New Airbnb Report Finds Home-Share Hosts Continue to Racially Discriminate
In a report released this week, Airbnb acknowledged that some home-share hosts are continuing to discriminate against guests based on race. This is the company's first public data on its steps to reduce racial disparities. Included in the report are some of the findings by Project Lighthouse, a project begun in 2020 by Airbnb and Color of Change. Color of Change is an online anti-discrimination group that uses internal company data to measure patterns of discrimination. Laura Murphy, ex-employee of the American Civil Liberties Union and a senior adviser to Airbnb, wrote the introduction to the report.
The report presents findings about its booking success rate, how often guests can make the reservations they prefer on Airbnb. Previous research has found that guests perceived to be Black - by name or other factors - are more likely to have their booking requests rejected than are those thought to be white.
Since 2016, Airbnb has required all guests and hosts to agree to its "community commitment," to “agree to treat each other with respect and without judgment or bias,” and to follow a nondiscrimination policy. To reduce bias, in 2018 Airbnb stopped showing guests’ photos to hosts before a reservation was confirmed. Airbnb users do not identify their race. The report found that omitting photos has “slightly increased” the rate at which Black guests are able to book homes. The report also detailed that allowing more guests to use the Instant Book feature, letting individual users make reservations without being specifically approved by the host, has also helped Blacks make more bookings. Despite these strides, guests perceived to be white get the rental they want 94.1% of the time. Asian and Latino renters' success rates are somewhat less than that. Guests perceived to be Black get their choices 91.4% of the time. Discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation is not measured.
To improve minorities' success rate, Airbnb said it was testing changes to guest and host profile pages; enabling even more people to use Instant Book; allowing guests who are not the primary account holders to receive reviews in order to accumulate more of them for guests of color, who tend to be newer uses of the service; and improving its ability to audit reservation rejections.
The report is vague about what Airbnb is doing to oversee hosts and guests who show bias after a home is booked. Many Black home-share guests have complained on social media about their treatment, and the New York Times interviewed six about what they believed to be racism on the part of hosts.
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