You’ve probably not seen anything about this, but…
We are not even allowed to get to know our guests. Exchanging phone numbers and asking for their emails have been banned by Airbnb for a long time because Airbnb “own the relationship”.
This would make me take the Cottage off Airbnb – they only gave me 10%-15% of my bookings any way. But it took me years to reduce their hold on my business.
Guests who comment on social media say this is only fair, why should they have to clean (they mean tidy) and also be charged for cleaning too, hotels don’t charge for cleaning, greedy hosts rip off guests with extra tasks and charges, and so on. There seems to be a lot of anger towards Airbnb hosts, which I’ll come back to in a minute.
Airbnb has a reputation for neurotic hosts. But there are many professional hosts on there too quietly giving stellar customer service in amazing properties. And they (we) point out that it’s our property and business, not Airbnb’s, that some jurisdictions require us to record names, nationalities and passport details, that its an insurance nightmare if we don’t know who our customers are, and safeguarding goes out of the window when people invite anonymous strangers into their actual home.
They (we) also say that tidying is not cleaning, and guests will feel entitled to leave nightmarish messes; that 6 hours is a tight same-day turnaround as it is, and becomes unworkable if guests leave a mess. Hosts are also outraged at not being permitted to know who is staying in their property. My favourite comments are from hosts in the US and Canada who cannot now tell guests to put rubbish in the lockable bins which stop bears getting hold of it.
Here is where the angry guests go wrong. (And cynically, I wonder if they are angry flying monkey bots released by Airbnb into social media). If you book a room in a hotel, housekeeping go in for 10 minutes or so every day to do a quick tidy and re-set and spend maybe twice as long on a change. It’s easy to add that on to a nightly charge. If you booked my cottage you got three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, bathroom and kitchen. All of which need cleaning top to bottom after every stay, to hospitality standards, not domestic ones. The pricing model can’t be the same. The only way to make it fair is to add it on as an extra charge per stay, and not add it on per night.
As you can tell, I am in the hosts’ camp here, despite no longer hosting.
Airbnb set up a platform so amateurs with no experience could host people in their homes. Their schtick was “authenticity”. Airbnb’s service was, well, service. It put a marketing and quality assurance wrapper around inexperienced hosts. Some were fabulous hosts, but unfortunately others were overly anxious or just plain inhospitable. Hence Airbnb’s reputation for mad notices on every surface.
Then people like me who run a holiday let as a business started using the platform, and investors bought up multiple apartments to manage remotely almost like a resort, with no connection with humans or place. And so here we are, with “Airbnbs” blamed for the world-wide housing crisis. (I’ve already explained why this is a myth).
This is pivot by Airbnb away from their folksy roots helping individuals turn their home into a side-gig. (Airbed and Breakfast – geddit?)
They don’t want quirky any more. They don’t want human, either. Quirky and human are expensive. A year or so ago, Airbnb handed their customer service over to AI bots. (So much for authenticity, then). Not that it was great before, with poorly trained and inconsistent call centre staff. Anecdotally, the bots side more with guests than hosts, but I’ve not seen any metrics for that.
Amateur hosts make more mistakes and tend to be higher maintenance and more costly to support. Airbnb want to cut down these costs and move into the space occupied by Booking,com and VRBO.
These rules also tell us the decision-makers don’t actually use the product. My guess is they always stay in hotels or resorts, and just don’t understand the holiday-let business or the stay-in-a-home business either. They clearly don’t care about hosts or guests.
And Airbnb have just told us they don’t care about women’s safety, without actually saying so. Staying in someone’s home creates huge safety and safeguarding issues for any women and children in the place. Denying them the right to know who is staying is a massive issue.
Airbnb – or its AI bots – say they are gathering feedback and the rules are not set in stone. I am sceptical – I think the bots may be in “polite/conciliatory” mode and saying something that Airbnb have not authorised them to. (There will be some interesting law suits where people hold corporates to account for the things their bots have said, but I doubt this will be one). Airbnb are imposing these new rules without negotiation, and without any awareness of the difference between sharing a spare room in your home and professional hosts running a holiday let business.
We are losing independent hosts, holiday cottages, and independent B&Bs. Hosts are squeezed by increasing red tape with legislation where hotels are consulted but independent operators are not. (Looking at you, Scottish Government, about the Short Term Let Licence and Visitors’ Levy). Meanwhile, corporates have been replacing humanity with KPIs (key performance indicators) for decades. Centuries, really. And now AI is squeezing human judgement out of customer service. In a competitive market, sites from Airbnb to Cottages.com, from VRBO to Sykes, all want to get rid of customer complaints. What easier way of doing that, than weighting the scales against the host?
This is not good for anyone. I need to stay in a self-catering place that will take my dogs and where we can cook our own food (cheaper, and we have dietary restrictions). It’s not good for tourism either. Scotland in particular markets itself as an escape from the urban corporate world, and at the same time is destroying independent businesses.
I wish I had a solution for this. Unfortunately I don’t.
Articles like this should have a call to action. I think mine is to support independent hosts. And here are my recommendations for how to find us.
About Me
My name is Ben, and I have run a holiday cottage in Noss Head since 2018, but I am closing it in November 2026 because there is too much red tape, too much AI, and because of the Visitors’ Levy. I will still be involved in tourism locally, and still advocating for independent businesses.
Being human matters. This post was written by me and not by AI.
