Hosts can rent rooms or their entire home and use the income to avoid having a day job, to make ends meet or to get into the bed-and-breakfast business without bothering with local licensing rules or all the usual red tape.
Travelers get to express their displeasure with local hotels and their sky-high prices and double-digit taxes. Plus, they can stay in residential neighborhoods or rural areas where inns might not exist.
That’s all well and good until somebody gets hurt. Which is what happened late last month to Mike Silverman, a 58-year-old American who encountered a host’s Rottweiler on the third day of his stay in Salta, Argentina.
By the time the dog was through with his arm, he had suffered a six-square-inch gash and a handful of puncture wounds. When he first contacted Airbnb, it declined to cover his two-night hospital stay, or do much of anything else besides refund the money for his aborted stay.
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| Mike Silverman spent two nights in the hospital after being attacked by his Airbnb host's Rottweiler. Credit Anibal Adrian Greco for The New York Times |
And so it goes in the so-called sharing economy, where companies create a market for others to sell rides and rent rooms, while wrapping themselves in shiny-happy hero capes. But when it comes right down to it, what the companies share most of all is risk, even if the chance of grievous injury is relatively low.
Airbnb now claims more than one million listings in about 190 countries, and it became that big in part by ignoring inconvenient local rules banning short-term rentals. In the process, its hosts would sometimes get caught up in the enforcement of municipal codes. The company eventually warned hosts about this, but it also never stopped taking their listings in cities or buildings where the rules were reasonably clear. Many municipalities have since changed their laws in the company’s favor.
Insurance companies frown upon people turning their houses into hostels and have even threatened to cancel the policies of homeowners who do this. While Airbnb knew this when it started in 2008, it began to provide liability insurance for its hosts only late last year. And that coverage is secondary: Hosts have to make initial claims to their own insurers, which may cancel the policies if they find out about the hosts’ innkeeping activities.
All this is irrelevant for Mr. Silverman, however, since Airbnb’s new liability coverage doesn’t extend outside the United States. Over the last year, he and his wife have driven from Alaska to the bottom of South America, trying to stick to a budget of $100 a day.
The pair have stayed in about 20 Airbnb properties without incident over the years. They tend to look for ones with kitchens and decent Wi-Fi, and they carefully examine reviews written by previous guests. That’s how they found a place in Salta, in the far northwest of Argentina, for about $60 a night. Airbnb said on Thursday that it pulled down the listing after the canine attack.
Quite often, a host’s Airbnb listing will make no mention of a pet. The Salta listing and reviews didn’t mention the fact, and in the first couple of days that Mr. Silverman and his wife stayed at the property, the dog never barked or growled or moved much, despite plenty of activity near the building, according to Mr. Silverman.
Which is why he was shocked when he stuck his hand out to the dog for a sniff a few days into his Salta stay, only to have the dog leap and clamp its jaw on his arm.
In some respects, Mr. Silverman was lucky. He has a plate in his forearm from a motorcycle accident, and he believes that when the dog’s teeth hit the plate, it loosened its grip momentarily to try to bite again. At that point, he was able to get away.
“I looked down, and I knew instantly it was bad,” he said. “I could see my artery, the tendons exposed and the muscle. There was blood everywhere.”
At the hospital, the couple was required to pay a deposit before he could be admitted for the night, and the owner of the flat could not provide it, so the couple had to come up with the cash. The immediate medical concern was the risk of infection, which tends to be higher in older bite victims. Ten days after the attack, some of the wounds still had not yet closed completely.
Mr. Silverman may have rattled Airbnb in his request to be reimbursed for his medical bills and additional lodging costs — compensation beyond the original room refund the company offered. He wrote in an email to Airbnb: “There is also a pain and suffering element as well as, perhaps, permanent nerve damage. Have you ever been attacked by a large dog? When I close my eyes at night, I see this thing tearing at my arm and blood everywhere — which is exactly what happened.”
But Airbnb’s initial email responses politely turned him away. “Please understand our refund was an attempt to soften the impact of an unfortunate accident and to provide our best possible customer service to you,” one said. “Unfortunately, per our terms of service, we are unable to consider any request for compensation in liability scenario such as this.” Then it went on to say how much the company valued him as a guest and wished him well in his recovery.
The response, however, changed right after I inquired on his behalf, with the company then asking for his medical bills and the receipts for his lodging expenses.
Nick Papas, an Airbnb spokesman, added the following in an email: “Over 30 million guests have stayed on Airbnb, and these kinds of incidents are incredibly rare, but when they happen, we try to make things right. This was a terrible incident, and we’re working with the guest to help cover his medical and other expenses and we’ve provided a full refund.”
Mr. Silverman respects a fair bit of what Airbnb has accomplished. He spent years as a technology and strategy consultant, and he’s enough of a student of the world to see how much economic opportunity the site creates for many hosts in countries with low average incomes. He’s also aware of what he refers to as the Latin American view of liability, which is that bad things sometimes happen to people, and there’s not much you can do about it when they do.
But less experienced Americans and Europeans may not know about these attitudes, or the possible lack of insurance in many countries when they make their reservations.
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| The Airbnb-listed house in Salta, Argentina, where Mike Silverman and his wife, Kerry Lin, stayed before he was attacked by the host’s dog. The listing said nothing about a dog, but the incident pointed up the messy insurance issues around liability for hosts and risks for guests. Credit Anibal Adrian Greco for The New York Times |
Instead, they take comfort in the Airbnb brand, all of the company’s positive press and the fact that it usually provides happy experiences. All the more reason then, in Mr. Silverman’s opinion, for the company to provide some kind of insurance backstop all over the world.
“There’s just an obligation on the part of an organization that is providing hospitality to have some level of protection for both their hosts and for the guests that use that facility,” he said. “They seem to want to deny that they are in the business that they are in.”
Mr. Silverman wanted to know how many accidents have happened at Airbnb-listed properties. I’ve asked the company for this information before and gotten nowhere, and the same thing was true this time. So we don’t know how many other dog bites have occurred, and we don’t know whether travelers have died of carbon monoxide poisoning, say, in illegally converted hostels.
Mr. Papas of Airbnb did say that the company was seeking to expand its host liability coverage to other countries. Until that happens the world over, here’s hoping that the company’s quick change of heart in Mr. Silverman’s case reflects a determination to pay claims for serious injuries without the injured having to put up a fight.
(New York Times - Apr 10, 2015)
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