AirBNB taking down illegal campsite listings in Hawaii
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A tent sat on Waimanalo Beach on April 14.
Executives from the private lodging website AirBNB are removing some campsite listings from their website. They’re responding to Hawaii’s attempt to crack down on illegal campsite rentals advertised online.
The company says they took down seven camping ads that may be for campsites in public parks. That’s just a fraction of the company’s 10,000 rental listings in Hawaii.
Critics say those ads can easily pop up again because people can re-advertise using a different name. A bill in the state Legislature aims to end that by requiring online brokers like AirBNB to verify that their listings are legal.
AirBNB’s Cynthia Wang says the company doesn’t have the ability to verify whether its listings are legal. She says the company has 2 million listings in 34,000 cities, each with different laws.
9 responses to “AirBNB taking down illegal campsite listings in Hawaii”
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Hawaii needs legal private camping places with amenities.
Hawaii has to “allow” AirBNB to respond, because the state is so incompetent to do anything but verbally complain. If they had any backbone, they would have seized the tent and property and that would end this scheme.
Not that easy, with seizure laws the way they are – have you been paying any attention to the lengths the City had to go through to get homeless people off of sidewalks? Imagine, just for a second, how tricky it would be to take people’s possessions away on land where people are SUPPOSED to camp! Give the legislature a little credit for actually trying to address to problem at its source BEFORE the tents go up.
There’s tons of them on the beachfront of private vacation rentals, especially in Kailua. Oh..most of them may be illegal.
Why get all in a tizzy about AirBNB illegal “campsite” advertisements when we have gazillions of homeless people camping illegally at beach parks and other places all over the State? Let’s clean up our own backyard of hundreds of illegal campers before we worry about the influx of a few “vacationing campers” showing up from the mainland.
Wow, you can’t distinguish the difference?
Do we really want to get into bed with these guys? … to be a part or our governmental tax collection system. I do not think so!!
Would someone please include in their writings jut Exactly does “AirBNB” stand for. People keep tossing the acronym around without Defining.
That’s actually the name of the company – sure it stands for something (it grew out of the former AirBed & Breakfast), but Airbnb is the registered name, so it’s not like reporters have to explain it. BTW, it’s “Airbnb,” not “AirBNB” like in the article.