Airbnb

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 26 May 2016

After a tense two week stand-off, the Balham Airbnb Crisis has been resolved. My upstairs neighbour and I have drawn back from the brink. He has agreed to let me station bed and breakfast guests in my main bedroom. I have agreed to pay slightly higher building insurance contributions. By the time we signed the new direct debit forms, we had brought Balham to the brink of world war three. The biggest irony is, now it’s all sorted, I’m not so sure I want to do Airbnb. I’m not sure my nerves will stand it. My latest guest, a girl from Taiwan, arrived on Sunday afternoon when I was out

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 April 2016

The gloves are off in my battle with the two brothers who live in the flat upstairs. They have just socked me a brutal left hook. And so no more am I going to be the neurotic, menopausal fruitcake downstairs. From now on I am going to unleash my difficult side. It’s a shame, because when they first moved in I thought they were going to be the neighbours I had always dreamed of: handsome and polite, with a look of dread in their eyes whenever I banged on their door. When I explained that the wheelie bin must be put out at right angles to the kerb at 8

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 April 2016

I am becoming the Basil Fawlty of Airbnb. Almost everything that tormented Basil has tormented me since I started taking in guests. I am thinking of nailing up a sign saying Kitey Towers, with the ‘y’ askew. If you don’t know what Airbnb is: some whizz-kid in America hit upon the idea of charging people to sleep on an airbed in his New York apartment. He started a website. You register your home, put up photos, and choose guests you think you will get on with. I’ve had customers from Australia, New Zealand, America, Spain. But while they are usually delightful, I have often felt myself bristling like Fawlty at

Thursday

Robert E.

When sharing isn’t fair

In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be far more profitable than renting out your own. Over the past few years, companies like Airbnb and Uber have made a great deal of money by pioneering a business model of connecting consumers, who want to use things — such as apartments and cars with drivers — with other people, who want to provide them. For public relations reasons they promote this model as the ‘sharing economy’. And who could be against ‘sharing’? But this isn’t the kind of sharing your mother taught you. The term entered the technology vernacular

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 July 2015

‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask me if I do WhatsApp, I say I don’t do WhatsApp and they never bother with me again. I deduce from this that not only can we not now meet in person (so 80s), we cannot talk on the mobile phone either (so 90s), and nor can we email each other (so noughties). We have to do WhatsApp. I don’t know what WhatsApp is and I cannot bring myself to find out. In answer to the next person who asks, I say: WtfApp! WhocaresApp?! GetalifeApp!! I was full up with

Thursday

Philip Delves-Broughton

That’s not a ‘sharing economy’: that’s an invitation to sell your whole life

Technology businesses have a genius for inflicting indignities on us and spinning them as virtues. When they don’t want to respect copyright, they talk about the ‘democratisation of content’. When they want to truffle through our contact lists and browsing histories, they talk about ‘openness’ and ‘personalisation’. A hundred years ago, when a widow had to take in lodgers to pay the bills, it was called misfortune. Today, when an underemployed photographer has to rent out a room in his house or turn his car into a taxi, it’s called the ‘sharing economy’. First Google took his job. Now Airbnb wants his house. Next they’ll be after his pets. In

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Cameron’s second coalition dream and the problems of the sharing economy

David Cameron is secretly planning for a second coalition, according to the new Spectator. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth and Miranda Green discuss the possibility of another Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition after the general election. Would it be more difficult than it was five years ago to strike a deal? Will the Conservative party back Cameron if he falls short of a majority and decides against a minority government? And why is 30 MPs the magic number for the Liberal Democrats to enter into another coalition? Fraser Nelson and Alex Massie discuss our interview with Alex Salmond and his plans to hold Ed Miliband’s feet to the fire. Instead of doing a coalition deal with Labour,