Regency Square, Brighton
“ We provide all hosts in the UK with Host Protection Insurance which provides insurance coverage for up to $ 1 million in the rare event of an injury”, the Airbnb website says.
However, it is not clear if this insurance applies, if a claim will be allowed and if so, if it will succeed. Even if it did, the $ 1m limit applies to the total claim and all legal costs – which is unlikely to be enough for adequate compensation to four badly injured victims and to reimburse their legal costs.
Many travel and tourism industry commentators are hoping that a case will come to court to test Airbnb’ s claim to have no responsibility in such circumstances.
Early last month, B & B Association CEO David Weston was speaking at a Policy UK event alongside Airbnb’ s head of policy, Patrick Robinson( inset), and asked him directly whether, when a Fire & Rescue Authority( FRA) requests for local premises let to paying guests to be identified,
Visit our website: | bandbnews. co. uk | 13
Airbnb provides the identifications necessary to allow that FRA to do its duty given by Parliament. Robinson admitted that Airbnb would refuse all such requests without a court order.
With 50,000 premises in London alone now let to paying guests through Airbnb which are beyond regulatory enforcement- because only Airbnb can identify the premises owners- this is clearly a very urgent issue.
Richard Nye of the Policy Group within London Fire Brigade believes that FRAs already have the power to demand data from Airbnb- though this may be academic because he also admits the LFB have not used them- basically they don’ t want to‘ discover’ vast numbers of new premises they may have to inspect, when they have not sufficient resources even to inspect the ones they already know about!
All this leaves our members in an anticompetitive situation as regards compliance costs, compared with our“ collaborative economy” competitors, who can avoid compliance and costs without any penalty.
Our lobbying continues- watch this space!