Airbnb’s Supposed Independent Host Clubs Are Run by the Company: New Report

Online Travel This Week

A new report based on interviews with nearly two dozen former Airbnb public policy staffers found that the company’s supposedly independently run host clubs, key elements in Airbnb’s purported grassroots lobbying campaigns around the world, are funded and directed by Airbnb.

“Home Sharing Clubs are associations of selected Airbnb landlords who are resourced, mobilized and coordinated by Airbnb public policy teams to advocate for favorable regulation,” reads the University of Manchester report, which was supported by Ethical Consumer. “These associations are made up of an unrepresentative segment of Airbnb landlords — mainly those that share their own homes or rent them short-term.” [See the report embedded below.]

While Airbnb’s verbiage about the clubs often revolves around fostering community and helping hosts learn from other hosts, the primary aim is to enhance Airbnb’s lobbying efforts against regulatory incursions from San Francisco to New York and Barcelona, the report said. Airbnb said it has more than 300 clubs in 220 countries.

Part of that effort is to foster the impression, based on the fact that club membership is carefully curated to lean toward individual hosts, that Airbnb stands for the little guy or gal trying to eke out a living by renting out a room or two.

But the Manchester University report claims only 8 percent of Airbnb’s listings are one room in a home, and that 59 percent of listings actually come from professional property managers and other corporations. We reported recently that around 5 percent of hosts control nearly a third of rentals, while Airbnb says that individual hosts are 90 percent of the pie.

“Airbnb’s public narratives continue to highlight a minority of cases on the platform, misleadingly suggesting that they are representative of the business,” the report said, referring to the way Airbnb curates club membership to skew toward individual hosts.

Airbnb staff provides “extensive” support to the clubs, including helping them coordinate protests, rehearsing curated stories about their experiences as hosts, and offering them other training, according to the study, which purports to be the first-in-depth look at “platform-sponsored grassroots lobbying.”

While some former staff that the university interviewed endorsed Airbnb’s host club strategy as effective and worthy because it increased citizens’ involvement in local politics, “there are also concerns about insufficient public transparency about the support offered by the company; and fears that Airbnb’s tactics give them further unfair political advantages over local citizen campaigns and governments,” the report said.

For its part, Airbnb’s response to the report notes the company announced formation of host clubs at a 2015 press conference, and that it was “proud to assist” the first club in San Francisco fight an adverse ballot measure. The company declined to elaborate further.

One of the main problems with these corporate-backed and supposedly grassroots clubs — and it is a tactic used by other gig economy companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Doordash — is the lack of transparency, and the unfair advantages they have over legitimately grassroots affordable housing advocates, for example. Not that the latter are always pure or free of hotel lobbying interests, for example.

The Manchester University report calls for reforms, including public disclosures of funds provided for “corporate grassroots lobbying,” and details about companies’ use of employees and consultants in lobbying efforts. Airbnb has 25 employees of its Community Leaders team who “guide” host club development, and there is no public disclosure about the dollars allocated toward host club efforts.

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