In Paris, Airbnb Blamed For All Kinds Of Ills

The first paying guests to the ground-floor studio flat newly posted on Airbnb were innocuous enough: A family, come to experience the joys of Paris, like many millions of others.

- 

Franck Briand, who lives in the apartment directly above, now looks back on that moment as the start of what he calls his Airbnb “nightmare.” The ensuing four years, he says, have been an incessant carousel of late-night parties, drunken revelers and the rattle of newly arrived groups, sometimes 15 at a time, dragging wheeled suitcases across the cobbled courtyard.

“I want to leave,” Briand says. “But I said to myself that it shouldn’t be the weakest, those under threat, who give in.”

Paris, long one of the world’s top destinations, is still grateful for the billions of euros (dollars) that tourists pump into the French capital’s economy and the 300,000 jobs they sustain. But Parisians and City Hall officials also are expressing deep qualms about having so many visitors directly in their midst, no longer largely corralled in hotels but instead living, albeit temporarily, cheek-byjowl with locals in properties rented online.

The backlash in Paris against intrusive, onyour-doorstep tourism hasn’t yet reached the proportions of other heavily visited cities. Venice and Barcelona, among other destinations, have seen repeated protests. But concerns voiced in top European destinations are often the same: That mass tourism and its online platforms are hollowing cities out, driving away locals with higher prices, higher rents and sheer inconvenience.