Hosts tips

New York City’s Office of Special Enforcement says it has now decided on 90% applications from potential short-term rental hosts as part of regulations that kicked in last September. 

Achieving Airbnb superhost status usually means more money in your pocket, and it comes with several perks. But some hosts are critical about the program’s current status on Airbnb. 

Airbnb several years ago had the ambition to be a “super brand for travel.” There was talk of an Airbnb flights feature, as well as restaurants, boutique hotels and experiences. But the pandemic forced it to refocus on its core business of short-term rental stays.

Airbnb has started to verify listings in five of its top global markets, but the process is much simpler for professional hosts than those with individual listings, according to requirements viewed by Skift.

Travelers may choose an Airbnb over a hotel for a number of reasons, but let’s face it: They’ll often go for the cheaper option.

Airbnb settled a tax dispute with Italy for around $620 million (576 million euros), the company said Wednesday.

With critics questioning Airbnb’s growth momentum, Airbnb announced Tuesday that Chief Financial Officer Dave Stephenson will become chief business officer, a newly created position, and VP of Finance Ellie Mertz will become CFO March 1.

The problem surfaced in late Summer — Booking.com’s short-term rental hosts in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America cited financial hardships because the company wasn’t paying them for guest stays.

There have been plenty of headlines in the past few days about a lawsuit against an Airbnb guest in Brentwood, California, who has allegedly overstayed her reservation, which ended on March 19, 2022 —without paying rent for more than a year-and-a half.

Airbnb took several steps to ease the process of onboarding new hosts, increased damage protections, and added a half-dozen new search categories, including trending homes and those adapted for wheelchair access.

Bowing to criticism about surprise fees that potential guests encounter late in the booking process, Airbnb announced Monday that starting next month it will begin displaying the total price of a stay before taxes, but including its own fees and hosts’ cleaning charges, at the very beginning of the search process.

Despite lots of vacation rental industry talk about making inroads in attracting more direct bookings, a global survey of property managers and individual hosts reported those percentages were stable, if not decelerating.

Building on initiatives that had mixed results in the past, Airbnb is debuting an Airbnb-Friendly Apartments program to enable long-term renters in multifamily buildings where landlords permit it to list their rooms or apartments on Airbnb.

When pressed about an analytics company report that found 38 percent of Airbnb hosts offered only one listing, an Airbnb spokesperson countered this week, without elaboration, that “the vast majority of active Airbnb hosts are sharing just one home as single-listing hosts.”

People perceived to be African American or Black still see their prospective Airbnb reservations rejected by hosts at higher rates than any other racial group, but the company made changes to Instant Book last month to attempt to ease the injustice.

Airbnb has an answer for all those skeptics who claimed for years that it was a typical Silicon Valley unicorn with a penchant for growth at the expense of black ink — the short-term rental giant in 2022 recorded its first profitable year.

What can we expect from Airbnb? While there’s no timeframe, a marketplace is in the works where hosts might pay to contract cleaning services and the company may implement tax-inclusive pricing in places where it doesn’t do so already.

With no strict timeframe, this is what we can expect from Airbnb: A marketplace where hosts might pay to contract cleaning services, tax-inclusive pricing in places where it doesn’t do so already, an academy for hosts, and partnerships with destinations to promote tourism.

In an about-face, Airbnb has put all new experiences submissions on hold, with no date set for new experiences applications to resume, Skift has learned.

Whoever has the most short-term rental listings wins, right? OK, that’s a simplistic view. But with Airbnb’s revenue per available room forecast to decline a tad over the next four years compared with 2019, it would have to count on listings growth to hit analysts’ bookings expectations in 2026.

Airbnb Inc on Thursday filed a lawsuit against New York City over a new law it called a “de facto ban” against short-term rentals set to go into effect in July, which the company says will limit the number of people who can host rentals in the city.