Airbnb faces $400m lost bookings in London crackdown

Airbnb faces $400m lost bookings in London crackdown(ft.com)

8 points by sperling75 9 years ago | 13 comments

whazor 9 years ago |

Airbnb is supposed to be part of the sharing economy, where normal people can share their places to earn some extra money. But now it is turning into a heaven for rentiers to earn money with their redundant properties. Airbnb should have stopped those bookings themselves, not after being forced by local authorities.

jakozaur 9 years ago |

Random idea. What if, there was AirBnB equivalent endorsed by local city letting it control rules.

Currently AirBnB do some arbitrage based on regulations: change residential zoning to hotel one.

E.g. startup does infrastructure, but let city control what going on in exchange for enforcing rules. AirBnB seems easy to crack down as almost all listing are semi-public.

dogma1138 9 years ago | |

Then it would never work, ABNB works because it has these margins to play with - the cost differential between running a business and just subletting a residential property.

You don't have to pay the premium that comes with regulation, you pay lower taxes (if at all), you don't have to have special insurance, trained staff, meet stricter public safety regulation etc.

This is why ABNB works if the property owners on ABNB had to meet the same standards as a hotel or anything close to that they would be considerably more expensive than hotels because they don't do that at scale while most hotels do.

swisschicken 9 years ago |

https://www.google.ch/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/3bedf28e-c63d...

dandare 9 years ago |

This article is not even accessible from google.com :(

zeroer 9 years ago | |

It is for me.

Beltiras 9 years ago |

How do paywalled articles get to the frontpage? Is there a prevalence of ft.com subscribers on HN?

rspeer 9 years ago | |

HN puts a convenient, though subtle, "web" link on the comment page that bypasses the paywall by Googling the title.

Beltiras 9 years ago | | |

That link doesn't work for me.

bengale 9 years ago | |

Presumably a bunch of us maintain FT subscriptions.

hmoghnie 9 years ago |

So apparently I have to subscribe first in order to read the article... NO, thank you.

Cypher 9 years ago |

Stop posting paywall please. Otherwise its simply an add for a subscription service.

grzm 9 years ago | |

Paying for news is arguably one of the ways to improve news quality, and quality news is valued by many HN users. The submission includes the source. If you don't want to visit a paywalled source, HN already provides you with the information you need to make that decision.

Here's a comment from 'dang (one of the HN mods) on this topic from about a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057425):

Paywalled articles are different. That's a settled matter on HN. The rule is that paywalled articles are ok when there's a workaround:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Yes, the paywalls suck, but it would suck worse to deprive HN of the better NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, etc., articles.