Editor: I love Airbnb, and Canmore should too.
I want to start by saying that I love Airbnb. With any new trip, much of the planning involves my wife spending inordinate amounts of time scrubbing every Airbnb offered near where we’re going. She’ll take me aside and talk about each house, what she likes about it and what it has to offer that will be unique that we’ll be able to appreciate.
For those who’ve only ever heard about Airbnb, those who use it are often not trying to avoid the costs of a hotel, they are trying to avoid the experience of a hotel.
Contrary to staying at a hotel, every stay with Airbnb is unique. I’ve had the pleasure of showering in a bathroom that only had two walls while a casowary ate nuts a stone’s throw away. I’ve drank local coffee in a hut that was so completely banana themed the legs of the side tables were wooden bananas and I’ve eaten homemade lilikoi butter and kayaked upstream in Washington state at six in the morning.
I have countless other experiences and stories of places you will never find on hotels.com or expedia.
I love to travel, as many do, but I am not one who likes resorts, spas or glamourous pools. I enjoy being a local for a day or for a week. I enjoy putting my car keys on a kitchen counter like I would at home. I want a home away from home.
This leads me to say I feel it’s a shame our village has began to crack down on Airbnb. If I were to want to vacation here I would start with Airbnb to escape the hotel life. By eliminating this service the town has now suggested my ideal form of travel is not valid and to stay here I must stay in a resort or hotel.
Despite this disatisfaction, this letter isn’t meant to gripe for the five per cent of travellers like myself who enjoy a unique experience; this letter is to specifically address a missed opportunity by the town to find a win-win solution with its residents who would like to make a bit of income on the side.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane. Music downloading became very big during the early 2000s. I was one of the first to use Napster in high school, among the first to understand bit torrent in university and how to use usenet to pirate free movies.
In response to this new wave of piracy, the recording and film industry fought back led by Metallica’s famous lawsuit against Napster, followed by swaths of lawsuits demanding damages in the millions – randomly targetting Americans in hopes to strike such fear of financial ruin that the piracy would stop.
But piracy continued, and even thrived despite the lawsuits, because people were not trying to avoid paying for music, they were avoiding paying for archaic CDs.
So what turned the tide against piracy? It was new innovative services led by the likes of Apple with iTunes, it was Netflix for video, it continues on with Pandora, Spotify, and a host of other services who figured out how to provide consumers with what they wanted while also paying the artists what they were due, while also making money themselves.
So too can we expect mainstream adoption of services like HomeAway, Airbnb, VRBO and Uber. I was recently in Maui and my hosts charged me a short term occupancy tax as they were a legit and regulated Airbnb provider.
Since Airbnb does not collect taxes on behalf of municipalities, it is required locally to be an approved Airbnb host. My hosts were proud to show us their local licence.
Opening a debate is sure to bring strong arguments such as how to deal with noise complaints (hotline? penalties?), how to audit taxation and what’s likely closer to everyone’s heart is preventing abuse to our local renters who are in dire need of rental housing.
I would never endorse an open policy where owners remove rental properties and flip them onto Airbnb; this would be a diservice to the town. I am a landlord, and would never do this to my tenants or subject my neighbours to this kind of traffic.
If I own a property that I frequent nine-12 days of the month, that leaves a staggering 21 days where my unit is empty. In a town that fully books up, with a massive lack of short-term accomodations, there are 21 days of the month that I have an empty condo.
So renting it a few days of the month does not affect the long-term rental market, but does add to the town’s precious short-term rental market.
I want to finish by saying that with local elections coming up it’s a good time to begin having public debate about the merits of regulating this service instead of ignoring or discouraging it. I for one would rather the town find new and innovative ways to increase its revenue today rather than raising my property taxes even more. If these new services will one day be mainstream, why delay the inevitable? Why deny the town the precious tax revenue?
Finally, my wife and I are planning to return to Hawaii one day. Not because of the beaches, or the coral, or any of the million pictures you’ve seen in a magazine. We plan to return so that we can visit a nice family who showed us a little piece of heaven, who provided a notebook with some clippings of local attractions, and let us stay in their cute little hut, fully decorated in bananas.
Antoine Bouchard,
Calgary/Canmore
