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A Year of Airbnb Hosting During a Pandemic
I barely made it home to the 19th arrondissement of Paris before lockdown in March 2020. At the time I was away in Bulgaria at a conference hosted at Coworking Bansko and had planned to stay on for a few more days of skiing when enough people I trusted told me I should get back to France before they stopped flights. I managed to land back in France the night of lockdown. The next day they stopped regular flights out of Sofia.
I had an Airbnb guest staying in my apartment at the time. I had actually gotten this specific two-bedroom apartment in 2018 in order to host full-time when Paris tightened its regulations on Airbnb some years ago. I’ve been hosting in Paris for five years now, have welcomed almost 1000 guests from dozens of countries, and hold the helpful “Superhost” designation, which definitely helps land more reservations.
Neither that guest nor I knew what would be ahead of us, not just for Airbnb but for anything. Soon enough, however, Airbnb made an announcement that it would be refunding 100% of all reservations made before March 14, 2020, regardless of the cancellation policy of the hosts.
This decision is still a hotly-debated issue by hosts and led to an exodus of a significant number of them to other platforms or self-hosting websites. They felt let down by Airbnb. While a single-listing host like…
