Airbnb suspends Istanbul host after police evict British guests from apartment
'Our original handling of this incident fell below the high standards we set ourselves'
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Your support makes all the difference.Airbnb, the accommodation-sharing service, has apologised after a dawn raid on an apartment in Istanbul in which two British guests were detained and interrogated. Turkish police took action in a dispute over whether the company had the right to rent out the property.
Tom Duggan, 36, from London, told The Times that the pair were woken at dawn by seven police officers. He said: “We were pretty shaken by the whole experience.
“They questioned us for over an hour about the purpose of our visit and to provide evidence that we were allowed in the apartment. We were really worried.
“They tried to contact the apartment owner but he wouldn't answer their calls even though he’d been regularly in touch with us by text over the weekend.
“Eventually they explained that the owner was renting the apartment illegally and either he wasn’t paying tax or hadn’t registered it.”
After signing a document in Turkish they were given their passports back. They then had 10 minutes to pack and leave the apartment.
An Airbnb spokesperson told The Independent: “Our original handling of this incident fell below the high standards we set ourselves.
“We have apologised to the guest and are giving them our support. We have also suspended the host while we investigate further.”
The company, which has enjoyed meteoric success over the past decade, has been under growing pressure from local authorities in a wide range of locations over what are said to be distortions caused to the housing market.
What began as a peer-to-peer practice has been increasingly professionalised, with property owners entering the market. Paris, New York and London have all imposed restrictions on lettings; in London, rentals are limited to 90 days in a year.
There are also concerns about guests’ expectations. Writing in The Independent, Rosie Millard — who is an Airbnb host at her home in London — said: “If you dared to offer an air bed these days, you would be hounded off the internet.”
The Turkish authorities are cracking down this summer on property rentals, which has also affected British owners who let out their villas in coastal resorts.
Turkish travel agents, who have seen business slump after a series of terrorist attacks over the past two years, have taken legal action against the global website Booking.com to prevent the firm selling rooms in Turkey to Turkish people. The aim, said the agents’ association Tursab, is ”to prevent unfair competition and thus protect member travel agencies”.
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