Airbnb, Visa, don't touch The Olympic Partners of Paris2024?

The Olympic Partners, a status that allows you to be above the law and dissuades the media from reporting illegalities? The examples of Airbnb and Visa are instructive: Airbnb has buried ads for super hosts and Visa is imposing itself as the sole method of payment during Paris2024. Hoteliers filed complaints and the Zorr.ooo platform aggregated requests for compensation from injured super hosts.

Airbnb, like many GAFAMs, often comes close to illegality, or even wallows in it. But it is not often caught out by the police. Why not? Does the complaint lodged by a group of hoteliers in France signal the end of an era?

At the same time as the revelations by the Zorrooo platform, which have not been disputed or denied by the French management, Airbnb has had to deal with the lawsuits launched by 26 hoteliers in France, defended by Jonathan Bellaiche. Mrs Welter is the owner of the Cavendish hotel and president of Umih Cannes Hotels. The figures she has produced show that, behind the cloak of the collaborative economy, Airbnb is competing with the hotel industry, without assuming the same obligations as owners of French establishments.

‘There are 1,700,400 hotels in France with a total of 650,000 rooms. We pay over €500 million in tourist tax, whereas Airbnb, with over 1.5 million properties for rent in France, only pays €148 million.

A hotelier must have a night watchman on duty and comply with the restrictive and costly obligations of the ERP (establishments open to the public).

In France, Airbnb is increasingly a business run by professionals who own more than 4 properties on average. Entire buildings are being operated in their entirety, what we call zombie hotels, where none of the obligations we have assumed are being met. Thanks to lockers, places where keys can be collected by tenants for the evening, these ‘hotels’ are managed without staff, without any safety standards.

That, in a nutshell, is what we are denouncing, this inequality in the exercise of a profession. I'm not even talking about the inflation that this causes in rents and the cost of accommodation that employees in all sectors of activity have to bear’.

Cannes has a population of around 72,000 and more than 10,000 Airbnb properties are available on the platform. 

What are the two grounds for your collective complaint?
‘The first is the platform's failure to comply with the law, which requires them to check that all rentals have a registration number and to collect the tax.

The second is the loss of business that we have quantified for our establishments. We have provided details of our sales figures, profit margins and average operating results, and we have calculated what Airbnb has lost us in terms of revenue, as well as the moral prejudice linked to the depreciation of our business’.

Visa, Airbnb... the Olympic Partners above the law?
Since 1986, the International Olympic Committee has had a very closed programme called TOP, The Olympic Partner, which brings together the world partners of the Games. For Paris 2024, this includes Coca Cola, Airbnb, Toyota and Visa. Visa has a monopoly on credit card payments during the Olympics at the competition venues and in the official Paris 2024 shops.

This monopoly is surprising, since it excludes CB and Mastercard. ‘This imposed monopoly is a distortion of competition, bordering on forced sales,’ says Michel Guillaud, President of the France Conso Banque association.

The major French media are silent on Airbnb's behaviour towards its superhosts. 
When Capucine Berr, the founder of Zorrooo, sent details of the loss of turnover suffered by the hundreds of superhosts concerned to over 800 journalists in France, she attracted a great deal of interest.

‘Television channels, including TF1, and national and foreign media were very interested in the information provided and the practices and terms and conditions unilaterally modified by Airbnb. But their French and communications departments were very reactive and managed to shelve all the planned reports. Airbnb is a major advertiser and a worldwide partner of the Olympics, a factor that would help to postpone or even cancel any reporting that might be a little complicated, I suppose.