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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.
The Internet keeps leaking documents, somebody should fix those pipes!
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Why shouldn't someone operating a hotel out of an apartment be expected to operate under the same rules?
I think they're taking the wrong approach here. They should be promoting their services as being of constant quality in a business setting, unlike the competition which are just a bunch of people sort-of renting places in their own homes.
Would I stay in a stranger's home? Not even if you paid me.
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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?
Just love how protecting us from ourselves always seems to protect large interests from anyone else making money in their racket.
So those anti-regulation Republicans will shun this, right?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"the organization is planning a multi-pronged attack at local, state, and federal levels..."
The word you're looking for is 'conspiracy'.
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.
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.
The wife and I seldom use the pool, never the gym, never the masseuse. We want a place to stay while we either spend the night, or spend a couple days exploring the area.
You want to charge a fee, charge it when I go into the pool. Or when I go into the gym. Or when I go wherever. But charge me for shit I don't use? Fuck that.
Why shouldn't someone operating a hotel out of an apartment be expected to operate under the same rules?
I can counter with an equally valid, 'Why should they?'
They are not a hotel. If I rent let my neighbor do their laundry in my washing machine once in a while, am I a Laundromat chain? If I drive a friend to the airport and hit them up for some gas money, am I a taxi service?
Now, you might counter with some concerns that they need to be regulated in order that AirB&B suites are safe and follow rules governing proper business practices, and that is a fair request. In the next century, everything is going to become micro-transactional, and there needs to be a whole new set of laws and regulations that govern these businesses that are separate from traditional business regulations.
That does not mean that we should treat them like traditional businesses because it is convenient. The real story here is that existing vested interests are trying to use monopolistic practices to keep a rival with a possibly better business plan down.
If these Dumb fucks running big hotel chains were at all smart, they would just open their own AirB&B service to compete. If AirB&B is truly a threat, they should just adapt, and start stealing market share from Hotel chains that don't.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!