Airbnb cracks down on sex trafficking

Boy hold cage with eye sad and hopeless

Home sharing service Airbnb has vowed to crack down on “pop-up brothels” which sexually exploit women and girls internationally.

According to Airbnb, the service will invest in technology that aims to expose modern slavery, following concerns that traffickers are using rental properties to mask illegal activity.

As part of the mission, Airbnb has partnered with anti-trafficking campaign Polaris to help train its staff and develop systems that will spot signs of slavery and report them to police.

According to Reuters, Airbnb has stated it would use safety strategies already implemented – such as screening hosts and guests – and combine this with data from Polaris, which heads up the US National Human Trafficking Hotline.

Nick Shapiro, global head of trust and risk management at Airbnb said: “We’re taking a modern approach to combating modern slavery by leveraging the innovation of the sharing economy to better spot and stop potential exploitation ahead of time.”

“Exploitation and trafficking are still all too common in today’s society, but we are eager to use our global reach to help assist in the effort to end it once and for all,” he added.

 As per Reuters, Polaris has identified roughly 2,680 slavery victims who have been trafficked within the United States, between January 2015 and September 2017.

 “The sharing economy and companies like Airbnb offer new ways to scale up … the fight against trafficking,” Brandon Bouchard, a spokesman for US-based Polaris, said by email.

Airbnb, which started in 2008, operates in almost 200 countries and has facilitated more than 260 million home and room rentals.

Earlier this month, Travel Weekly reported that Airbnb could be on the way to becoming agent friendly, thanks to a new partnership.

Airbnb teamed up with an Australian-founded hotel distribution platform SiteMinder giving the home-sharing service access to hotel rooms as well as private accommodation.

The deal with the Sydney-based company, a “cloud-based” platform used by more than 28,000 hotels globally, allows Airbnb to access, and list, hotels’ inventory.

This will give Airbnb access to hotel rooms and their availability in real-time, as well as rates and content.

As per the release, “Traditional hospitality businesses that use SiteMinder and meet Airbnb’s hospitality standards can quickly and seamlessly list rooms on the platform.

“THE NEW TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPED JOINTLY BY THE TWO COMPANIES WILL NOW MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR HOTELS TO CONNECT BOOKING INFORMATION TO THEIR EXISTING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN REAL-TIME,” IT ADDED.


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