If you’re looking for a place to party with your friends on New Years Eve this year Eve, it won’t be in an Air BNB in Toronto…Airbnb is cracking down on any bookings that even smell like a party.
Air BNB did the same with Halloween and other major holidays recently, they are temporarily implementing stricter restrictions at the end of December to ensure people will not rent a unit just to host a massive NYE party.
They want to “reduce the risk of unauthorized and disruptive parties,” Air BNB is employing AI not just in Toronto and Ontario, but across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and a handful of other countries.
The tech will seek out one, two and three-night reservation requests for entire homes over key party dates that “could be potentially higher-risk” for bashes, and then bar them from successfully going through.
Risk factors include the duration of the “trip” in question — with shorter bookings being more suspicious — and what type of listing is being booked out (a large detached home for a high price, for example, may mean a large group is chipping in to cover the cost).
Also Air BNB is thinking about how last-minute a user is trying to book, and how far a listing is from their given location; someone from Toronto booking a home over the holiday in Toronto, for example, would be very suspicious.
Airbnb says in a release that last New Year’s Eve, some 4,200 people in Ontario were blocked from booking out homes for gathering purposes, including 1,550 in Toronto specifically.
Since the measures first came into play over NYE 2020, there has been a 78 per cent decrease in reports of parties at properties on the app.
You been warned!!
