TLDR: A Bloomberg Businessweek investigation revealed that the world’s most famous vacation rental company has a ‘black box’ team of specialists to hush up ugly things that happen at its properties. Think murder, rape and more. The story has now been picked up by multiple media outlets—and Airbnb’s stock just happened to fall by 3% after the story was published. 

What’s this ‘black box’ team?

Airbnb calls it the Trust and Safety team—which is comprised of a range of 24/7 ‘response agents’, engineers, law-enforcement liaisons, crisis managers—along with experts in policy, privacy, cyber security, insurance, and fraud. Until recently, it was run by Nick Shapiro, a former deputy chief of staff at the CIA and National Security Council adviser to the Obama White House. According to Bloomberg, the team is made up of about 100 agents in Dublin, Montreal, Singapore, and other cities—and some have emergency-services or military backgrounds.

And what do they do?

According to Shapiro’s interview on the company website, their number one job is to keep Airbnb guests safe while they travel: “While no one can ever take all the risk out of traveling, we work day in and day out to mitigate that risk as best we can and build a safe and trusted environment for travelers.”

But according to Bloomberg, the real purpose of this team—nicknamed the ‘black box’—is to keep Airbnb safe from scandal or bad PR. And it includes ‘safety agents’ who are hired to ‘clean up’ after bad things happen. Sometimes, they have to literally ‘clean up’ as in “hire body-fluid crews to clean blood off carpets, arrange for contractors to cover bullet holes in walls, and deal with hosts who discover dismembered human remains.”

In most cases, however, their job is to whitewash:

“The hardest part of the job, the former agents say, was making peace with their role in keeping cases quiet and ensuring that victims and their families didn’t blame the company. Sometimes they were told to prioritize less traumatic situations involving reality-TV stars and others with big social media followings, which they say made them uncomfortable.”

How do they do that?

One: Money. Airbnb spent $50 million a year in payouts to hosts and guests in recent years.

“Team members have the autonomy to spend whatever it takes to make a victim feel supported, including paying for flights, accommodation, food, counseling, health costs, and sexually transmitted disease testing for rape survivors. A former agent who was at Airbnb for five years describes the approach as shooting ‘the money cannon.’ The team has relocated guests to hotel rooms at 10 times the cost of their booking, paid for round-the-world vacations, and even signed checks for dog-counseling sessions.” 

The aim is to settle quickly in “sensitive” cases and get the victims to sign payout agreements to ensure Airbnb is never mentioned. And as this Observer story shows, even in incidents that do not involve violence—as with a London flat that was trashed by guests—the company often uses payouts to keep a story out of the press.

Point to note: Until 2017, these agreements came with strict nondisclosure clauses that barred the person from ever talking about what happened, asking for more money or suing the company. When the #MeToo movement made NDAs controversial, the clause was replaced with a new one that says payout recipients can’t discuss the terms of their settlement or imply that it’s an admission of wrongdoing on Airbnb’s part.

Two: A mandatory terms of service agreement:

“Anyone registering on the site is required to sign this agreement, which bars legal claims for injury or stress arising from a stay and requires confidential arbitration in the event of a dispute. Former safety agents estimate the company handles thousands of allegations of sexual assault every year, many involving rape. Yet only one case related to a sexual assault has been filed against Airbnb in U.S. courts… Victims’ lawyers say the terms of service are an important reason.”

A good example: of how this works is a 2016 rape case that was widely reported once the Bloomberg story came out. 

• An Australian woman checked into a New York Airbnb along with a group of her friends. They picked up the keys to the flat from a nearby shop.
• They went out at night, but the woman returned early—and was alone when a man hiding in the bathroom raped her and fled.
• When he was caught soon after, the police found a spare set of keys on him. 
• The pesky issue of the duplicate keys was a big problem for Airbnb—which doesn’t have a key exchange policy.
• Also a problem: The woman’s friends had signed the terms of service—not the victim herself. 
• The blackbox team immediately swung into action: “They relocated the woman to a hotel, paid for her mother to fly in from Australia, flew them both home, and offered to cover any health or counseling costs.” 
• And they later paid $7 million to get her to sign an agreement “not to talk about the settlement “or imply responsibility or liability” on the part of Airbnb or the host.
• Until Bloomberg flagged it this week, there wasn’t a single media report on the attack—or any mention of Airbnb in the court case.

Why is this such a big deal for Airbnb?

Trust. The company’s business model requires perfect strangers to trust one another. That’s why it makes such a fuss about it on the Airbnb website: “Trust is the fundamental currency of the sharing economy, and it’s at the heart of everything we do [at Airbnb].” And trust requires feeling safe, which again Airbnb insists is a core goal: “Keeping our Airbnb community safe and secure, both online and offline, is our priority.”

Anything that undermines that trust will result in fewer rentals and more lawsuits. Also: more government regulation if the frequency of violent incidents at its properties becomes widely known. It is also why the actual work of its Trust and Safety team is kept secret. As one sexual assault victim’s lawyer says: 

“Everything is getting sent to arbitration so nobody really knows [about these incidents]. The only thing that really motivates [Airbnb] is the threat...of bad PR or a nightmare in the press.”

So Airbnb isn’t as safe as it seems?

The company claims that less than 0.1% of its rentals involve any kind of safety issue. The reality, however, is that Airbnb offers far less security than the average hotel. 

One: Despite the 2016 rape, its key exchange policy remains weak. As Bloomberg notes:

“Airbnb still hasn’t set any clear rules regarding keys… In the end, little was done beyond posting information about keyless entry online and working with several lockmakers to reduce the cost of implementation. Doing more would have been difficult because Airbnb can’t dictate how hosts enter their own homes, and it might have discouraged them from listing on the platform. The business case won out.”

Two: It vets hosts for past convictions only in the US—which is why the company didn’t flag a host who had been charged but never convicted of battery. He later went on to sexually molest a guest. Also settled via a payment agreement: A US citizen who was raped in India by a host’s relative out on bail on murder charges. In other parts of the world, the company claims to “screen all hosts and guests globally against regulatory, terrorist, and sanctions watch lists.” So presumably the level of vetting is even weaker.

Three: Unlike hotels, Airbnb doesn’t provide security to its guests—and certainly doesn’t vet what kind of security is available on its properties. In one case, a woman was killed by a security guard at the apartment complex where she was staying. The company had no idea that he was in the country illegally.

The bottomline: Airbnb is a global company with 5.6 million listings and a $90 billion market value. Using some of that wealth as hush money is a small price to pay for the safety of its brand—which seems to be more important than the safety of its users.

Reading list

We strongly encourage you to read the original story over at Bloomberg News. Also read: The follow up stories from The Guardian and BBC News. This older South China Morning Post story flags the lack of safety and offers tips to protect yourself. For the longest time, Airbnb employees were forced into arbitration to settle sexual harassment claims. This CNBC News report looks at how that policy was changed.