How I Fought Airbnb’s Sex Discriminatory Policies — And Won.
By: Jane Peng
Tags: Gender Equality, Airbnb, Toxic Masculinity, Pregnancy, Social Issues

Last year in April, when the world was in the initial stages of the Covid pandemic, I did the most ordinary thing that almost anyone had done at one point in 2020: I cancelled a holiday and all the bookings tied to it. Little did I know that this simple, almost prosaic, act would trigger a David VS Goliath battle one year later between myself and the travel giant, Airbnb.

You see, when I cancelled my Airbnb booking, instead of a refund Airbnb issued credits to my account to be used for a future booking. At the time, it struck me as odd that a refund option wasn’t even provided, but seeing that all travel companies were struggling heavily at that time, I wasn’t too bothered by it at the time.

This April, my husband and I found out that we were pregnant, which we were delighted about. The challenge: we were still in the midst of a global pandemic, and the world was grappling with the highly infectious Delta variant. This in itself was already a health risk to all pregnant women, who are immunosuppressed and therefore more vulnerable to the dangers of Covid. To put it into perspective, a recent study found that pregnant women who catch Covid are 22 times more likely to die than those without Covid.

This harsh reflection on our mortality rate is compounded by the fact that in late May 2021, the British government still did not yet have timelines as to when I or anyone in my age group could receive our first dose of vaccination. And unlike the US, which was providing the second dose per CDC guidance (3 weeks gap for Pfizer; 4 weeks gap for Moderna), our government was at the time only offering the second dose after a minimum 12 week gap from the first. This meant that even if I received my first jab in the early summer, I wouldn’t be properly inoculated until late summer or September, by which time I would be in my third trimester — a generally dangerous time to travel.

If you were in my shoes, what would you do about travel plans for the year? For me, the choices were pretty clear cut: either I travel before I was in the third trimester but before I am fully innoculated, or I travel in my third trimester, once I’d received my second jab. Both options presented a risk to the health of mother and baby, so of course the third option was to simply to not travel and look to 2022 for a holiday instead. A pretty reasonable thing to do in these conditions, I thought.

Cue a phone call to Airbnb to enquire about my credits they’d issued. This quickly turned into a surreal exchange as below (adapted for brevity):

Me: When do the booking credits you’d issued expire please?

Airbnb: End December this year.

Me: Ah, I’m due to give birth end November. And it’s pretty unrealistic to travel the very first month after labour, with a newborn at home. Could you please extend the validity of the credits? I should be able to use them next year.

Airbnb: No, we cannot do that. It is not Airbnb policy to extend the credits. You will need to use them before end of the year.

Me: …But I’m currently pregnant and have not been able to get vaccinated against Covid because the rollout of the government’s vaccination program hasn’t reached my age group yet. There’s no indication when I can even get my first jab. You don’t expect me to travel when pregnant but without vaccination, do you? That’s a health risk to both myself and my baby.

Airbnb: I understand your concerns, but again we cannot extend the validity of your credits.

Me: So… you expect me to plan a holiday and do the trip all within the next 6 months, whilst pregnant but unvaccinated, and when the pandemic situation is unstable, both in my country and globally? Why can’t the credits just be extended? It’s not like I’m asking for my money back. I’m just planning to use it at a later time.

Airbnb: Look, when you signed up to our services, you agreed to our terms and conditions and not extending the credits is part of this.

Me: But the credits were forced upon me — I never asked for them. It was Airbnb who put it upon me.

Airbnb: I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you on this matter.

The Airbnb customer representative was adamant that where the credits were concerned it was a case of “use it or lose it”, pandemic and pregnancy be damned.

When I escalated my case at Airbnb and reiterated the many challenges of being expected to travel as an unvaccinated pregnant woman, the manager reiterated that “it is impossible to extend coupons” and that “the policy is in place to ensure equality and impartiality for everybody.”

The response stung — not just because of their callous attitude or the fact that it reeked of hypocrisy and sex discrimination, but because my situation seemed so perfectly normal that I couldn’t understand why they refused to account for it.

Pregnancy is a fundamental condition that impacts vast majority of the female sex. By conservative estimates, approximately 75% of all women will be pregnant at least once in their lifetime, the rest generally choosing either not to bear children or are unable to. To put it bluntly, every single person on this planet came to be through a pregnant woman, and without this most basic of biological functions, there would be no continuity of our civilisation.

How could a business like Airbnb fail to account for the basic but important needs of an entire sex? How could they claim that their policies are striving for “equality and impartiality for everybody” when they neglect the fundamental needs of the female sex?

I also wondered: how many people around the world were facing the same issue, at risk of losing their money because they had “credits” with unreasonable timelines forced upon them? Turns out, a LOT. In fact, the first pregnant friend I spoke to about this said she was in the same fight with Airbnb herself.

Pregnancy can be a wonderful, empowering experience, but it is also a condition that is fraught with challenges and mental and/or physical health issues: you could become pregnant but experience a devastating miscarriage, or you could carry the baby but experience a laundry list of “wonderful” side effects: debilitating nausea (for five torturous week, I threw up food, water and my own bile and “peaked” when I had five rounds of vomiting in a single morning), high blood pressure, heartburn, constipation, diabetes, fatigue, back pain and loosening joints, and haemorrhoids, to name just a few of the most common symptoms.

Faced with such health conditions that could last the full duration of the pregnancy and may require medical attention, how could women be expected to plan and take a holiday whilst pregnant and a pandemic was still raging in the world? It would be a different story if we didn’t have a pandemic; as it were, it changed everything.

Why should one be effectively pressured into spending their money within an unreasonably short and dangerous time frame — doesn’t the term “holiday” contain an element of choice and desire, and should not be taken under duress?

When I tried to share my situation on an online parenting forum, things got even more interesting. Though a few people were sympathetic to my situation, a notable number of them were unsympathetic or outright antagonistic.

“I don’t see a problem. You have half a year. Just travel”; “You’ll be fine; infection rates are falling now anyway” (which turned out to be a short-lived trend. Within weeks, the UK’s new case count again soared to 40,000 per day and stayed there; the infection rate was so high that we became listed as and still are a “red country” in many parts of the world and faced strict travel restrictions). One commenter went even further, dismissing the problem by saying “it’s your fault for getting pregnant in the first place.”

It struck me then that a large chunk of society has a blind spot where pregnancy is concerned, something that I too was guilty of before I became pregnant myself. Many simply don’t see how pregnancy can at times be an incredibly lonely and even harrowing journey, especially for women whom healthcare providers deem to have a “high risk pregnancy” like myself.

Perhaps, for too many people, the word “pregnant” simply evokes the image of a cute baby, but not the mental and physical struggles, nor the tremendous blood loss that continues for an entire month following delivery. And is it any surprise? After all, it’s far easier to garner likes on social media with a cute baby post rather than talking about the realities, the messiness, of giving birth.

At this point, my situation was clear. I was not about to take a big risk on my health nor my baby’s in the name of a forced holiday, so either I let the credits expire and forfeit my money, or I take the fight with Airbnb further.

Frankly, the amount of money at stake wasn’t worth my time, which I valued far more. But pregnancy changes your perspectives on life. I had to consider not just whether this was an injustice I could live with, but whether it was an injustice I was happy to leave to the next generation, to a world that my child will have to grow up in.

The answer was: no. And now I understood why they say one should never pick a fight with a pregnant woman. It is not just that we are hormonal; it is that we have more at stake now, and are fighting for a world we wish to see.

Airbnb may have shut my case on their side, but I still had a voice in the world. At the suggestion of a journalist friend, I took the fight to Twitter, that place where journalists are always on the look out for a new story and brands are wary that their missteps can blow up into a media storm. So one morning, I sent a simple tweet:

Sure enough, within an hour of my tweet calling out Airbnb’s discriminatory policies, Airbnb reached out and, citing their own non-discrimination policy, stated that they do not condone any form of discrimination and were reviewing my case again. Before the morning was over, I got an apology from Airbnb; they also acknowledged the difficulties in planning and taking trips during Covid and provided a full year extension to my credits. They now will only expire in December 2022.

All of which is to say, pregnancy is at once an empowering and vulnerable time in a woman’s life; companies that fail to acknowledge the duality of this basic human condition or fail to implement policies to reflect this fact are inherently failing to acknowledge the differing needs we all have as human beings.

There is still a mountain’s worth of work to be done on the sex discrimination front at large, and these issues are not just shortchanging our women, but punishing our men as well. I highlight the latter for a simple reason: just as Airbnb’s booking policies neglect a common condition of an entire sex, so too does the widespread issue of toxic masculinity. Both problems are a form of repression on our sex and/or gender, and we cannot achieve true progress towards equality in our societies until we acknowledge the inherent differences and needs that we all possess.

So the next time you face a manifestation of a deeper social injustice, consider your voice and how you can use it: debate, discuss, or simply call the guilty party out. For only through open dialogue and attention on the issue can we hope to initiate change — for ourselves and a future that others will one day have to call their own.