Airbnb Says Hosts Will See Only the Initials of Oregon Guests Before Booking

On 4 January 2022, Airbnb told NBC News that a change to the way hosts see a guest's name would be kept to one state. By 31 January 2022, the company had said, a host looking at a booking request from a guest who lives in Oregon would see that guest's initials where the first name used to be. The name would appear once the booking was confirmed. Airbnb said the change would be fully implemented by that date and would stay in effect for at least two years.

The company had posted the plan on 22 December 2021. It became national news on 4 January 2022, when an Airbnb spokeswoman, Liz DeBold Fusco, gave NBC News the reason for the limit. “Given that the impact of this change is unknown, the implementation will be limited” to Oregon, she said in a statement.

What hosts would see

The change was narrow. It applied to guests who were Oregon residents. Airbnb's post said a host would start seeing an Oregon guest's initials where the first name had been, until a booking request was confirmed, and the guest's name once the booking was confirmed. The announcement dealt only with the name.

It was the second piece of a guest's identity that Airbnb set out to move behind the booking decision. On 22 October 2018 the company said hosts would receive a guest's photo only after they had accepted the booking request. NPR reported that Airbnb gave hosts the option, at the same time, of choosing whether to require guest photos. The Oregon change was to do for the first name what the 2018 change had done for the photo, for the guests of one state.

Why Oregon

Airbnb tied the change to a legal settlement. Its post said the update was consistent with a voluntary settlement agreement the company reached in 2019 with people in Oregon who had raised concerns about how a guest's name is shown when the guest asks to book a listing.

NPR reported that the lawsuit behind that agreement was brought by three African American women. They alleged that by showing guests' full names and photographs the site let hosts discriminate against Black users, in breach of Oregon's public accommodation laws. NBC News described the claim the same way: the plaintiffs said the site let rental owners discriminate against customers on the basis of race. Airbnb settled the case nearly two and a half years before the name change, NPR said. The plaintiffs' claims are reported here as allegations.

The research on the question was older. A field experiment on Airbnb by Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca and Dan Svirsky, published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in April 2017, found that an application from a guest with a distinctively African American name was 16 percent less likely to be accepted than one from an identical guest with a distinctively white name. The authors found discrimination among landlords of all sizes and said it was most pronounced among hosts who had never had an African American guest.

NPR cited a 2016 Harvard Business School field study of Airbnb that put the gap at roughly 16 percent, and reported that the study prompted an apology from Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky. NPR said Airbnb also made users accept a nondiscrimination pledge and launched Instant Book, a feature that let a host offer a home for immediate booking, with no prior approval of a specific guest. In its December 2021 post the company listed its other steps: the Airbnb Community Commitment that all hosts and guests must agree to, the change to profile photos, and Project Lighthouse, a research method launched in partnership with Color Of Change. NBC News noted that discrimination reported by Black travelers over the years had given rise to a hashtag, #AirbnbWhileBlack.

A test, by the company's own account

Airbnb did not claim to know what the change would do. The spokeswoman's statement to NBC News called its impact unknown, and NBC reported that a company representative described the policy as an experiment in one state. The December post said Airbnb would “take any learnings from this process and use them to inform future efforts to fight bias.”

KEZI 9 News in Eugene reported on 5 January 2022 that the change was only for guests who were Oregon residents. Airbnb told the station it would look at the results of the experiment to decide whether to make the change permanent across the country.

What hosts in Oregon said

KEZI put the change to people who host. One, who rents out homes in Utah and Oregon, said that reviews decide whether he accepts a guest. “If it's initials, that's okay; I'm still going to default to their past reviews,” he said. He told the station he did not think the change would have a big impact.

A second host raised home sharing, where a host rents out one of the rooms in a home. If she were doing that, she said, she would want to know a little more about the person coming to stay in her house with her. She gave the example of a single woman who wanted only women in her house to feel safe. A civil rights attorney whom KEZI described as local called the change a step in the right direction and said it posed privacy concerns.

NBC News put the wider question to a University of Kentucky librarian who had researched the origins of African American names. She said people do mental gymnastics with a name as soon as they hear or read it, that the reaction is sometimes innocent, and that she could not say one size fits all.

What it meant for hosts

For a host in January 2022 the practical change was small and specific.

• A booking request from a guest who lives in Oregon would show initials in place of the first name until the request was confirmed. After confirmation the name would appear.
• Airbnb gave 31 January 2022 as the date by which the change would be fully implemented, and at least two years as its length.
• The announcement dealt only with the name. A host who decided on past reviews, as one host interviewed by KEZI said he did, could go on deciding that way.
• On a listing set to Instant Book, which NPR said let a home be booked without prior approval of a specific guest, the host was not approving guests one by one in the first place.
• Guest photos were already held back until a host accepted a booking request, under the change Airbnb announced in 2018.
• The Airbnb Community Commitment, which all hosts and guests had to agree to, already required everyone to treat others without discrimination.

The direction was plain from the company's own statements. Photos went behind the booking decision under the 2018 change, and first names were due to follow for one state's guests by the end of January 2022. Airbnb said it would use what it learned to inform future efforts to fight bias, and KEZI reported that the company would look at the results to decide whether to make the change permanent across the country. A host whose screening rested on reviews had nothing to change.

Sources

1. NBC News, Airbnb to limit use of travelers' names as an anti-racism experiment in Oregon (4 January 2022).
2. NPR (via Michigan Public), Airbnb's new experiment to combat rental bias uses initials instead of names (4 January 2022).
3. KEZI 9 News, Airbnb changes up guest profiles in Oregon to prevent discrimination (5 January 2022).
4. Airbnb Newsroom, Update for guests who are Oregon residents (22 December 2021).
5. Airbnb Newsroom, Update on Profile Photos (22 October 2018).
6. American Economic Association, Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment (April 2017).