The vacation rental platform Airbnb announced this week that it is permanently banning parties at the properties it lists.
In northern Michigan, vacation rentals have increased in recent years, along with noise and traffic, upsetting some full time-residents.
Stacy Slater is among them. She’s lived in the Pine Grove area of East Bay Township for about a decade, and said her once quiet neighborhood now has noise, traffic, and party buses.
Slater works from home while her visiting neighbors vacation, sometimes loudly.
“We are trapped here,” she said. “Usually on Fridays or Saturdays, a party bus pulls up in front of my house on my little itty bitty street … and 10, 12, 15, 16, 17 people get into these buses.”
She wants to move.
Airbnb says it’s working with competitor Vrbo to crack down on people who repeatedly throw loud parties at the houses they rent. And they’ve set up a section of their website for neighbors to report problems nearby.
“Who’s going to enforce it?” Slater said. “It’s like trying to talk to somebody at Uber. Or Yahoo.”
But Airbnb notes that its methods have been working. The company said a temporary ban on parties put in place about two years ago resulted in a 37 percent drop in party complaints in Michigan.
Ray Draeger, who owns short-term rentals near Spider Lake, also in East Bay Township, said Airbnb’s permanent ban was a necessary step.
“But let’s get real,” he said. “They can’t do much. All they can do is ban a person, possibly give some money to the hosts, or give some money to the guests. But none of that is satisfactory in terms of a neighborhood.”
Draeger said it’s up to individual hosts to make sure their guests behave. He’s had to bring the hammer down a few times, including once when a group of vacationers got a little too rowdy, and one who was intoxicated ran through a neighbor’s yard. The other guests agreed to keep the person under control.
He said it was one of just a couple problems he remembers, in 20 years of renting out his properties. He notes that Airbnb hosts, like him, don’t want problems either.
