AirBnB requires credit card on file, doesn't it? And property gets damaged in hotels the same way, the only difference whose property it is - hotel owner's or appartment owner's. As for fire code, I don't see how it is even relevant.
So? It doesn't prevent people from ignoring those rules, and there's no fire inspector going through all rooms to check if there's no code violation. Again, the prevention here is impossible. Fining people that did it after the fact - easily, but that's not the problem here. If having "max occupancy set" were a problem, AirBnB would just said on the site "no more than 3 people and no wild sex parties" and problem solved, right?
It is legally relevant, whether you like it or not. There's a lot of bluster in the rest of your response. I sure as hell don't support the hotel lobby and I'm not a fan of "hotel taxes" either. But that's special interest politics and its quite removed from the broad structuring of risk that legitimate regulation facilitates. Fire-codes, health-codes, and fundamental liability for willful corporate malfeasance/negligence are not so easily dismissed.
Nobody is dismissing anything. OP has posted a story about his bad experience with AirBnB-approved people he let into his place, and the knee-jerk response was "that's why we have hotel regulations". No, that's not why - hotel regulations would not do anything to prevent the specific thing OP was complaining about.
That is a very common knee-jerk response which appears any time new and disruptive industry challenges one with entrenched regulation that had already captured the law and the regulatory agencies. Every time something wrong happens - and eventually something wrong always happens, nothing is perfect - we get a knee-jerk "that's why we need all that regulation". Never it is examined if the said regulation would actually prevent the said bad from happening (usually not) and whether the costs of this regulation is worse overall than the bad thing happening. This is so basic logic fallacy that it just boggles the mind how so many people insist so much on not seeing it.
What the OP reported was that a business fronted its way into a residential building (using AirBnB) to hold a commercial event in an un-sanctioned venue.
This is exactly why places like NYC have regulations of various types, of which a multitude are applicable.
It is incredibly inefficient economically to have consumers "due dilligence" every potentially manipulative market exchange with a limited liability c-corp. So, we can either ban limited liability c-corps outright (forcing liability onto biz owners) or we can allow them within a regulatory framework that forces "structured" liability onto them.
The idea that this is some kind of logical fallacy is hillarious. It is quite sound, and is in general acceptable trade-off. It allows capital concentration/formation which is required for MES projects, whist not allowing abuse of power driven by such scale variance.
