https://goo.gl/JdliYe
Airbnb hosts have already been found to discriminate against guests with "black-sounding" names, and now it sounds like host discrimination extends to guests with disabilities as well.
A study by researchers at Rutgers, highlighted in The New York Times today, found that guests who disclose a disability are less likely to be approved for a room and more likely to be outright rejected.
Guests who didn’t disclose a disability received “pre-approval” from an Airbnb host 74.5 percent of the time. But that number dipped sharply for guests who disclosed a disability. A person with dwarfism had a 60.9 percent approval rate, and a person who was blind had a 49.7 percent approval rate.
Those figures dipped further for guests with cerebral palsy and spinal cord injuries, falling to just 43.4 percent and 24.8 percent, respectively.
The researchers said that some of the gap between pre-approvals could be explained by hosts stopping to ask questions about what accommodations a guest will need.