The hotel industry has never liked Airbnb. Since the launch of the short-term rental company in 2008, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, the sector’s trade group and lobbying arm, has urged cities to tax, restrict and prohibit Airbnb’s activities. But now the industry may be encouraging a new tactic: inciting fear of child predators. “With a revolving door of strangers coming and going from short-term rental properties, tools like sex offender lists are becoming obsolete,” wrote Stacie Rumenap, president of the nonprofit Stop Child Predators, in a guest column last March in the Knox News in Knoxville, Tennessee. “There is no safeguard in place to stop a child predator from renting an Airbnb property next door.” At the time, Tennessee lawmakers were considering whether to forbid cities across the state from regulating short-term rentals. Rumenap wrote that if the legislation passed, “the term ‘Stranger Danger’ will take on a whole new meaning for parents in Tennessee as the community fabric of neighborhoods across the state will be fractured and local schools, parents and children will have to contend with more complete strangers in their neighborhoods.” Tennessee was not the only battle in Stop Child Predators’ war against short-term rentals. Throughout 2018 and into 2019, the group has published nearly identical op-eds and letters to the editor in Miami and Washington, D.C., and participated in anti-Airbnb campaigns in Los Angeles, Boston and San Diego. Starting in June 2018, the group’s Facebook page dedicated itself almost exclusively to supporting local efforts to restrict short-term rentals. In May 2019 alone, Stop Child Predators posted more than two dozen advertisements related to legislation in Hawaii that would loosen the state’s existing regulations and allow more Airbnb units to come onto the market. “How would you feel,” the group writes on its page about the Hawaii bill, “if you are a parent of young children, about your kids playing outside in the cul-de-sac, riding bikes or playing ball when you have no idea who is renting out the place next door and have no real way of finding out?”

BalkansCat via Getty Images American Hotel & Lodging Association, of which Marriott is a member, has made no secret of its opposition to short-term rentals.

Grassroots Or Astroturf? Many of the advertisements and other written materials produced by Stop Child Predators have a striking resemblance to the messaging that the hotel industry uses in its own efforts to restrict the operations of Airbnb. “Commercial landlords are using Airbnb to rent out multiple residential properties year-round, just like a hotel, while avoiding regulation and taxes,” writes the AHLA on the “Illegal Hotels” page of its website. “Commercial landlords are increasingly using short-term rental sites like Airbnb to rent out multiple residential properties year-round, just like a hotel, while avoiding safeguards designed to protect patrons and the surrounding community,” writes Stop Child Predators on its “Special Projects” page. The AHLA, whose members include Marriott, Hyatt, the Four Seasons and Red Roof Inn, has a history of carrying out lobbying efforts using nonprofit organizations. In 2017, The New York Times published an internal document laying out the AHLA’s strategy for fending off Airbnb. In the document, the AHLA admitted that it had “stood up” a group called AirbnbWATCH to gather negative stories about short-term rentals. Similarly, the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2015 that a group called Neighbors for Overnight Oversight was also an AHLA-funded “astroturf” group. Though the group is now defunct, its website redirects to AirbnbWATCH. “When businesses face major threats that could potentially harm their whole industry, these kinds of ‘grassroots’ campaigns start to happen in a pretty serious way,” Edward Walker, a University of California, Los Angeles, sociology professor told the Center for Public Integrity in 2015. Stop Child Predators and AirbnbWATCH both tweet using a number of phrases featured in AHLA press releases, including “commercial landlords” and “revolving door of strangers.” The AHLA did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this article. Stop Child Predators has also been linked to corporate lobbying efforts in the past. According to a 2011 Mother Jones investigation, one of the group’s earliest lobbying efforts was in support of “Jessica’s Law,” legislation that requires sex offenders to be monitored by GPS. At the time, Rumenap was on the advisory board of Omnilink Systems, a major vendor of the “offender monitoring” devices. Mother Jones reported that Omnilink would have earned up to $20 per person per day for every sex offender subject to the law if monitored using Omnilink’s equipment. Omnilink was also listed as a corporate partner of Stop Child Predators at the time. Though the group’s website features a “donate” button, its most recent tax filing noted that it received just 9.6% of its revenue from the public. The source of its remaining income is not specified. Stop Child Predators did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this article.

BananaStock via Getty Images "Stereotypical" child abductions, in which a minor is kidnapped by an adult they don't know, are extremely rare.