Airbnb

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

Yesterday I registered myself an Airbnb Account. Since I am moving to a new apartment I thought I should check out how easy it would be to create an account and prepare my new Apartment.

As it turned out, you are pretty fast set and ready to open your apartment for rent.

They have got a process set up where you are basically asked questions and based on the answers, your settings are set.

Since the new apartment doesn't have any furniture right now, I didn't upload any pictures. But I completed all the questions, wrote a brief description on the what and why.

After all that you're basically set on a page where they tell you, you're responsible for the law-correctness of your service.

My brain switched instantly. "Oh, I didn't even think about that".

Even though I am a freelance developer since 2014 (besides my normal day to day job), I didn't think of that aspect. Since there are a bunch of "Airbnb"'s available in Austria I thought that it couldn't be that hard.

Well, I don't think that I have to say it isn't that easy in Austria. I quickly checked the Governments online Platforms to find something about it. Interestingly, our Government thought already about such platforms, but not really in a good way.

Basically, even if you don't provide breakfast (for example), you have to have a Guestbook and report any Guest to the local city Government.

I was sure that I had to pay taxes, but reading through the pages of "law-german" ("Juristendeutsch", basically texts that only lawyers really understand), my enthusiasm turned into frustration.

Now I am thinking about if I just delete everything again, or if I am taking the cost on my tax advisor and lawyer to figure it out for me. At least a couple hundred bucks would be burned.

I just thought about it as a way to meet interesting people, as I do it as paramedic regularly (I mean new patients with interesting stories :) ). Now I am facing theoretical costs I don't really want to pay for something probably will never pay back.

A small callout to the people here on the platform, did you already sleep in an Airbnb or something similar, or are you hosting one yourself?