Regarding Arwa Mahdawi’s article (Airbnb feels like a soulless rip-off – and its hosts are revolting, 28 October), I’m really sick of being scapegoated. I’m aware that Airbnb has negatively impacted some urban communities, but without the income from the two self-catering cottages on my family croft, I couldn’t afford to live in Wester Ross, raise my kids here, spend my money in the village stores and volunteer as a community councillor for the last 25 years. There may be tyrannical hosts with 90 pages of house rules, but the new guidelines are nonsensical.
If self-catering guests are now not expected to wash up, am I supposed to provide them with enough crockery and cutlery for each day of their stay? They’ll then have to live with a growing pile of dirty dishes. And if I’m expected to wash their dishes after they leave, that is not “charg[ing] hotel-like fees without providing hotel-like services”.
On the contrary, it’s expecting hotel-like service for a self-catering fee. I’ve just taken a booking from a group of five for next February – at that time of year, they’ll each be paying £25 per night. There is an assumption that hosts are necessarily rapacious capitalists with an extractive attitude to the community.
As part of my community work, we’re applying to the Scottish Land Fund so we can build some affordable housing for locals. We asked some housing associations for an average annual rent on a two-bedroom house. The figure we were given is 20% of the income achievable from the same property as a short-term let.
That’s an economic fact that we all share. Anyone offered five times the money for the same work would take it. Alasdair Wright Poolewe, Highland For 20 years my partner and I have been letting our spare room through Airbnb.
Originally, the idea of Airbnb was to have locals host visitors, and this is what we think it should revert to. Anything we read about Airbnb takes no account of locals who rent rooms, and just dwells – understandably – on the evils of the encroaching apartments. We are both now in our 70s, and the stream of people through our house in Belfast has been a joy to us and keeps us young at heart.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
