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Airbnb is building a hotel chain. Out of your home.

You're expected to hand the keys to your home to a stranger, and you may not ask for anything more than their first name. Airbnb took your booking records, then your guests' details, and now writes your house rules. It doesn't want hosts any more. It wants inventory.

In 2007, two broke designers in San Francisco blew up air mattresses on their living-room floor, cooked breakfast for three strangers and called it AirBed & Breakfast. The whole idea was the host. You weren't booking a room. You were staying with someone.

Nineteen years on, Airbnb is quietly writing that someone out of the story.

First, your records

In September, hosts across Europe opened their accounts and found the reservations export gone. That was the one spreadsheet with every booking on a line: guest name, dates, adults and children, confirmation code, earnings. Hosts say Airbnb support told them it was "intentionally removed due to data privacy policies".

Privacy from whom? From the person whose home the guest slept in.

What's left is an earnings report with one row per payment and no guest details. If you run a B&B in Spain, Italy or Portugal, where every guest must be reported to the authorities and tourist tax is charged per person, you now copy each booking out by hand. Your own business records, held back from you.

Then, your guests

Guest email addresses went in 2020. Everything moved into Airbnb's messages. In parts of the US, guests' phone numbers are now swapped for temporary numbers that die two days after checkout.

From 20 November, Airbnb goes further. For new bookings, hosts may not ask a guest for a phone number, an email address or a home address. No copy of an ID. No contract for an ordinary stay. For most hosts, no deposit.

Let that sink in. You're expected to hand the keys to your home to a stranger, and you're not allowed to ask for anything more than the first name Airbnb gives you. Not their phone number. Not their email. Not where they live. Not their ID.

No hotel works like that. No landlord would accept it. You'd never lend your car on those terms. Yet that's now the deal for the most personal thing you own: the house where you keep your family's things, with your neighbours on the other side of the wall.

You can't reach them outside Airbnb's app. You can glance at an ID at the door, but you can't keep a copy. And you can't hold a deposit against the damage.

Now, your house

From the same date, Airbnb also decides what you may ask of guests in your own home. Strip the beds? Not allowed. Wash the dishes? Not allowed. Take the bins out? Not allowed. There are now seven standard house rules, and Airbnb wrote them. Anything else is a "request" that guests are merely "encouraged to follow". Ask for more and your listing gets flagged. Keep asking and you can drop down the search results.

It's your house. Airbnb writes the rules.

Look at the pattern

Every one of these changes comes with a reasonable-sounding reason: privacy, safety, fairness to guests tired of chore lists and cleaning fees. Taken one at a time, each is easy to defend. Taken together, they are a strategy.

Airbnb is building the world's largest hotel chain without owning a single building. No staff, no maintenance, no mortgage, no risk. You carry all of that. In return, Airbnb keeps the guest, the guest's details, the reviews, the rules and the relationship. When that guest comes back next year, they come back to Airbnb, and Airbnb takes its fee again.

In that model the host isn't a partner. The host is supply: a room with a calendar, run to a standard someone else sets, and interchangeable with the next one down the list. You provide the keys. Airbnb decides who gets them, and what you're allowed to know about them.

So what do you do?

You don't have to quit Airbnb tomorrow. It's still a powerful shop window. But treat it as a shop window, not a landlord.

Own your front door:

  • A website in your own name, where guests can see what's free and book with you directly.
  • Your own records of who stayed and when, for your accounts and your tourist office, without begging a platform for a spreadsheet.
  • A real relationship with the guests who choose to come back to you. Every guest who books direct is a guest no platform can take from you.

That's why we're building Kleida: one simple system for a small B&B's own website, bookings and guests. Keep Airbnb if it works for you. Just don't let it own you.

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