Come September, San Diego’s smaller hotels, motels and home sharing hosts like Airbnb will no longer have to pay a special room surcharge for tourism marketing, the City Council agreed on Tuesday. The move to eliminate the fee, which is over and above the city’s 10.5 percent room tax, is expected to cost the city’s tourism marketing effort at least $2.4 million a year. Effective Sept. 1, only lodging establishments with 70 or more rooms will now be assessed a marketing surcharge of 2 percent. Hoteliers, who oversee the tourism marketing effort, said they had no choice but to change who pays the fee because of complaints from some home sharing operators who felt they had no say in who was controlling the funds. “It became problematic for us to have an organization where our board is voted on by the (district) members in a weighted vote but we can’t establish how much of a vote these people should get,” said San Diego hotel owner Bill Evans, who chairs the hotelier-run board of the Tourism Marketing District….

Airbnb has emerged in recent years to become a popular option for both those seeking accommodations and those looking to provide their homes and apartments as a place to stay for travelers. A common feature of most Airbnb rentals is WiFi access, but providing that connectivity might well come with risks for both the person providing the space and the guest, according to a Black Hat USA talk scheduled for Aug. 4 in Las Vegas. In an interview with eWEEK ahead of the talk, titled “AirBnBeware: Short Term Rentals Long Term Pwnage,” security researcher Jeremy Galloway from Atlassian provided details about the risks that he sees for Airbnb WiFi users….

It’s not just Rio de Janeiro hotel prices that are soaring ahead of the Olympics. The Summer Games have turned Rio into the world’s priciest destination on lodging platform Airbnb Inc. In a new Bloomberg index released Wednesday, Rio de Janeiro lodging on Airbnb cost $206 per day on average, exceeding that of No. 2 Miami and No. 3 San Francisco. A stay in a private Rio dwelling was more than twice as costly as Paris, according to the index of global cities with at least 100 local listings. It took average prices for two blocks of time that are six months apart and include part of the Olympics — Aug. 1 to 10 — as well as Feb. 1 to 10, 2017. Data were collected between May 1 to May 10, 2016….

Originally a way for those with spare space in their homes to rent out these rooms to travellers looking to ‘live like a local’ on holiday, Airbnb has rapidly risen to become a way for professional investors to generate income through short-term rentals. Since launching in San Francisco in 2008, Airbnb has grown to have “hosts” in over 34,000 cities throughout 191 countries. While homeowners do make up a substantial number of these hosts, professional full-time property investors are taking the opportunity to buy property specifically for use on Airbnb, especially in highly popular markets such as London….

Starting this week, Santa Fe vacationers who find lodging through the website Airbnb must pay a local bed tax, adding a source of potential revenue that has for years eluded city coffers. Homeowners who list rooms on the online marketplace will be required to apply for permits by Aug. 9, according to Randy Randall, the city’s tourism chief. People who host in residential areas will need one of 1,000 residential permits, while those in commercial zones will need to apply for a business license. Those who continue to rent out their property without a permit will be subject to fines. Officials hope the new regulations will help legitimize a rogue market that has long frustrated local hoteliers who say they’re being punished for following the rules….

The number of suites available for rent in Vancouver could increase by almost 50 per cent if all AirBnb units that are rented out for more than three months a year were converted into rental housing, estimates show. But there’s an alternative: making all homes identified in a city report as “empty” available could more than quadruple what’s available. Both of those factors are contributing to the hollowing out of Vancouver’s rental supply – and are both being targeted by city council as they try to provide more places for Vancouverites to rent, and to rein in rapidly escalating prices….

Law360, Los Angeles (August 1, 2016, 5:09 PM ET) — User-based room rental service Airbnb has sued the city of Anaheim in California federal court, saying a new city ordinance barring short-term rentals and imposing fines on websites that do so is a violation of the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act. The San Francisco-based company filed suit on Thursday, claiming that Anaheim’s new law, which passed on July 12 and goes into effect Aug. 11, flies in the face of the CDA since it treats online platforms such as Airbnb as the publisher of third-party content. Anaheim had previously allowed short-term rentals for homeowners with a permit but the new law bans short-term listings altogether, with permitholders receiving an 18-month grace period. “By imposing civil and criminal penalties on Airbnb for publishing and for failing to screen and remove listings that lack a permit or do not comply with other city law, the ordinance treats Airbnb as the publisher or speaker of those listings, whose content is provided by third-party hosts,” the company said in a 20-page complaint. “The ordinance therefore violates and is preempted by the CDA.” In addition, Airbnb asserts that the new law violates the First Amendment since it’s a content-based restriction on speech….

ANAHEIM – Airbnb retaliated with a lawsuit against Anaheim Thursday less than a month after the City Council banned short-term rentals and said home-sharing web sites would be fined for illegal listings. Airbnb’s suit says the city is violating the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment. The lawsuit is the latest for the popular online platform, which filed legal actions this summer against San Francisco for similar reasons. Anaheim’s City Council on July 12 gave the 363 permitted short-term rental operators in town 18-months to stop operating. But the lawsuit targets the stricter regulations the council adopted in the meantime to limit the impact of the rentals on the community. Come mid-August, Anaheim will require hosting platforms such as Airbnb, VRBO and HomeAway to remove listings the city has not permitted or face fines starting at $500 for each violation that could reach $2,000….

ANAHEIM – A second home-sharing platform is suing Anaheim over penalties recently approved for hosting online listings for illegal short-term rentals. A day after Airbnb took legal action against the city, HomeAway also filed a lawsuit saying Anaheim’s ordinance fining websites for advertising listings of short-term rental homes that don’t have a city permit violates the 1996 Communications Decency Act and First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The Communications Decency Act prohibits government from holding websites liable for content and actions posted by users. The ordinance, the lawsuit says, “would impose liability on HomeAway for publishing information provided by third-parties.”…

When I first began listing my one-bedroom adobe house in Marfa, Texas, on Airbnb, the service seemed like a godsend. When I took a weekend trip, I’d host tourists from Austin; their rental fees would more than cover the cost of a few tanks of gas and a nice dinner. The rewards weren’t just financial: The people who stayed in my house felt more like houseguests than clients. After a visitor left, I’d find a handwritten thank-you note on the kitchen table, leftover snacks in the fridge, and once, a charming pencil drawing of my cat scratching his ear. And since the hotel options in town are limited, plenty of visitors were happy to pay below-market prices for an authentic Marfa experience, housecats and all. This utopian vision of regular people helping each other out (and making a little money along the way) is a cornerstone of Airbnb’s PR strategy: “It’s like the United Nations at every kitchen table. It’s very powerful,” Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky told attendees at a hospitality conference last year. “For us to win, no one has to lose.” But that’s a more contentious claim than it might seem. Recent years have shown there are plenty of profits to be made in the short-term-rental world—and big profits tend to produce both winners and losers. Airbnb’s top 40 hosts in New York City have grossed more than $35 million combined. It didn’t take long for the original hosts of the so-called sharing economy to find themselves competing with enterprising property owners….