The bods at Expedia in Seattle have obviously spent up big on a gaggle of Australian media influencers to “draw people’s attention back to the needs of regional Australia”.  Not a whiff of pretext around ‘home sharing’:  Expedia’s Australian corporates fly under the St...

Today marks 20 years since the Childers backpacker hostel fire that killed 15 people.  “Sergeant Geoff Fay was one of the first on the scene and said it was still difficult to talk about the tragedy.”  As reported by the ABC, the event prompted a state-wide overha...

To quote Airbnb watchers in San Francisco:  “So Business Insider is republishing a corporate press releases?  Is it a package deal?  You pay for the “article” and receive the social media promotion for free? (The) idea that Airbnb rentals are about to get a lot cl...

Airbnb was recently ordered by a French court to pay the owner of a Paris apartment after the tenant sublet the property.  Airbnb and the tenant were jointly ordered to pay Euros 52,000 plus Euro 5,000 in legal fees (approximately AUD94,000.00 in total).  The judge rul...

Remember the days when online booking platforms courted legislators with the concept of ‘Mums and Dads’ earning some extra cash by doing a bit of (commercial) ‘home sharing’?  While a still unknown number of NSW Federal and State MPs and Local Council Administrators ra...

Looking across our Harbour two days ago, Tim Ritchie photographed the Shangri-La Hotel.  With all 565 rooms empty, Management are sending a message to locals (see photo or link).  One expects that many of the Shangri-La’s employees and sub-contracto...

Back in April, Minister for Better Regulation and Innovation Kevin Anderson MP wrote that the NSW Government is committed to establishing a short-term rental accommodation regulatory framework that balances “the rights of homeowners to reasonably use their properties a...

Our Tourism Industry has been totally blindsided by drought, bushfires and now the coronavirus COVID-19.  With the winding back today of some restrictions, the State Government’s DestinationNSW is set to tell us:  “It’s time to love NSW.”  We are al...

A media search of Airbnb ‘news’ over the last 24 hours features, in every language imaginable, one outstanding topic:  Airbnb is making a quarter of its global workforce redundant…laying off 1,900 employees due to a decline in demand.  And in an open call to ex-Airbnb...