Hotels a drag for smokers, so rentals the answer

Services like Airbnb connect to friendly lodgings

People using peer-to-peer services like Airbnb, which link potential guests to hosts offering space in their homes, can find plenty of smoking-friendly lodging, according to a recent Canadian study.

In Canada and the United States, many major hotel chains have banned smoking, and several states prohibit smoking in all hotels.

“Hotels have increasingly gone smoke-free over the last 10 years. This is good for the staff who work in hotels and for guests,” said lead author Dr. Ryan Kennedy, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

When it comes to regulating peerto-peer accommodation services, the public health concern of smoke exposure should be a consideration, he and his colleagues write in the journal Tobacco Control.

Nonsmokers who use these services “should always ask if smoking is prohibited, how smoking bans are monitored and enforced, how long smoking has been prohibited, and where smokers are allowed to smoke,” said Dr. Georg Matt, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who studies smoking restrictions but wasn’t involved in Kennedy’s research.

In April 2016, the study team searched Airbnb listings in 12 Canadian cities across all 10 of the country’s provinces. They looked for various types of lodging available in June, including private rooms and entire homes or apartments, noting whether smoking was permitted and also the price of the rooms.

Availability of smoke-friendly accommodations varied widely, and smoking-permitted lodging tended to be less expensive than smoke-free homes.

In Regina, Fredericton and Charlottetown, no listings permitted smoking. In five cities — Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and St John’s — less than 10 percent of listings allowed guests to smoke.

In larger cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, the proportion of smoking-allowed rooms was much greater, making up 18 percent, 45 percent and 69 percent of listings, respectively.

While some cities listed similar prices for smoking or nonsmoking rooms, others had a significant price gap. Vancouver’s was the biggest: The average cost to rent a smokefree private room for one night was about $95, while the cost of a private room that allowed smoking was $46.

The team also looked at the reviews section of each listing and noted that hosts often commented on exactly where smoking was allowed. Most specified that smoking was only allowed outside.