Airbnb Renders Apology For Racial Discrimination

After several days of backlash from the public, the vacation rental company, Airbnb has come out to apologize for acts of racism visited on some customers.

On Thursday, the Airbnb company rendered an apology following complaints by some customers for what they describe as racism. The company also apologized to the public and its customers for haven taken such a long time to public respond to their accusations.

Customers complained of incidents whereby African-American guests were told that listings they had selected were unavailable for the chosen dates but only to see those same listings with the dates advertised again later.

In a video published on the website’s blog, the co-founder and C.E.O of the company, Brian Chesky said, “We have been slow to address these problems, and for this I am sorry.”

So badass. Love me some @votolatino. And proud to see @Airbnb putting forward real effort! https://t.co/IuqtPePVbU

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) September 9, 2016

With our help, Airbnb is setting the standard for Silicon Valley to end discrimination and build inclusion https://t.co/BQS0AzWhw3

— ColorOfChange.org (@ColorOfChange) September 8, 2016

In a quest to prevent future occurrences, Airbnb outlined some new changes to its operations.

The company seeks to create a new calendar-blocking which will prevent hosts from discriminating against their guests by deceitfully telling them that a property is already booked. The calendar-blocking is scheduled to be implemented during the first half of 2017.

Moreover, Airbnb promised to review their policies which will expand their “Instant Book’ program. It has promised to add anti-racial policies to its guiding principle.

 Also, the company has added a new feature to their platform which channels the complaints of its users to specialists for a swift response.

Nonetheless, the company didn’t agree to the call by the public to take down pictures of guests so as to make them quite anonymous so that, they cannot be discriminated against due to their skin colour. They said pictures forms part of the security features of the platform ad cannot be exempted.

It is sad how Black-Americans are faced with so much racism all around them. They are denied a booking online all because of their skin colour. What has America turned into now? Apologies alone won’t solve the problem. There is a need for an affirmative action. It would be better we created our own social community, our own apps and had our own social network system. In that case, we wouldn`t need to live at the mercy of some supremacists. However, we hope that the example of Airbnb will influence other companies to introduce anti-racial policies in their rules.

Source: thegrio