Why I’m considering a (partial) Airbnb boycott

Airbnb has gotten out of control.

This won’t come as news to anybody with even a passing interest in housing trends. Or anyone who has tried to rent (or buy) a place to live in a desirable city of late.

Though I happen to have a place of my own to call home, the raging leftie in me is no longer entirely comfortable holidaying in Airbnbs. At least not those gobbling up lodgings needed by locals, and thus driving up rental prices for the dwellings that remain.

The original concept of Airbnb, as I understand it, was closely aligned to the traditional understanding of the ‘Bed & Breakfast’ wrapped up in the platform's very name. Maybe hosts didn’t always literally supply a morning meal under the old-school concept, but the rooms they were renting were either annexed to or within their own homes. I believe the general idea may even have involved meeting your host in person.

I’ve got no problem with that definition. Because that kind of letting, when you stick to the spirit of the thing, cannot get out of control. It's not scalable, you see.

It’s when physical presence is removed as a hosting requirement that you start to get people building up unacceptably antisocial money-making empires. Which is exactly what has happened with Airbnb.

That’s why my solution for eliminating greedy mega-hosts is simply to ban those little keysafes that have become so popular.

It’s these that allow hosts to industrialise holiday letting. To let a cleaner they’ve never met handle all the sticky stuff that needs scraping away between guests. To sit back – quite possibly in another city or country – and count their money whilst a housing crisis mounts up in the immediate vicinity of their cash cow. Keysafes are pretty cynical little devices, when you think about them like that.

That said, I’m happy to concede that actually outlawing keyboxes would be desperately difficult to implement in practice.

So here’s my new rule going forward: if you’re neither bothered nor able to turn up and hand me the keys to my accommodation, I’m filtering you out on moral grounds.

And if that means I have to sleep in a hammock instead, then maybe I will. I've done it before. (Check out Monte Carlo for Vagabonds on my books page)

If you care about a fairer housing market for all, perhaps you'll think about joining me?