Airbnb is banning parties at all Ontario listings this New Year's Eve and here's how it will check

If you're looking for a place to host a New Year's Eve get-together around Toronto this year, you'll have to risk trashing your own home or splurge on an actual event venue, as Airbnb is cracking down on any bookings that even smell like a shindig.

As it has done with Halloween and other major holidays in recent years, the platform is temporarily imposing sterner restrictions at the end of this month to enforce its blanket party ban around the times of year when its listings are most often used for such purposes.

With the aim of "reducing the risk of unauthorized and disruptive parties," the short-term rental giant is employing AI not just in Toronto and Ontario, but across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and a handful of other countries.

The tech will seek out one, two and three-night reservation requests for entire homes over key party dates that "could be potentially higher-risk" for blowout bashes, and then bar them from successfully going through.

Risk factors include the duration of the "trip" in question — with shorter bookings being more suspicious — and what type of listing is being booked out (a large detached home for a high price, for example, may mean a large group is chipping in to cover the cost).

Also considered is how last-minute a user is trying to book, and how far a listing is from their given location; someone from Toronto booking a home over the holiday in Toronto, for example, would be suspicious.

Guests booking stays over New Year's will also need to agree to the company's anti-party policies and to potential suspension or removal from the platform if they don't abide by them.

Airbnb says in a release that last New Year's Eve, some 4,200 people in Ontario were blocked from booking out homes for gathering purposes, including 1,550 in Toronto specifically.

Since the measures first came into play over NYE 2020, there has been a 78 per cent decrease in reports of parties at properties on the app.