Airbnb - The Devil next door? What's happened to our neighbourhoods

Airbnb: Industry Disruptor, Community Corrupter or Budding Green Hotelier?

You’ve possibly already enjoyed your share of Airbnb rooms in your travels. The global home-stay juggernaut has a value proposition that dovetails nicely into the desires of eco-conscious travellers: using what is already there, spreading the burden of tourism traffic across a larger geographic footprint and living moderately like a local as opposed to an over-consumptive tourist. 

But has Airbnb also created a raft of unimagined and potentially unmanageable issues that local communities are struggling to overcome? What if your Airbnb booking is contributing to very large and growing unsustainability problem? The answer for conscious travellers lies in peeling back another layer when considering your accommodation choices.

Master disruptor

By the year 2030, “the global middle class” will number one billion people and these people are superkeen to travel, enabled by increasingly cheaper long distance airfares. Airbnb delivers a timely solution to the seemingly unstoppable growth in travel to, and beds needed at, almost every corner of the globe and any kind of destination.

The now-famous Airbnb story extends beyond disruption of tourist accommodation, to the disruption of tourism itself. Airbnb accommodations offered travellers a more immersive experience by switching up accommodation outside of a predictable hotel room and placing people in neighbourhoods and communities. It moved people away from the usually well trodden paths favoured by tourists – the very tenet of undertourism. 

Airbnb’s stats are super impressive: over 6 million listings, in over 81,000 cities throughout 191 countries (of a possible 195).  Its eco-conscious sustainability stats go something like this:

• 88% of Airbnb hosts around the world incorporate green practices into hosting, such as using green cleaning products, providing recycling, encouraging guests to use public transportation, and installing solar panels. 
• 79% of guests said they decided to use Airbnb because they wanted to live like a local, and 66% of guests said the environmental benefits of home sharing were important in their choice of Airbnb.
• 89% of guests said that they chose Airbnb because it was more conveniently located throughout the city than hotels, and 44% of guest spending happens in the neighbourhoods where they stay. 
• 53% of guests spent the money they saved using Airbnb at businesses in the cities and neighbourhoods they visited.

Events management on steroids

One of the great Airbnb success stories has been assisting communities to scale up accommodations easily for big events. Rio de Janeiro avoided building about 257 hotels for their 2016 Olympic games as Airbnb homestays picked up the slack.  For the recent Winter Games in South Korea, 15,000 guests used Airbnb to attend the event, negating the need for about 7,500 hotel rooms. South Korean hosts earned over $2.3million and retained 97% of what they charged. 

In the case of large but short-term events, residents see these as short disruptions to their daily lives and can see beyond the displacement, sweetened with the prospect of making some sidebar cash off their suitably placed properties. But not everything is rosy if you live in an area with high and year-round levels of Airbnb travellers.  In fact, for many it’s been nothing short of downright traumatic.

How Airbnb became a symptom of overtourism, not a saviour from it

Governments and tourism boards have long believed the more tourists, the better. A successful year in tourism is generally considered to be one in which numbers have increased substantially, irrespective of the effect on residents or communities. 

While Airbnb made thousands of beds suddenly available for the growing demand, it did not change the environment into which these travellers suddenly found themselves. Instead of being thought of as stemming the overtourism burden, Airbnb may have inadvertently added to it.  As demand for accommodation goes up, so do housing prices and rents, and local people become displaced from their neighbourhoods.  Intermittent homesharing has been commercialised with homes in some residential areas now reserved 100% for tourists. 

Every time an Airbnb booking is made, there is an invisible third party in the transaction, and that is the group of neighbouring residents whom have been thrust into a commercial tourism culture. When you inject tourists into highly residential areas, with no glare of authority, conflict arises and questions are asked about the long term viability homesharing with travellers. 

The Sharing Economy is here to stay

The sharing economy now permeates ever aspect of our lives. Shared office spaces, ride sharing - all kinds of services utilising asset idling capacity and peer-to-peer financing through crowd funding. It has changed us all and even as others like Uber and eBay have all had their teething problems, it would be hard to extricate many of these new peer-to-peer transactions from how we now go about our lives.  

But is the home-sharing economy viable everywhere when some communities continue to be so negatively affected?  Some communities have moved to regulate the amount of time accomodation can be leased either across the year or in specific blocks of time. Airbnb have also reacted, in a very interesting way.

A new Airbnb story

In April 2018, Airbnb launched its Office of Healthy Tourism, an initiative to further drive local, authentic and sustainable tourism in countries and cities across the globe. It stemmed from a project in 2017 when Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia opened the Yoshino Cedar House, a landmark listing in a rural community that was slowly disappearing due to an aging population, low birth rate, and exodus of young people. Since the house opened, Yoshino has hosted hundreds of guests from 32 countries, and 70 jobs have been supported in this small town by the spending of hosts and guests. 

The Office of Healthy Tourism seeks to continue the good news story that was Yoshino, focusing on rural regeneration everywhere, from small villages in Italy  to the countryside in China. The goal is to help bring the economic benefits of tourism to areas that want to welcome more travellers into their communities in a locally sensitive, sustainable way. Airbnb are looking at similar scenarios in Africa to promote inclusive tourism and empower underserved communities, supporting them in times of resources scarcity.

This right turn into developing and building sustainable accommodation projects, community projects, and influencing urban planning is a long way from the simple, but sometimes fallible home-sharing model Airbnb was founded upon. Perhaps Airbnbis  making a whole new business model for more sustainable tourist accommodation? 

Is Airbnb building hotels?

Dig a little bit deeper and Yoshino Cedar House meets every criteria of a hotel – a beautiful community minded sustainable hotel – but a hotel nonetheless. Is Airbnb now building exactly the entities it sought to disrupt, albeit in new and novel ways? With plans to edge into the urban planning area, coupled with their 2016 launch of delivering local “Experiences” for destination travellers (where anyone can be a tour guide in their area), it seems Airbnb is trying to move away from its one trick pony status of the world’s preeminent homesharing marketplace.

Keep a watching brief on what they do next – they are gamechangers and they are wearing their sustainability hats into the next play. 

Where does this leave the eco-traveller?

If you are a conscious traveller, the upshot of using Airbnb is to do a little extra research before you book. In a world where nothing is straightforward anymore, the same applies to seemingly innoculous accommodation choices when you travel.

If you are going to avail yourself of the eco-friendly benefits of home sharing, do your research and know your impact. Organisations like Airbnbwatch have sprung up in reaction to the negative experiences of neighbours and communities – see if one exists for the community you plan to visit. If you really want to understand the breadth and depth of neighbour complaints, spend a few minutes on AirbnbHELL. Support the eco-friendly homesharing culture means also remembering that invisible third party in your Airbnb experience – your temporary neighbours.

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