Airbnb permanently banned a host in Amsterdam for refusing to take Israeli guests, the company has confirmed.
The holiday accommodation service has recently been under fire for the discrimination that sometimes takes place on its platform, with certain hosts refusing guests on the basis of their color or nationality.
In this Dutch case, the host—a woman apparently named “Maria”—refused to accommodate four Israeli tourists because she supported the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement. This campaign aims to apply pressure on Israel over its Palestinian policies.
As initially reported by the Jewish publication Algemeiner, “Maria” had rejected the tourists by saying she would “not accept guests of Israeli citizenship until there has been a significant change in the question of Palestine.”
“So unless you are well documented activists who work for a peaceful solution to the problem (for whom I will be very happy to make an exception) you will have to look elsewhere,” she reportedly told them.
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Airbnb confirmed to Coins2Day that it permanently banned the host around two hours after it was notified of the incident.
“Discrimination like this has no place on the Airbnb platform and our policies prohibit hosts from declining a guest because of who they are, where they come from, how they worship, or whom they love. As soon as we learned about this matter, we promptly removed the host from our community,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Earlier this month, Airbnb told its hosts to sign up to a non-discrimination policy. It also initiated a new “open doors” policy, through which any guest who felt they were the victim of discrimination on the platform would get assistance finding alternative accommodation.
However, critics have noted that the measures don’t provide enough protection from hosts discriminating on the basis of photos and names.
