Airbnb has promised to start playing nice with city governments

Airbnb has been really aggressive with how it expands, which has more often than not brought it into conflict with local regulators, but the company has continued to choose to fight rather than comply. Now, having grown and matured a bit, Airbnb has decided to start playing nice with city governments, and has promised to be much more cooperative in the future.

A week ago, Airbnb fired off a warning shot to cities that it would fight back if municipal officials proposed rules that might curtail its home-sharing service. “There is going to be more people doing home-sharing tomorrow than there are today; there is going to be more the day after that,” Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs, said at the time to underline how the company is unstoppable. “This is now a movement.” This week, Airbnb dialed back its rhetoric. The start-up, which is based in San Francisco, on Wednesday introduced a lengthy treatise pledging a renewed spirit of cooperation with local governments. Called the Airbnb Community Compact, the document outlines several ways that the popular company plans to work with municipalities, including sharing anonymized data on the hosts and guests who use the service, preventing illegal hotel landlords from operating on the platform, and promising to pay its “fair share” of hotel and tourist taxes in cities that have them.