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Post by trafalgar on Feb 1, 2016 20:54:56 GMT
There is a deadline when you make an access request; 21 days in Ireland, 40 in the UK. So hopefully, if word gets out and hosts proceed to make access requests, we should hear some feedback by mid March.
You recall correctly that there are 30,000 listings in London. But tourist numbers are around 18 million visitors per year!
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 1, 2016 21:29:10 GMT
This thread has been deleted from the Airbnb community forum.
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Post by High Priestess on Feb 1, 2016 21:38:23 GMT
That's interesting....and concerning. And it's part of why I think it's important to preserve some of the Airbnb Community Center posts on an offsite location like this one. Other posts have been deleted by Airbnb from the old host groups (known as Groups 1.0) at times, and some of those deleted posts have been preserved.
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Post by High Priestess on Feb 1, 2016 22:55:28 GMT
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 2, 2016 15:07:13 GMT
Ah, the link in your first post is broken, that's the reason.
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Post by High Priestess on Feb 3, 2016 0:23:56 GMT
By the way, in case anyone didn't know, there is a website that provides data on Airbnb listings in certain cities, including London: insideairbnb.com/about.htmlThey have info on London here: insideairbnb.com/london/THey have a list of "top hosts" in London and there is one host with 104 listings in London. OThers have 30-50 listings in London. I would have thought that if any heads would roll, those would be the ones....
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Post by apricotnelli on Feb 3, 2016 11:34:20 GMT
In Ireland under company law a website must contain the company name address number and registered directors. If airbnb are not doing that in Ireland you can complain them to the CRO (company regulations office cro.ie) who will require them to be compliant
Data protection laws are in sync across the EU. Customer data(not all but that protected by law) should not be transferred outside the EU to America etc as the laws are different on data protection in America. Data held on customers in the EU should not be on a US server. In practise this may happen but it shouldnt and if it is airnbnb are breaking EU law. This means personal customer data. It doesnt mean aggregated statistics on customers
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 13:05:20 GMT
Apricotnelli, Thanks for clarifying re international data protection.
I too noticed that Airbnb do not give company numbers, registered addresses etc on the website. Maybe the website is registered in the US? Would that make a difference?
They don't comply with Irish VAT requirements. They do not issue a VAT compliant receipt for the service fee they deduct from the guest payment. All you get is a a basic calculation at the bottom of the itinerary; £X for X nights, less "Airbnb Service Fee (includes VAT)". It should give the amount excluding VAT, the amount of the VAT etc. and I think the figures should also be shown in Euros.
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 13:16:36 GMT
Ah, just got an email back from the Data Protection office in Ireland. I emailed yesterday to check what the situation was if you don't live in Ireland. They say:
"if the organisation has an established base in the Republic of Ireland regardless of where you reside you can submit your Data Access Request directly to the organisation quoting Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 as the basis of your request. You should keep a copy of your instruction and include an access fee of €6.35. The organisation will have 40 days from the date it receives your request to provide you with a copy of your personal data."
Though I guess Airbnb Ireland won't be holding data about US hosts - but who knows?
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 13:25:16 GMT
Customer data(not all but that protected by law) should not be transferred outside the EU to America etc as the laws are different on data protection in America. Data held on customers in the EU should not be on a US server. In practise this may happen but it shouldnt and if it is airnbnb are breaking EU law. So they ought to have two servers? One in US for Airbnb US and one in EU for Airbnb Ireland? Or could it ALL be on one EU server? In which case, EU data protection law would apply to US hosts. Edit: To be honest, I don't have a clue what a server is...but surely they must be using just one big system?? With one big backup somewhere??
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Post by High Priestess on Feb 3, 2016 14:11:52 GMT
That's very interesting about data from EU hosts should not be on a US server. Who would have known? And I certainly dont' know anything about their servers....nor do I know a way anyone could find out about that. A tech expert might have an idea...I'll ask around...
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 19:42:52 GMT
I heard tonight from a host who got the email that someone from Airbnb called and said it was a mistake and they'd been 'wrongly selected for removal'. Although it's vaguely encouraging that a decision can be reversed, it still doesn't answer the key question of why anyone is being 'selected' in the first place.
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Post by High Priestess on Feb 3, 2016 19:54:56 GMT
Yes that is encouraging those delisting decisions can be reversed. I'm just wondering ---- I know very little about the short-term rental politics in Europe but if it's anything like what is going on in the big cities in the USA , it is very controversial here for people to have many listings of an entire apartment particularly if they have say 10 or 20 or 30 entire apartments that they are listing as short-term rentals. There is a big concern in the US about housing being taken off the rental market meaning long-term housing being converted to short-term housing ---so cities are passing laws that prohibit people from renting out an entire apartment or house in less it is their primary dwelling. There is a big concern in the US about housing being taken off the rental market meaning long-term housing been converted to short-term housing so cities are passing laws that prohibit people from renting out an entire apartment or house in less it is their primary dwelling . There have not been many purges of listings but this has occurred in New York City and to some extent in Los Angeles and there have been a few hosts in San Francisco affected as well .
So that is one possibility but if the hosts who were being delisted do not have many apartment listings then I don't know what the issue is.
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 21:11:44 GMT
I can only speak for London. I explained before about the regulations here. The UK is a small and very densely populated country, so I can understand the concerns people have about reducing the housing stock. HOWEVER, the number of entire property Airbnb listings is a tiny fraction of the super-dense London housing market. The population of London is around 8.5 million and the number of Airbnb listings is 30,000, half of them rooms, not entire places - it's really not a significant removal of housing. Many of the Airbnb listings are in the central expensive areas of London which the average Londoner couldn't afford. I have one solitary rental property and I only put it on Airbnb after it had been empty for two months - I couldn't get a long term tenant and I couldn't afford to wait 3-4 months or more for one to turn up.
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Post by trafalgar on Feb 3, 2016 21:20:41 GMT
USA is not a densely populated island like us so I don't know why there's the same fuss. Whatever the case, hosts with only one or two listing are being targeted in London and elsewhere so it is not about multiple listings just on its own.
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