How Airbnb In Arizona Has Adapted To Pandemic Precautions, Drop In Travel
Download mp3 (8.91 MB)STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Despite pleas from state and federal health officials to limit travel over the Thanksgiving weekend to avoid expanding the spread of COVID-19, airports were full of people getting on planes to get together with friends and family. In addition to wearing masks and practicing social distancing, limiting how many people can gather in public has been consistently brought up, if not always enforced. But those limits were not being applied the same way to locales like Airbnb, at least not when the pandemic began in the spring. And with me to talk about changes Airbnb has made in Arizona and around the world is John Choi, policy director for Arizona with Airbnb. John, have you seen and heard examples of hosts having a lot of people — too many for a pandemic — at Airbnb locations, and that put the company in a position to make changes?
JOHN CHOI: Yeah. Let me first let me say that obviously global travel took a huge hit when the, the pandemic started. For several months, people really were locked down and in place. And then what we started to see really towards the beginning of the summer is that slowly travel start to return. And really what we saw was a shift from, you know, large, long-distance trips or international trips to a form of regional travel where folks were looking for ways to find some respite from, you know, working from home, from, you know, being cooped up to looking to travel to destinations that are, you know, say, within 200, 300 miles where they — road trip type trips. And with that, we saw a return in growth, a regrowth of domestic travel. Now, as a result of some of that growth, what we saw was really a lot of positive impacts where, you know, folks that were heavily, you know, impacted by COVID through a loss of a job — maybe they had their work hours cut back — and local small businesses that were really struggling to hold on were able to actually see some rebirth and some regrowth of activity in a positive way through some additional income. Now, there have been some concerns about the increase in activity in certain neighborhoods that has raised some concerns. In Arizona, we have — we know that that's been a concern in different parts of the state. And so as a result, we stepped up some of our policies.
GOLDSTEIN: When you do communicate with political leaders, community leaders, area residents, were there clear signs of agreement on certain things where people were at least on the same page as far as what steps at the beginning needed to be taken?
CHOI: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it was, it was a certainly a chaotic time. We had, as information was, was slowly being disseminated from global health leaders in organizations like the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] CDC, national governments, state governments, local governments were scrambling to try and digest and implement the guidance that was coming from these sources, often in shifting ways. And so there's quite a bit of chaos in the early beginnings of the pandemic. And we spent a tremendous amount of time coordinating with these, you know, these, these health leaders and elected representatives to ensure that our community was informed that our community was in compliance and in keeping, keeping people safe. And that was the top priority.
GOLDSTEIN: Well, John, let's be a little bit more specific with some of the policy shifts you made.
CHOI: One of the policies was to identify — help identify unauthorized parties. We actually passed a ban on parties allowing hosts — you know, host sort of had the option — prior to COVID hosts had options to either to set their own house rules. And we essentially override those rules with their own global party house ban to make sure that guests couldn't throw parties in homes, hosts couldn't authorize parties to occur. That was one of the first steps we took and something that we realized we need to take some decisive action on. The second step really was recognize that even though we could pass that policy, we need to do — go even further to make sure that these parties were still not happening. So what we did is, one, we passed a policy that, you know, banned certain guests from booking — those guests being guests under 25 that are looking to make local bookings, you know, guests, guests under 25 that also didn't have any positive reviews and that were trying to book larger homes at the last minute. And really what we, we, what we did was we followed the data. We saw that, we looked at what's happening on the platform and realized that that cohort and in those circumstances were really high risk from a, from a party house perspective. And so we passed that policy and that policy's in place today.
GOLDSTEIN: John, finally, there were some specific changes you made to Arizona, which I understand you've broadened out to other parts of the country as well. What were some of those?
CHOI: What we've done in Arizona in particular, which we've now replicated in a number of other jurisdictions, was to proactively look at listings that are problematic for a number of reasons and actually took action to remove about 50 listings on our own accord earlier this year, really in a combination of, you know, complaints, high risk reservations, and they've shown a pattern of disregarding both the local health orders as well as our own community standards. We did that in part to obviously address those listings, but also to raise awareness of the 24-7 neighborhood hotline that we've created and really tried to push out aggressively this year to raise awareness of the tools and options that, that communities have to, to, to, to raise issues directly to us. We realized that that was a gap in, in communities. And so we, we stood up a portal for anyone to flag different problematic listings to us. And it's largely been successful. We've been able to remove a number of chronic location — chronic party locations throughout the state, and we continue to have that open for anyone to, to access.
GOLDSTEIN: John Choi is the policy director for Arizona with Airbnb.
