According to Airbnb, hosts discriminate against black guests more often than any other race
Discrimination seems alive and well in the home-sharing economy, and industry giant Airbnb admitted this week that its platform suffers from racial prejudice.
Airbnb hosts are more likely to turn down applicants with African-American names and profile pictures, according to a report released Tuesday by Airbnb.
“Unfortunately, discrimination happens every day in our world, which means it can happen at Airbnb, too,” the report reads. “Understanding how discrimination occurs on Airbnb, making our platform more inclusive, and strengthening our policies to protect our hosts and guests are just a few of the many ways we are fighting prejudice.”
Airbnb found that booking success rates can vary significantly based on user ethnicity, with the “largest gap” being found between black and white guests. The booking success rate of black users was 91.4% in 2021, compared to 93.4% for Latino and Asian people and 94.1% for white applicants. The results were based on a random sample of 750,000 reservation requests made on the platform over the past year, and the applicants’ ethnicity was determined by the company based on their first name and profile photo.
“It’s a significant difference and unacceptable,” Janaye Ingram, Airbnb’s director of community partner programs and engagement, said in an interview with CNN about the report’s findings. “It’s something we obviously don’t agree with and we’re doing a lot to address it.”
The study was conducted by Project Lighthouse, an internal review initiative launched by Airbnb in 2020. Between 2016 and 2020, Airbnb removed 1.3 million people from the service for “refusing to treat others without judgment or bias” before launching Project Lighthouse, which continues to fight discrimination by collecting data on racial bias on the platform will. As of December 2022, the company has denied access or banned a total of 2.5 million people throughout its history for violating its anti-discrimination rules.
In its bias report this week, Airbnb announced several changes to the platform, made in November 2022 to make it more equitable, including simplifying the eligibility requirements for the service’s “instant book” feature, which allows guests to book a Reserving a listing without prior approval from a host. Airbnb found that black guests used instant book less often because their profiles were typically newer and had fewer reviews, leading to further optimization of the service, making it easier for black users to get more reviews soon after joining Airbnb to obtain.
The company estimates that the recent policy changes will allow an additional 5 million people to book properties instantly.
Racial prejudice on traditional home-sharing platforms has led to various apps designed specifically for different minorities, including Noirbnb, which aims to “create a better travel experience for black people and people of color”.
Airbnb’s recent review isn’t the first time researchers have uncovered evidence of racial bias on the platform. A 2015 Harvard study sent out around 6,400 applications from multiple fake accounts and found that applications from guests with “pronounced African American names” were 16% less likely to be accepted than guests with “pronounced White names,” who were otherwise identical had profiles.
Another Harvard study earlier this year found that bookings from Airbnb hosts with distinctly Asian names fell by 12% in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to hosts with distinctly white names. The authors linked the decline to the rise in anti-Asian hatred in the US in the early days of the pandemic.
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