In June, we announced that our previously temporary ban on parties will become a codified policy. We are continuing our work to enforce that policy by taking measures trying to the best of our ability to take on unauthorized parties — meaning parties thrown without the knowledge or consent of Hosts. It’s integral to our commitment to our Host community — who respect their neighbors and want no part of the property damage and other issues that may come with unauthorized or disruptive parties.
To that end, today we’re announcing the introduction of new anti-party tools in the US and Canada to help identify potentially high-risk reservations and prevent those users from taking advantage of our platform. For example, this system looks at factors like history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the listing, weekend vs. weekday, among many others. The primary objective is attempting to reduce the ability of bad actors to throw unauthorized parties which negatively impact our Hosts, neighbors, and the communities we serve.
A similar variation of this system has been piloted in Australia since October 2021, where it’s been very effective. We have seen a 35 percent drop in incidents of unauthorized parties in the areas of Australia where this pilot has been in effect. We are now ending the pilot phase in Australia and codifying this product nationwide. We are hoping for similar success as we begin testing this in the US and Canada.
This anti-party technology is designed to prevent a reservation attempt from going through. Guests who are unable to make entire home bookings due to this system will still be able to book a private room (where the Host is more likely to be physically on site) or a hotel room through Airbnb.
This system is a more robust and sophisticated version of the “under-25” system that has been in effect in North America since 2020, which focuses primarily on guests under the age of 25 without positive reviews who are booking locally. We anticipate that this new system will help prevent more bad actors on our platform while having less of a blunt impact on guests who are not trying to throw a party. While we are consistently willing to make trade-offs in the interests of building trust, our goal is to make these systems as precise and fair as possible to support our Hosts and guests.
While we are optimistic that this technology will have a positive impact for the safety of our community and our goal to reduce unauthorized parties — we want to be clear that no system is perfect. We work hard to deter bad actors from using our platform, but ultimately Airbnb is an online platform that facilitates real world connections. That’s why we continually seek to partner with experts and communities to complement their safety efforts, and we continue to invest in our Neighborhood Support Line to facilitate direct communication with neighbors regarding potential parties in progress or concerns with any nearby listings.
We will communicate with transparency about the results of this testing phase and the next steps of our ban on parties.
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