“Boston City Council approves rules limiting short-term rentals like Airbnb” (WCVB) describes a new regulatory regime that adds jobs for bureaucrats (to register AirBnB hosts and monitor them) and, mostly, shuts down competition for hotels. It seems that stays of more than 10 days are exempt so in some ways it is less restrictive than in the adjacent paradise for hotel owners of Cambridge, where rentals for less than 30 days are more or less shut down.
2 thoughts on “Great day for hotels in Boston: AirBnB effectively shut down”
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“Shuts down competition for hotels”
Well, other than hotels competing with each other, you mean? Or is there a big cartel ran by Marriott, et al?
Javier: The original post was talking about AirBnB hosts in the aggregate being competition for hotels in the aggregate. However… Do Boston hotel companies conspire to fix prices? Adam Smith would have predicted “yes”: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” (See https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreading-adam-smith for how Smith thought that government regulation would make this natural tendency yet easier )
And the hotel managers to meet… http://www.masslodging.com/ and http://www.masslodging.com/board-of-directors.html