Airbnb announced that it will be canceling all reservations in the Washington D.C. metro area during inauguration week, and will prevent any new reservations from being booked during this period.

Guests with reservations will be refunded in full. Airbnb will also be reimbursing Airbnb hosts the money that they would have earned from those canceled reservations.

This follows requests from various local, state, and federal officials, asking people not to travel to Washington D.C., due to reports of armed militias and hate groups planning to disrupt the inauguration. Airbnb states that it continues to receive input from the local host community, as well as Washington DC officials, Metro Police, and Members of Congress.

Airbnb also states that it’s continuing its work to ensure hate group members are not part of the Airbnb community. Airbnb has banned numerous individuals associated with known hate groups, who were involved in activity at the Capitol Building on January 6.

Following the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, we saw video footage of the public spaces of several hotels in the D.C. area, with dozens of guests socializing. There are a couple of major issues here:

• For the most part these guests weren’t wearing masks, in violation of the major hotel groups’ policies that require masks to be worn in all public areas with a pandemic breaking records daily
• Many of these people were directly involved in the insurrection, and were arrested hours and days later

This also raises the question of how hotel chains such as Wyndham and Hilton should realistically handle this situation, especially in the next couple of weeks. There are reports of armed protests being planned in all 50 states:

• How should hotels control who stays with them?
• Should hotels close down altogether? If so, only in DC, or in all state capitals and Governor mansions? The latter doesn’t seem very realistic…
• I also think it’s important to recognize that there’s a difference between people who want to peacefully and legally protest (which they should be entitled to do, while observing travel restrictions), and trying to take part in an insurrection

Many people were no doubt expecting the violence that we saw in DC on January 6. Hotels most likely will not be held responsible for accommodating those guests. Therefore, we can hardly expect private hotel groups to handle this differently.

Airbnb has a different business model than hotels — it’s ultimately a tech company with unlimited funds, which is very different than the hotel business model. We may not see the hotel chains such as Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and Choice hotels doing the same.