Good luck booking an Airbnb in Texas for your next Halloween party

HOUSTON – Like Halloween crawls around the corner, Airbnb reminds people of the heightened anti-party defenses it has launched in the US and Canada.

In 2023, the popular short-term rental booking company said it stopped about 4,000 people from booking an entire home for a Halloween party. It was about 700 people in Houston alone.

The technology Airbnb relies on works like machine learning to try to identify one- and two-night booking attempts for entire houses that might pose a higher risk to a party and prevent them from being made. Hundreds of trigger signals are also taken into account, such as whether the stay is booked at the last minute or the duration of the trip and the distance to the advertisement.

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In the U.S. and Canada, about 37,000 people were deterred from booking Airbnbs last Halloween, and the company says it saw a decrease in reports of disruptive parties during that holiday weekend.

“The vast majority of Airbnb guests are responsible travelers, and problems are rare,” said Tara Bunch, Global Head of Operations at Airbnb, in a press statement. “We want to support our host countries and local communities in trying to reduce the risk of disruptive events even further, and we believe these measures will help us do that.”

For more information about Airbnb’s anti-party measures: click here.