In Oregon (United States), owners renting accommodation on AirBnb will no longer be able, from January 31, to see the first names of users requesting to book a stay, announced the US company on December 22. This measure aims to fight against discrimination and to prevent owners from refusing a reservation on the basis of the supposed origin of a user. When it takes effect, Airbnb hosts will only see the user’s initials when requesting reservations, and will not see the full first name. only after validating the transaction.
This policy change, confined to this state of the United States, is the result of a class action lawsuit launched in 2017 by Patricia Harrington, a black woman who believes that the company allowed racial discrimination by asking its users to post their name and photo to request a reservation. Two other black women, Carlotta Franklin and Ebony Price, had joined this group action, which was the subject of a legal agreement in 2019. At the time, Airbnb announced that it was reviewing its policy regarding the names of its users.
A study on discrimination
In 2015, an experiment carried out by three researchers from Harvard Business School of 6,400 listings Airbnb in the United States found that users with African-American sounding names were 16% less likely to have their reservations accepted than those with names suggesting they were white. Alerted by several campaigns against discrimination, the company has since launched a project, Lighthouse, intended to measure the extent of discrimination on its platform and to think about solutions against the phenomenon.
Three years later, the American company introduced a new measure by deciding to hide the profile photos of users making a reservation request, the owner not discovering the photo. only after accepting the stay request. Questioned by the American site The verge, Airbnb spokesperson Liz DeBold Fusco did not say whether the experiment carried out in Oregon was intended to be extended to other regions of the world.