I WISH TO RESPOND to an article appearing in another section of the press recently headlined Out Of Control, inwhich general manager of Sugar Bay Resort, Morgan Seale, called for immediate Government regulation of thehome-stay sectionof our tourism industry.
Mr Seale referred directly to Airbnb, on which, as a matter of disclosure, I do have a one-bedroom apartment listed. Airbnb, a relative newcomer to the international home-stay rental business, has grown tremendously because they don’t charge the property owner or manager (or the tenant who risks subletting his rental unit) a listing fee.
In other words, it’s absolutely free to place your property (or space) on Airbnb with few to no questions asked. You pay a small fee when your space is booked. Of course this creates potential problems regarding property ownership and the location, qualityof the space, and so on.
However, this arrangement is largely self-regulating where guests can rate their accommodation and make whatever complaint they wish, with Airbnb being able to remove the listing after a negative complaint. I have had the unpleasant experience of a guest demanding a two-day refund from a four-day booking because he had found “a better deal somewhere else”. I refused the refund because Airbnb specifically states that refunds must come from the company which will later debit the host, if necessary.
In my case, after the guest, a Pakistani-Canadian, threatened me, the police were called and I was forced to refund him immediately. Astonishingly, the guest said he was legally entitled to 24 hours to find alternative accommodation and the police agreed, although I said Airbnb states that the guest should leave immediately after a refund.
The police, despite promising to do so, never came back to check if the guy had left, leaving me in my home with a very hostile guest for 34 hours. Needless to say, the guest gave me an extremely nasty review which, to its credit, after I gave an explanation, Airbnb ignored, although it never responded to my request for a refund of my refund.
But, back to Mr Seale and his family-owned hotels of Sugar Bay and Bougainvillea. On February 8, I checkedtheir booking rates for the period February 13 to 20. Bougainvillea was fully booked so no rate was quoted.
Sugar Bay had rooms available and it quoted US$2 520 (US$360 per day) for the one-week stay, breakfast, lunch, dinner excluded. A guest might go out of the hotel for dinner, but it is highly unlikely they will skip breakfast and lunch or take a bus (or more likely a taxi) to visit the nearest supermarket to purchase breakfast materials, or go outside on the street to look for a lunch van.
One final point is that if you look at the Airbnb Barbados website, you will see that a high proportion of the listed properties are small hotels, guest houses, condominiums, villas and the like, which presumably are already being taxed and regulated by the Government. They advertise on Airbnb because everyone loves freeness.
Everyone in Barbados pays taxes . . . and the income that the lower level Airbnb hosts or home-stay providers earn stays in Barbados. It doesn’t flow into the offshore accounts of expatriate hotel owners.
– WYNSLO PHILLIPS
