Airbnb Unveils Changes To Address Racial Discrimination (npr.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Acknowledging that his company has "been slow on this issue," Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky is rolling out changes aimed at addressing discrimination complaints against the home rental service. Among the changes: de-emphasizing the role of user photos in arranging stays. Here are some of the other changes Airbnb announced Thursday: Providing assistance to people who feel they've experienced discrimination; Anti-bias training for all staff; Setting public diversity goals for staff; Partnering with historically black colleges and universities to strengthen their recruitment pipeline. The move comes after longstanding complaints from African-American Airbnb customers who said their booking requests were turned down at a high rate. Black Airbnb users vented their frustration with the phenomenon of being rejected for a booking date -- only to see the same place get listed once again -- spawning the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack on Twitter. And those frustrations were borne out in a study that sent 6,400 requests to AirBnb hosts in five large U.S. cities; the requests were identical except for the customer's name. As the Hidden Brain podcast reported, "requests with African-American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts."

Comments

Re:Flip Side

[serviscope_minor]

3* for everything good and expected sounds reasonable. Unfortunately the star ratings have become something like this:

5* Everything worked as expected. Clean, owner was there on time etc.
4* Kind of skeezy but whatever there were less than 3 rats visible at any one time.
3* The bed was on fire.
2* Turns out the apartment was floating above hell itself. Would not rent again.
1* WiFi was slow and unreliable.