Airbnb rallies users amid regulation threat

Airbnb sought to rally the people who host travellers in their homes at a splashy event in its new San Francisco headquarters, in the face of new regulatory challenges for the "sharing economy" pioneer.

Brian Chesky, Airbnb's co-founder and chief executive, showed off a redesigned mobile app and networking site for hosts to make it easier for them to rent out their spare rooms and get support from other users of the service.

The company, which launched in 2008 and now operates in 34,000 cities, is also overhauling its reviews systems to provide more detailed ratings, such as cleanliness, accuracy, availability and a host's "commitment".

"We are confident that in the future the majority of guests staying with you will be booking their trips on a phone," Mr Chesky said, showing new apps for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Airbnb is considering a financing programme to help hosts to upgrade to a smartphone, he added, as part of an expansion of its customer-support programme. "We really think mobile is the future."

Some Airbnb hosts had complained that the previous version of its app was too difficult to use.

The overhaul to its site and services comes as Airbnb faces a fresh struggle with regulators in New York, one of its most popular destinations, as well as other US cities that say it is illegal for tenants to sublet their homes while they are away.

The New York attorney-general, Eric Schneiderman, filed a subpoena against Airbnb demanding the records of 15,000 of its hosts. The company is fighting to protect what it sees as its customers' privacy and has rallied travellers to sign an online petition to "Save Airbnb in New York", which has garnered more than 160,000 digital signatures.

"This is the new economy, a sharing economy," Mr Chesky told an audience of hundreds of hosts gathered at Airbnb headquarters, which was also broadcast live online. "It's starting to feel like a revolution . . . We can take the power back. Cities are changing for the better."

He cited research that hundreds of thousands of Airbnb customers had spent $630m in New York in the last year. "Much of this money wouldn't have actually come to New York," Mr Chesky said, and more of it was spent on local businesses because its locations are more widely distributed across the city.

He said that regulatory challenges, which have previously included a row over tax payments from booking fees, were "not entirely to be unexpected".

"Fundamentally here is the problem: there are laws for people and there are laws for business but you are a new category, a third category - people as businesses," he said. "As hosts, you are micro-entrepreneurs and there are no laws written for micro-entrepreneurs."

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