Renting accommodation on Airbnb now requires being very vigilant about this detail and we don’t always think about it.
Over the years, Airbnb has established itself as a very popular solution for French people to find temporary accommodation. Whether it’s a business trip or a short vacation, it’s often more pleasant to book an apartment on Airbnb rather than a hotel room. Especially since the site managers regularly ensure that stays go smoothly and follow user feedback to find suspicious rentals or those with bad feedback.
Prices can also vary a lot between Airbnb accommodation and its hotel equivalent. This is why more and more French people are favoring the Airbnb option rather than the older methods of accommodation.
However, the Airbnb company is far from being free of flaws. The short-term rental market and its impact on life in seaside resorts, or in tourist areas, are a scourge regularly highlighted to point the finger at the famous platform. Transient population with little respect for residents, weakening of social bonds and artificial increase in the cost of housing are the direct result.
Many users of the platform also regularly complain about a lack of confidentiality and inappropriate behavior on the part of rental managers. This is why the company decided to react and ban a very specific object, which is too often used to spy on tenants using Airbnb.
Since April 30, 2024, it is now prohibited for Airbnb rental companies to have any type of cameras inside accommodation. Don’t expect to cheat by installing a turned on webcam on a computer or tablet either! Until now, these devices could be placed in all rooms of a home (with the exception of bedrooms, toilets and bathrooms), provided that their presence was indicated in the advertisement for the property. Cameras outside the accommodation remain authorized as long as they are clearly specified in the advertisement and they are not located in an installation such as a shower, sauna or jacuzzi, in the open air.
The company Airbnb specifies that these prohibitions are also effective for noise detectors. Tenants are therefore asked to be very vigilant when they enter an accommodation and must report any suspicious device. The owners as well since if a rental company registered on the site does not respect these new rules, the site reserves the right to apply multiple sanctions which can go as far as deleting the user’s account.
It is not known whether fines have already been imposed in France since the platform’s rule change. But we remember that last spring, two vacationers who rented Airbnb accommodation near Annecy (Haute-Savoie) discovered a camera hidden in an alarm clock which was oriented towards the shower. This time the affair ended at the gendarmerie.