Tourists with a Moroccan-sounding name are structurally discriminated against when booking an Airbnb in Brussels, a recent study by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) found.
VUB Professor Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe revealed in a previous study that ethnic discrimination exists in the rental housing market in Belgium, however, Airbnb, the online rental platform for short-term stays, was still a blind spot.
His new study shines a light on practices within this sector, showing especially so-called "professional" hosts — people who offer two or more properties or one property for more than 120 days a year on Airbnb — appear to discriminate.
"We suspect that private hosts in Brussels are much more open to diversity than professional hosts, as those who have problems with diversity are not going to be quick to rent out their own homes to tourists on Airbnb," said Verhaeghe. "With professional hosts, this is much less true. It does not involve their own home so they have less contact with tourists."
Verhaeghe and his colleague Billie Martiniello found that tourists with a Moroccan-sounding name are structurally discriminated against when booking an Airbnb in Brussels based on 1,043 written correspondence tests — written versions of field tests — on the platform in the summer of 2021.
Disparities between hosts
As part of the study, fictional domestic tourists put in requests at the beginning of the summer holidays to book the Airbnb property for a weekend in Brussels in September. All the tourists had similar profiles, but the key difference was in how their names sounded: the researchers used Belgian, Moroccan or Polish-sounding names.
The tests showed that tourists with a Moroccan name were structurally less able to book the Airbnb property than tourists with a Belgian name. Across all hosts, half of the tourists with a Belgian name received a positive response, compared with 47% for Polish names and 44% for Moroccan names.
However, when breaking down the responses between professional and non-professional hosts, the biggest difference is revealed. "The discrimination is entirely down to the so-called 'professional' Airbnb hosts," Verhaeghe clarified.
Among non-professional hosts, there is no discrimination and the percentages are similar, but among professional hosts, there is a positive response for Belgian names in 61% of cases, but for Moroccan names, it is only 46%. The response rate to Polish names was in between these two figures.
"Although Airbnb condemns racism in the strongest terms, the results show that Airbnb's anti-discrimination policy is insufficient to address the problem," Verhaeghe concluded.
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However, he did refer to the so-called 'Instant book' function which the platform has been pushing since 2016, which allows hosts who voluntarily enable this feature to automatically confirm booking requests. The VUB study showed that there was no discrimination at all among hosts with this Instant book feature.
"Unfortunately, enabling the feature is only voluntary," they stressed, adding that Airbnb should make the Instant book feature mandatory for all hosts.
