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AirBnB Party-house Crackdown
Following a tragic incident involving a Halloween party with over 100 guests at an Airbnb home in Orinda, California, where five people died in a shooting the firm has decided to ban “party houses.”
Airbnb immediately set up a rapid response team back in 2019 presumably to help homeowners prevent dangerous parties.
So what is a party house?
Rentals that often annoy neighbours are referred to as “party houses.” Airbnb will add additional humans to its automated risk detection system, which Airbnb claims currently employs “predictive analytics and machine learning to immediately assess hundreds of signals that helps to identify and investigate suspect conduct before it happens.
Two years after this tragic event, in which three people died there and two more died later in the hospital, Airbnb is testing a new technology to target party houses as they promised. They are attempting to enforce a global ban on house parties.
The system looks at details like a guest’s review history, the age of their account, the duration of the stay they’re asking for, and whether they’re looking for a weekday or weekend to automatically identify the types of reservations that are likely to result in unlawful parties.
Airbnb claims since October 2021, it has been testing a comparable system in a few Australian locations, where it saw a reduction in illegal parties of 35%. In July 2020, they have implemented a similar method in the US, with a smaller emphasis on visitors under the age of 25.
Due to outdated technology, younger visitors were precluded from reserving large homes close to their homes if they lacked a track record of favorable ratings. The most recent deployment has a considerably wider scope and makes no mention of an upper age restriction.
Owing to the COVID epidemic when social distance was most important, Airbnb feared that the closure of pubs and clubs may encourage people to seek out Airbnb rentals as an alternative. Although the majority of social distance laws have since been lifted, Airbnb has opted to retain its party prohibition in place since it has shown to be beneficial for its company.
Airbnb may nevertheless allow users who have been flagged for suspicion of hosting unlicensed parties to make a different reservation. After implementing its party restriction in August 2020, Airbnb claimed that the number of party reports had decreased by 44%. In 2021, it claims to have suspended the accounts of about 6,600 visitors for breaking its anti-party policies, in contrast to the approximately 150 million users that Airbnb has on its site as a whole.
