This type of creepy stuff, together with Airbnb's horrible business practices (last time they wanted access to my checking account transaction history via Plaid!) and enabling scammy hosts, is why I'm back to just staying at regular hotels.
Sad to see some of them are now start adopting the same type of customer-hostile technology as well.
Of course Airbnbs are also a real problem in general with the way they increase the scarcity of housing, so I'm pretty happy all in all to see you saying you're being driven back to hotels.
Of course, a long term neighbor it is different. There the police would be a last resort.
Look, if you have a house in a tourist spot and you say "no parties!", you're not gonna make any money. And if the residents don't like said parties, they can rally together to make AirBNBs illegal in their area. That's how many (most?) touristy places are.
There must be a better answer than "pass a law so the american multinational does a better job at regulating its rentals"
They are, which is why residential properties that are used as hotels should be seized and auctioned off.
What's the actual mechanism for airbnbs to prevent housing construction?
AirBnB rentals typically make more money for apartment and condo owners than long-term rentals, at least in big cities (that attract tourists) where there's often already scarce housing and not a lot of new affordable construction.
So as housing units get taken off the long-term market rental (i.e. actually being used for housing) to be turned into short-term rental for AirBnB, it reduces the available stock for renters.
And in many large cities small condos and purpose-built rentals are mostly what get built, because that's what investors are asking for - and builders build what they expect to sell and what they can profit on.
But then the investors who buy these "homes" don't actually put them up for rent, they turn them into short-term rentals for tourists and visitors, and those dwellings are not available for the people who actually need to live in the city.
This dual pressure on scarcity then drives up the rent on available properties because the demand goes up since there's less and less long-term rentals available for residents.
So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.
This is why many large metropolitan areas have either banned AirBnB or heavily regulated them (with mixed success, and rarely the honest participation of AirBnB themselves).
This tells me that you think that treating housing supply as a relevant factor to the price of housing is a stupidly obvious error.
> So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.
That you for agreeing that they do not prevent housing supply from increasing to meet the increased demand.
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/20/spy-tech-nonlinear-junction-...
It would be nice if someone could make them and sell them cheaply. I would buy into that Kickstarter.
The other commenter is absolutely right that partyers in AirBnBs cause nuisances for local residents, but the owners will have to find another way to sort that out or close up shop
No one wants to live next to an Airbnb house blasting music at 3am.
I’ll also consider these things to be microphones unless their manufacturer explicitly says otherwise, yet on their website I’ve only seen vague assurances about them being privacy-friendly.
For some, “on-device speech recognition that only sends voice samples for cloud analysis in exceptional cases” would probably also meet that bar, but it doesn’t for me.
I once stayed at an AirBnB with some friends and the power went out in the evening one day of the trip. The next door neighbor also lost power, and came over to check on us - and didn't even step in the house. The next morning I got a nasty email from the host accusing me of abusing the occupancy limit. Clearly there were some hidden cameras or something in the house.
As silly as this example is, its just another annoying example of how technology is abused to monitor compliance with what should be a social issue.
