INDUSTRY leaders voiced fears that travel disrupter, Airbnb, had got “out of control” at Travel Daily’s 2019 Sustainability Summit in Sydney on Tue.
Speaking at the event, Cosmos and Avalon UK Chief Executive Officer Giles Hawke, said Airbnb was pricing locals out of their homes while failing to provide the same assurances around safety that travel operators are required to.
“The concept of it is good,” Hawke said.
“The reality is it’s probably gone further out of control than Airbnb might have expected.
“The way that Airbnb talk about it is people get to go places, to live like the locals and live in the local community.
“The reality is that in a number of places there are whole apartment blocks taken up by Airbnb, people just letting out their apartments, so they’re not living like locals, they’re just with a bunch of other tourists.
“It gives people the opportunity to travel at a lower cost than if they stayed at a hotel or official apartments, but I think there’s going to have to be much more regulation,” Hawke said.
“One of the biggest challenges of Airbnb is around safety.
“When you work for a tour operator you go to a hotel, you make sure that hotel is safe – you are really on the hook for anything that goes wrong…the checks that tour operators go through are intense – Airbnb doesn’t have any of that and I see that as a big issue.”
Hawke said Barcelona has already taken steps to curb the impact of Airbnb by restricting the number of nights they can rent out accom on the platform.
Hurtigruten CEO Daniel Skjeldam also voiced concerns about the business model.
Source: traveldaily