Airbnb goes titsup – travellers and hosts flip out over lengthy downtime Lodge-listing website Airbnb suffered what appeared to be a fairly widespread outage in the early hours of Sunday morning. At time of publication, reports of downtime woes continued to trickle in. One Reg reader told us that Airbnb's servers had been down for hours. The company, which claims to have 1.5 million listings …
In my fair burg (and many others, as I've been reading) municipal gubmints have been burbling on about "levelling the playing field" between "real" B&B operations (those with licenses, permits, and who remit bed taxes) and "air" B&B operations (no licenses, no permits, no taxes), since the former are concerned about losing customer revenue to the latter.
"levelling the playing field" is fairly simple. Enforce the existing rules on everyone. Period.
AirBnB is nothing more than yet another black market organizer that exists solely to encourage people to break local laws and bylaws mainly for the profit of the AirBnB corporation.
And note for your own safety B&B's have to have wired smoke and incident heat alarms, if they have more than X rooms, sprinklers. They must have an annual gas safety inspection. Stuff like that. Your ABnB host? nada. Domestic properties do not encounter gas explosions all that often, but they do happen. Fires happen much more commonly.
Oh yes. Your B&B will have fire extinguishers. I have one, it's tiny and rather old. There's a fire blanket too. The smoke alarms aren't wired so that beeping that wakes you in the night? probably the battery empty signal.
Many countries require accommodation guests to be registered with the 'appropriate authorities', some to keep their tracking records accurate and others to make sure the tax man gets his cut.
And before an accommodation provider goes into business, they have to get inspected as to fitness for purpose by the said Cong An and registered with aforementioned tax people.
In VietNam everyone's but everyone's sleeping accommodation has to registered with the designated branch of the Cong An (aka People's Police). Same applies to homes, temporary accommodation such as those for itinerant farm workers and construction types.
Many Foreigners here in Ho Chi Minh City/SaiGon have seized the opportunity to make money and have rented apartments by the year and sublet through Airbnb which violates the lease and numerous applicable statutes.
And, just like Uber, all it takes is an e-mail or phone call and the gendarmes have all the information they need for a take down!
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