Maturing STR sector challenged to balance host security and guest privacy

When Airbnb announced last month that it’s banning the use of indoor security cameras in all its listings, the news didn’t exactly set the short-term rental sector quaking.

After all, few of the platform’s listings were still using indoor security cameras, Vrbo has had a similar policy since 2022 and a fleet of vendors have stepped up over the years with solutions that all but obsoleted the technology.

Yet when the new policy takes effect April 30, it will underscore just how critical the sector’s concern for balancing security and privacy has become, industry experts said. Add in new government regulations that have complicated hosting in places like New York City, and the changes could signal another step on a path toward greater professionalization for the sector.

“Were many hosts or property managers using indoor cameras? I don't think so,” said David Angotti, the chief evangelist at property management software platform Guesty. “That being said, it only takes one of these used inappropriately to hurt the entire industry, to hurt people's lives, to hurt Airbnb, to hurt a property manager's brand. It's not like that's the only technology we have to keep our properties safe.”

The new rules follow years of reports from furious travelers who discovered hidden cameras in short-term rentals. Meanwhile, hosts — and their neighbors — have raised complaints over unruly guests who damage homes or turn rentals into party houses.

To get a better idea of how the new policy’s effects on the balance between privacy and security in the short-term rental sector, PhocusWire spoke with a handful of experts from the field.

How much will Airbnb’s new policy affect short-term rentals?

Very little.

“In a way this is already the industry standard in, let's call it, more professional hospitality,” said Nils Mattisson, co-founder and CEO of Minut.

The practice of using indoor cameras had fallen so out of favor that Murat Sonmez, CEO and founder of Trustd.ai, was surprised when he heard of Airbnb’s new policy.

“I was not aware that indoor cameras were not banned,” he said, “so this is something that came late to me.”

Yet the experts lauded the policy, even if it doesn’t force a lot of properties to make changes.

“The new restrictions are the right decision for Airbnb and the STR industry as a whole,” said Nate Wysk, general manager at PointCentral. “The result will be to push the less professional hosts in the right direction.”

“Airbnb is a leader in the vacation rental and short-term rental space,” said Guesty’s Angotti. “For them to take such a solid stance on [not having] indoor cameras in properties, that's a positive for the entire industry.”

In other words, what Airbnb declares becomes industry doctrine.

“They’re called Airbnb rentals, not because all the bookings take place on Airbnb but because they pretty much set the standard for the industry,” said Andrew Bate, the founder and CEO of Safely.

Given this focus on guest privacy, has home security become less of a priority?

Not to the experts.

“Safety, privacy protection, asset protection — these must always be a concern for all of us in this industry,” Guesty’s Angotti said. “The hotel industry is fully mature at this point, and they still care about those three things. No matter if it's 50 years from now, we need to care about those things, because that's how we take good care of all the stakeholders in the industry.”

Property security will always be an issue in the sector because houses and apartments are both vulnerable to bad actors and appealing to those who want to cut loose in a way they never would in their own homes.

“The party issues remain,” said Safely’s Bate. “Staying in a home is the perfect place to go if you're having a party because there's no front desk, so things can escalate a lot faster in a home than they can in a hotel, and there's less scrutiny about the number of people coming.”

Data from Safely, an Atlanta-based company that provides insurance for short-term rental homeowners and property managers, suggests that 14% of guests cause 70% of the bad stays.

The truly bad actors likely account for an even smaller percentage, but they are the ones who will find a way to circumvent whatever policies are in place to stop them, said PointCentral’s Wysk.

“We’re all trying to stay ahead of that,” he added, “and technology is a great [way] to do it.”

What are some of the tech solutions to balancing guest privacy with host security?

A video doorbell camera is a natural substitute for the indoor cameras that are now widely banned, Wysk said. They face outward, ensuring guests’ privacy, but can alert hosts if unexpectedly large numbers of people pour in or someone violates a no-pets policy, for example.

PointCentral and similar companies use artificial intelligence to train their devices to detect and send alerts for anomalies — a guest’s arrival or a package delivery, for example — rather than stream or record around the clock.

“You don't need to find that in 23 hours and 59 minutes and 30 seconds of the day,” Wysk said. “You want to see the 30 seconds when something was happening, when somebody walked in the front door or when somebody came to check in, did they bring 10 people with them?

In a similar fashion, the noise-monitoring devices produced by Minut do more than measure decibels; they’re AI-trained to detect specific events, like loud parties or breaking windows. That means they can provide a level of security indoors without listening — or recording — Big Brother-style to what’s being said among guests.

“We strongly believe that the right way to approach this is to never record the sensitive data in the first place,” Mattisson said. “We have this on-device AI that can detect events, and only when those events are detected [do] you send the metadata of it to the cloud.”

Trustd.ai takes a more proactive approach. The company uses AI to help short-term rental managers and hosts filter out potentially problematic guests by collecting and aggregating behavioral data points across multiple booking systems.

CEO Sonmez compared the company’s service to the way a car dealer finds security in a credit check before the customer drives off in a new vehicle.

“The short-term rental sector falls into what we call the gig economy or sharing economy,” he said. “There is no metric inside the sharing economy to provide the peace of mind in service exchanges for the host and the guest. … This is our goal.”

For when these measures aren’t enough, third-party insurers like Safely offer coverage that goes beyond what’s standard with the big platforms, with most of the claims paid in three days and without hosts risking bad reviews by having to ask the guests to pay. AI plays a factor here by aiding the company in screening guests to determine how risky the reservation is going to be, Bate said.

“We see the screening as a really big component of the insurance, not as a separate product,” he said. “So now we can understand the risk a little bit better.”

To what degree do new rules and regulations make it difficult for individual homeowners to break into the sector?

While no one dismissed the potential for individual property owners to thrive in the short-term sector, the experts agreed it was more difficult than it once was.

Mattisson drew comparisons to the early days or Airbnb or Uber when anyone could imagine renting out a second room or earning extra cash in a beat-up car.

“What happened, of course, is as more and more people [started] using these platforms, the expectation from the guest or customer point of view goes up every time,” he said. “So when an Uber now shows up in a half-broken car, we're like, ‘No way. That’s not OK.’ And it’s a little bit the same with short-term rentals. We have a very high expectation [now] of Wi-Fi being super stable, cleaning being spotless.

“I'm not going to say it’s out of reach for the average homeowner, but it certainly requires them to rely a bit more on professional services.”

Wysk sees a big push within the industry for greater professionalization and standardization.

“Whether you manage 2,000 units or you manage five, it benefits us and it’s important that you provide a good quality experience, and some of that comes from the professionalization,” he said. “It makes it feel like I, as a guest, am not going to be walking up going, ‘Buyer beware? Am I going to have to go and wait for three hours to get a physical key?’”

On the plus side, the experts agreed, there’s more help for individuals to break into the sector than there ever was.

“If you try to do all of this without the proper tools, it's like trying to do anything without the proper tools,” said Guesty’s Angotti. “You're going to have a hard time to, for example, distribute properties and go over manually on Airbnb and Booking.com and your own website and Vrbo. If you were to try to do that manually, that one task gets very difficult.

“As it becomes more competitive with the hotels and other mature industries, we are going to have to leverage technology for scalable hospitality — where guests come, have a great experience, where their privacy is respected, where we at least meet expectations, if not exceed expectations. The way we do that is through leveraging all these different tools we have available to us.”