninsula three years ago this month. Now, with no answers about how she died and no one arrested, her father is looking back at the company’s offers of help and wondering if he got caught up in a damage-control campaign. “They took advantage of our family’s vulnerability to avoid a public relations nightmare,” said Eli Kassirer, 74, sitting at his kitchen table in New Paltz, New York, in late June, surrounded by documents about the cas ..read more

From Bloomberg News The way Airbnb has handled crimes such as the New York attack, which occurred during a bitter regulatory fight, shows how critical the safety team has been to the company’s growth. Airbnb’s business model rests on the idea that strangers can trust one another. If that premise is undermined, it can mean fewer users and more lawsuits, not to mention tighter regulation. For all its importance, the safety team remains shrouded in secrecy. Insiders call it the “black box.” But eight former members and 45 other current and former Airbnb employees familiar with the team’s role, mo ..read more

By Lane Lambert for Forbes White people who host rental properties on Airbnb earn significantly more per year than Black hosts, but a “race blind” pricing algorithm could help close that income gap, new research shows. Black hosts who rely on Airbnb’s algorithm to set enticing prices instead of manually choosing rates increase their occupancy rates significantly, bringing their earnings more in line with the higher rental incomes of white hosts, according to a study coauthored by Shunyuan Zhang, an assistant professor in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. Zhang’s findings come ..read more

By Paul Stevens of Short Term Rentalz US: New research published this week has suggested that the presence of Airbnb listings in neighbourhoods is leading to an increase in violent crimes being committed over time. The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal PLOS ONE and conducted by Northeastern University in Boston, USA, analysed the veracity of news reports linking short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb with violent crime, using data gathered between 2011 and 2017. The researchers found that the greater the number of Airbnb listings there were in any given neighbourhood, the ..read more