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Leaked Documents Reveal the Hotel Lobby's Aggressive Plan To Undermine Airbnb (gizmodo.com)
The New York Times has obtained a document revealing the hotel lobby's aggressive plan to undermine Airbnb's business "by pushing for bills to regulate the company at every level of government," reports Gizmodo. From the report: According to documents from the American Hotel and Lodging Association -- a trade group that includes the country's biggest hotel chains, including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, the Four Seasons and Starwood Hotels -- the organization is planning a multi-pronged attack at local, state, and federal levels to prevent Airbnb from spreading to new cities across the country. Part of the strategy includes "aggressively countering" Airbnb's claim that it's just helping the middle class make ends meet "with a wave of personal testimonials of consumer harm." The document essentially serves as opposition research and gives its members talking points about Airbnb's alleged racism and taxation issues. According to the document, the association will focus its efforts on Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, and Miami, where Airbnb has yet to establish a strong footing.
Why shouldn't someone operating a hotel out of an apartment be expected to operate under the same rules?
If you are letting a friend sleep on your couch and he buys a pizza, that is not a business and is not tax to report. ..... you can be cheaper.
If you own a couple houses, you are renting them out by the day/week that is a hotel business.
Do you remove ALL the rules for the Hotel industry? or Do you make the "NEW and IMPROVED" business model abide by the rules built up over the years?
You either let them all run free, or make them all abide by the rules. You can't have it both ways. Here in Florida, a lot of things are based on tourist taxes.
So, if you don't pay hotel taxes, you can be a lot cheaper. If you don't have all the safety equipment hotels have, you can be cheaper.
If you
Is that really fair?
It's wrong on every level. When your big idea is to maintain your cartel status by regulating the competition at every government level it's obvious that your competition is onto something and you are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
This is a snapshot of so many things that are wrong with America:
1) Excessive government regulation -- that it's even possible to regulate a business into oblivion shows that we have too much regulation. Regulation in and of itself isn't bad, but it should be kind of a reaction to innovation to smooth it out, not so extreme that it snuffs it out.
2) Excessive government influence -- obviously the hotel cartel is only capable of accomplishing this because of excessive corporate influence over government. Money buys legislation.
3) Rent-seeking cartels -- that an entire "competitive" industry is lining up to defeat a business competitor via regulation instead of promoting why they are better than the upstart shows how intellectually bankrupt American business is. This is your big idea?
"the organization is planning a multi-pronged attack at local, state, and federal levels..."
The word you're looking for is 'conspiracy'.
It's wrong on every level. When your big idea is to maintain your cartel status by regulating the competition at every government level it's obvious that your competition is onto something and you are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The regulations in existence didn't come at the behest of the hotel industry. But now they they must operate under them, they SHOULD use them to protect themselves. Why would they agree to operate under those regulators while a growing competitor doesn't have to?
If you don't like the regulations themselves, then tell us which ones to get rid of and why.
Is that big corporations want a free market so they can 'run roughshod' over the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Big corporations want Big Government regulators that they can influence and control with their money and political connections. This gives them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Some refer to this as 'regulatory capture' as if it sometimes happens by accident, when in reality these bureaucracies are designed from the very beginning to be 'captured'
Big corporations are scared shitless of the Free Market. The Free Market is what allowed a small upstart company like netflix to destroy a juggernaut fortune-500 company that was blockbuster. The free market was what (almost) put kodak out of business. They refused to invest in the burgeoning digital camera market, trying to prevent it from happening and doubling down on film cameras. Thats not what the market wanted and they got put in their place.
If you fear the immense corporate power that exists in the world, do the one smart thing. Advocate for the abolishment of as many national regulations as possible, and try to remember there is a difference between a regulatory LAW - written, debated, and passed by your elected representatives and signed by an elected executive, and "regulator agencies" run by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats which get to write their own "laws" (regulatory codes), enforce them, and sometimes even adjudicate them.
If the dwellings are already deemed illegal by current laws to rent out, you don't need more regulation. You just need to enforce the existing laws.
Considering that the anti-Aribnb and anti-Uber interests have had their greatest success in big cities controlled by Democrats it is safe to assume that Republicans will shun this as they have time and again.
The hotels are dirty: they pay extremely low wages to cleaning staff, while charging exorbitant prices for rooms, and AirBnB is of course a threat to that business model, so their solution is to force them to compete under the same regulatory environment.
AirBnB is dirty: the company doesn't give a shit about party houses popping up in desirable neighborhoods that regularly violate noise ordinances. In their view, that's a local law enforcement problem. That's the next door neighbor's problem. They profess to care, but only pay lip service. AirBnB turns a blind eye to developers and landlords (who are already insanely wealthy) turning their properties into unofficial hotels, causing rents to skyrocket for people who actually live in the area. And let's not forget: AirBnB lobbied--HARD--against initiatives to prevent this kind of abuse of the housing market. And they won.
Local government is dirty: politicians lie, cheat, and do backroom deals to get on whatever side of an issue that brings them the most campaign money. In San Diego, the city is proposing yet another "transient occupancy tax" hike to finance all kinds of projects that they should be financing by taxing the entities that stand to gain most from those projects. But they won't because it's political suicide, so they always pick the easy target: out-of-city tourists. Comic-Con is a huge draw and the city milks the attendees for everything they can. Hotel costs are out of control, and that just pushes more people to use AirBnB. Why rent a $400/night hotel room when you can get a whole house for less than half that rate?
The landlords are dirty: they only care that they can rent out their properties with AirBnB at over twice the prevailing monthly rent in the area. They don't give a fuck about noise complaints. Not their problem as long as the city keeps saying they have no enforcement power. They just see the money rolling in because it's completely unregulated.
And as always, who suffers? Regular property owners and renters. Middle class people who are priced out of the rental market because $2500 or more per month for a 1 bedroom apartment is obscene.
Fuck all of you: hotels, AirBnB, greedy landlords, the city.