Airbnb really wants to ban parties from their apartments. On Tuesday, the company announced it is rolling out “anti-party tools”that it says will help identify users who might be throwing a party and stop them from renting property.
Airbnb is launching tools in the US and Canada. The tools use an algorithm that flags “potentially high-risk bookings”by analyzing user characteristics such as “positive review history (or no positive reviews), length of stay on Airbnb, length of trip, distance to listing, weekends and weekdays, among many others.”
“This anti-party technology is designed to prevent a booking attempt,” Airbnb said. “Guests who are unable to book an entire home due to this system will still be able to book a private room (where the Host is likely to be physically located on site) or a hotel room through Airbnb.”
Airbnb has earned scorn and even lawsuits for hosting sites with a reputation for turning into large gatherings that range from annoyingly loud to disruptive . Some of these parties even ended in fatal violence. The latter includes the highly publicized 2019 shooting at an Airbnb party in Orinda, Florida that left five people dead.
Later that year, Airbnb banned party properties. In 2020, he announced an age limit that prevented people under 25 from renting local homes unless they had at least three positive and zero negative reviews or were planning a long-term stay.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Airbnb implemented a temporary ban on parties at rental properties, but made the ban permanent on June 28, citing “feedback from longtime and trusted members of our global host community.”
Airbnb did not explicitly point to the Airbnb property shooting as the cause of its party war. Instead, it mentions “commitment to our host community, which respects its neighbors and does not want to participate in the property damage and other problems that may arise with unauthorized or destructive parties.”
The company has been testing the algorithm in Australia since October and said the number of registered rogue parties has dropped by 35% since then. The figure shows that Airbnb still has a long way to go before it can guarantee that tenants won’t party while the host is out of town. And some of the factors Airbnb relies on may have nothing to do with party availability, depending on the tenant.
In June, Airbnb said it had suspended more than 6,600 people from its platform for trying to throw a party.