A recent survey showed that more than 6000 Airbnb hosts were less likely to rent their properties to travellers with black-sounding names.
Airbnb is a website which enables people to rent each other’s rooms or entire homes. Service provides you with more than 2 million properties to choose from in more than 190 countries.
Room-sharing service has been receiving numerous racism claims lately. As a result a Harvard Business School researchers have conducted an investigation on racism presence on the online platform. It was found that people with African-American names are being discriminated.
Researchers have 20 created Airbnb profiles with white-sounding names and black-sounding names. (Nobel 2015) As a result, for white-sounding names, like Todd or Allison, there was 50% of success for an attempt to make a booking. On the other hand, black-sounding names, like Darnell or Tamika, had only 42% of success while trying to book their stay.
Researchers stated that racial discrimination does not exist in hotel industry where bookings are made without showing guest’s name or photo.
Airbnb has already made a statement admitting this global problem. The service has claimed that it is about to overcome these “significant challenges” and is looking for “anyone that can help us reduce potential discrimination in the AirBnB community”. (Warburton 2015)
Airbnb’s spokesman has noted that the website might introduce the feature of hiding real names, as e-mails and phones are already hidden. However, it was also stated that Airbnb service is not willing to stop making users use their real names as it preserves trust and confidence between travellers and landlords.
Airbnb wants to encourage guests to make instant bookings without asking for a prior approval.
Prof Ben Edelman, one of Harvard Business School researchers does not approve real-name policy of the website.
He stated: “They require you to reveal your name, but to what end? What good does that do? AirBnB says it increases accountability – but how does it?”
“It’s important that AirBnB know the person’s name, but we don’t think the prospective host needs to know the prospective guest’s name.” (Lee 2015)
What we can see is that racism still takes lot of place in our world. And and the problem is even bigger than we thought it is.
Discrimination of African-Americans was supposed do decrease with the popularisation of Internet. For example, you are not going to be racially discriminated while buying an item online. While it might not be the case in a physical store. But recent changes which aim to make the Internet a safer place require more personal information: real name, address, photo etc.
The real question is: do we want to fight racial discrimination or we want to feel safe online?
Bibliography:
Lee D. (2015), AirBnB racism claim: African-Americans ‘less likely to get rooms’, BBC, Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35077448.
Nobel C. (2015), This New Tool Helps Airbnb Hosts to Stop Being Racist, Forbes, Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/12/11/this-new-tool-helps-airbnb-hosts-to-stop-being-racist/.
Warburton D. (2015), AirBnB in racism row ‘as people with black-sounding names are snubbed from renting rooms’, Mirror, Available at: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/airbnb-racism-row-as-people-7002873.
Well written article. Well, I think racism goes way beyond Airbnb or the internet itself. In order to address the problem, we have to reach its grass roots. It is a change that won’t be quick but has to be gradual and steady.
I, on the contrary, think hiding any more information can only further the damage. Trust is built on sharing personal information. To increase the chances of getting a host the individual might exercise options such as verification, link facebook account or references. But that’s my opinion anyway 🙂
Unfortunately, racism is something that is still present on the net and will be in the future… I think Airbnb need to know the names of people that put their flat for rent, however owner’s should have the choice to display or not their names via the website. If it is a question of trust maybe Airbnb should add a sort badges that confirm the profile verification, if the company confirm the profile shouldn’t be enough to trust the renter? When you take a room in a Hotel you kind of trust the brand, so in that situation you have to trust Airbnb for renting a flat.