Airbnb Has Been Removing Listings of Cabins Where Slaves Lived

Airbnb has received backlash of featuring slave cabins and plantations, since removing 30 listings to reduce discrimination.

Airbnb is attempting to combat discrimination with the removal of 30 listings of cabins and houses that slaves either lived or worked in. The move comes four months after the rental company received backlash on TikTok over having an early 19th-century slave cabin at Mississippi’s Belmont Plantation on the website over the summer, per CBS News.

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“This particular structure, the Panther Burn Cabin, is an 1830s slave cabin from the extant Panther Burn Plantation to the south of the Belmont. It has also been used as a tenant sharecroppers cabin and a medical office for local farmers and their families to visit the plantation doctor,” the listing read.

Airbnb’s removals of the former slave quarters accompanies a six-year update audit of the company’s improvement to address bias and discrimination. Although the platform has denied access of more than 2.5 million for failing to agree to Airbnb’s anti-discrimination policy since 2016, Black and Latino travelers still have lower “booking success.” An audit that sampled 750,000 random reservation requests found that Black travelers had a 91.4% booking success rate compared to 93.4% for Latinos and 94.1% for Whites.

In a six-year update announcement earlier this month, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said that the company will “continue to innovate and design new products and initiatives that increase acceptance and combat bias.” Chesky also noted that the website “can’t do this work alone” and relies on the feedback from its listing partners.