In a scathing ad set to debut Monday, New York’s hotel industry accuses Airbnb of recklessness around security standards – and the home-sharing giant is not pleased.
The roughly half-million-dollar ad – paid for by the Hotel Association of New York City and a hotel workers union – pointedly questions the home-sharing company’s safety measures, challenging its refusal to provide addresses to law enforcement officials in New York City despite doing so in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans.
“We just want them to do what they do in other cities, that’s all,” Hotel Association of New York City CEO Vijay Dandapani told HOTELS. “This is faux outrage, nothing else,” he said of Airbnb’s response.
The ad also references the recent Manchester bombing, citing reports that bomber Salman Abedi used a short-term rental apartment in order to have “massive packages” sent to him there.
Media coverage to date has indicated that the short-term rental unit was not affiliated with Airbnb.
Airbnb’s response – via spokesman Peter Schottenfels – was to denounce the ad as “an outrageous scare tactic by big hotels,” noting that the company had “nothing to do with the tragic events in Manchester.”
But this is about more than terror, says Dandapani, who said his group considers the move a loophole – a way to allow commercial operators working out of residential units to skirt code issues that hotel companies face on a daily basis.
“They’re not having to carry the regulatory burden we have,” Dandapani said. “They keep claiming these are displaced mom-and-pop operators displaced by the Great Recession and they’re doing this to help them out, which is baloney. It’s a lot of malarkey.”
According to Airbnb’s Schottenfels, the company supports legislation that would limit individuals to a single, entire home listing in New York City.
When asked if it was misleading to mention the Manchester attack in an ad targeting Airbnb (which had nothing to do with the incident), Dandapani said it was fair game.
“The part that refers to Manchester specifically does not mention Airbnb,” said Dandapani. “It just points out the security instance that caused that kind of an incident – it could happen to any one of those platforms.”
AH&LA, which has been leading its own initiative to demand that home sharing in the U.S. be better regulated, said it “is not affiliated in any way with this new ad,” according to a spokeswoman. “However, we support efforts to rein in illegal hotels and to protect the integrity of neighborhoods and the traveling public around the country.”