Kristin Turner’s first few months as an Airbnb host had gone off without a hitch. She and her husband had purchased a home in Austin, Texas, in 2022 as a place to stay when they commuted into the city to work at a downtown trauma center, where they are both nurses. 

Turner, 41, and her husband are both Austin natives, but they normally live with their son on a family farm outside the city that has been passed down within her husband’s family for decades. “It’s a great life, but we commute a lot,” she said. To make the constant travel more bearable, they started to look into buying a home in Austin proper, but found the housing prices too high for them to afford on their own. 

“So we said, ‘Well, let’s look into buying a house in Austin as a place that we can stay part time and rent out other times,’” she said. 

In July, they closed on a three-bedroom home, planning to put it on short-term rental sites like Airbnb. One month later, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said recruiting more hosts was the company’s top priority as it tried to meet demand for rental properties and reduce nightly costs. The company regularly advertises the benefits of putting one’s home on the platform. 

To make the home more appealing to potential renters, the Turners fixed it up and built an elaborate guest book that took advantage of their knowledge as Austin locals. It was a sizable investment of time and money, but by the fall, the plan appeared to be working. 

“Things were going really well,” she said. “I had bookings coming in daily.”

Then, one night last October, Turner received an email that changed everything. It was from a member of the Airbnb team who identified herself only as “Eleanor,” saying that the company had decided to remove her from the platform not because of her own behavior, but because her account had been “closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb.” 

Airbnb was doing this for the “safety of our community,” Eleanor said.

Turner was shocked and devastated. Soon enough, all her home’s bookings had been deleted and she could not get into her account. The potential consequences were clear. She had purchased a home on the idea that she would rent it out to help cover the mortgage, and now  the company that dominated the short-term rental market had suddenly and permanently banned her from doing so. Immediately, she began to fear that her family would face financial ruin. She didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

For a decade now, Airbnb has had background checks performed on its users in hopes of making the platform as safe as possible for both hosts and guests. The checks, which are carried out by a third-party service that claims to complete them on average in less than a second, have been criticized for their arbitrary nature as people fight bans for infractions as small as not keeping a dog leashed, or, in Turner’s case, knowing the wrong people.

Hoping to overturn the ban, Turner wrote back to ask for additional information, but Eleanor replied only to say the company had given her “case and its details careful consideration” and was unwilling to reverse the decision or even offer “additional support.”

Turner’s responses became increasingly desperate. “Please give me an opportunity to appeal this,” Turner responded in turn. “There has been a misunderstanding. In no way was there any attempt to misrepresent myself or any information. I have had a guest account for many years and have hosted for a short time with no issues.”

Airbnb had not provided her with the association that had led to the ban, so she was left to try and piece together what had happened herself. Recently, she had tried to help her 70-year-old mother, Janet, and her mother’s partner, Carl, find a new place to stay after their landlord revealed plans to renovate t