How Airbnb Makes It Hard to Sue for Discrimination

In March of 2015, Gregory Selden, a twenty-five-year-old black man from Virginia, was planning a trip to Philadelphia. He’d heard it could be cheaper to stay at someone’s house, through Airbnb, than to rent a hotel, so he created an Airbnb profile, with a photo and some basic details about himself, and sent an inquiry to a host whose place looked appealing. The host quickly wrote back: the accommodation was already taken for those dates. But Selden thought there was something strange about the exchange—for one thing, the Airbnb site described the place as available—so he decided to conduct an experiment. He created two fake Airbnb profiles, for white people named “Jessie” and “Todd,” and put in requests for accommodations at the same property over the same dates. Again, a reply arrived right away, but this time they were different: Jessie and Todd were welcome.

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