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Comment by imroot | Hacker News Reader

AirBNB is interesting.

Before I even stayed at an AirBnB, I paid for a AirBnB, and then was kicked off of their system, because after they "searched public records," they discovered that they didn't want me as a customer.

Interestingly enough, at the time I was a contractor for a three-letter agency, so my background was pretty-damn clean.

They didn't follow FDCPA, no adverse notice telling me what their "source" of information was (so that I could correct it), and no appeal. It took me another week to get my $$ back from AirBnB.

The irony of this is that they still send me emails telling me of terms of service and marketing emails, even after telling me that they don't want me as a customer.

Oh well.

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AirBNB can easily fix this issue by disallowing the hosts to reject the booking request if place is available. If host rejects the booking request, AirBNB can block them from renting out to other people for that time period. They can run analytics and find out who is rejecting to black sounding names and renting out afterward.

What are they doing?

That starts getting into an interesting combination of laws..

A - While some stores say "we reserve the right to refuse service," that's been pretty soundly defeated in a number of lawsuits, part of which sparked the various "religious freedom" bills.

B - Alternatively, you can deny anyone access to your home for any reason. Just because a [black, white, gay, any religion] person knocks on your door, doesn't mean you have to let them in.

So when you rent your home via AirBnb, do you have the rights & responsibilities of a homeowner or of a business? Is there a threshold where it switches?

The problem, I suppose, is that having the ability to choose who stays in your house is a big selling point. If someone requests our spare room, but they have many other hosts giving them bad reviews, we will reject them.

We make most of our AirBnB revenue on big events, a weekend or two a month. If we kept losing those weekends because the first person to apply was someone we didn't want to share the apartment with, that'd make it pretty pointless for us to use the platform.

That'd also be a valuable-ish service - have someone with bad reviews apply very early to competitor's places during big events, for the sole purpose of getting denied and preventing actual costumers from renting from places that aren't yours.

It would only be valuable while unknown, as soon as it was known by a large enough crowd it would cause a viral reaction blowing out all availability for some big event.

Denying pre approval is easy and no damage to your rep.

AirBNB can block them from renting out to other people for that time period

Then this opens up a competitive hole where another, similar service will let you rent on their platform during that same period. Hosts will just use multiple services (if they don't already), just like drivers for Uber and Lyft do.

In other words, this wouldn't actually solve any discrimination issues, but it does keep it hidden and off AirBNB.

Requiring apartment owners to use multiple services increases the cost of discrimination, which will in turn reduce it.

That won't work. The ability to discriminate is a big selling point to hosts. And there's nothing wrong with certain forms of discrimination. Hosts have limited recourse to deal with bad guests. My parents rent out a spare building on their property and they're very conscientious about reviewing each guest. When a guest leaves too large of a mess, they get lower than 5 stars. And since their property is rented most nights, they refuse to rent to guests that have more than a few negative reviews. Since people are renting out their homes, this type of discrimination is necessary to make them feel comfortable.

Where discrimination becomes wrong is when it's based off race or some other protected class. I've said it before, but the way to fix this isn't to deny hosts the ability to discriminate at all, but to withhold the information that hosts need to discriminate unfairly until after the booking has been made. If a host is forced to choose to accept or deny a booking without seeing a picture or knowing the name of the guest and only being able to look at reviews, time on AirBnb and such, then you retain the ability to discriminate against people who have a history of being bad guests without giving hosts the ability to use race or some other unfair characteristic of the guest to determine whether to accept the booking.

But, as others have mentioned in response, AirBnB wants to give the appearance that it cares about unfair discrimination without actually dealing with it. Too many of its hosts want to discriminate in that fashion. AirBnB will do the minimum necessary to address the bad PR and do whatever it can to make it seem like they care about those guests affected, but really doesn't want to do anything about the issue.

> Where discrimination becomes wrong is when it's based off race or some other protected class.

Really now?

If a 50-year-old doesn't want to live with a 20-year-old, that's wrong to you?

If a theist doesn't want to live with an atheist, that's wrong to you?

If a woman doesn't want to live with a man (or woman for that matter), that's wrong to you?

If an Israeli doesn't want to live with a Palestinian, that's wrong to you?

If a pacifist doesn't want to live with a veteran, that's wrong to you?

If an American Indian doesn't want to live with a British, that's wrong to you?

You think people who want to rent out a mere room or two of their home should be forced to disregard the "protected class" of the tenant? That genuinely makes sense to you?

Like seriously... discrimination is not black and white. It shows complete ignorance when you say discrimination based on a protected class is somehow automatically wrong. The context (in this case, whether you're living with them) matters -- a lot.

> You think people who want to rent out a mere room or two of their home

No, I don't. I think the majority of AirBnB rentals are the whole apartment/home, and it would be very simple to apply the rules I mentioned to just that type of listing. In NYC, where I'd imagine the percentage of shared/private rooms would be higher than other areas, 2/3 of rentals [1] are of the entire home variety. Discrimination based on protected classes is wrong in these instances. It's illegal for a landlord and it's illegal for a hotelier. Why shouldn't it be illegal for a short-term rental just because it uses the same platform that others use to rent out a room in their home?

So, does your diatribe still apply in the majority case or were you just talking about those less frequent rentals?

> It shows complete ignorance when you say discrimination based on a protected class is somehow automatically wrong.

And it shows complete ignorance on your part that you ignore the circumstances that constitute the majority of AirBnB rentals.

[1] https://skift.com/2014/02/13/airbnb-in-nyc-the-real-numbers-...

I think that, if you "don't want" to associate with people in whatever group for whatever reason, that's okay -- what you want to do is your private business.

But none of this is about what you don't want to do. It's about how you treat other people, commercially and otherwise. Society should not permit a man to refuse to do business with a woman and vice versa.

You can discriminate against people for being young. :)

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Black sounding names? What does that even mean? Do other people not discriminated against? Fat people, ugly people, people with kids, etc..

We often reject becuase of schedule conflicts or becuase think the guests are renting solely to party.

Instead the site heavily pushes you toward Instabook which is automatic book with zero host input.

Black sounding names? I'm, your average airbnb is pretty wealthy.... You dont get white trash nor ghetto names as much in general.

Are you black? Do you suspect racism?

I'm a black airbnb host.... That platform is pretty easy to avoid Racism via Instabook.

Airbnb or the host told you that?

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