Your examples aren't helping to prove your point though. It makes zero sense to require single-family houses or duplexes to have hotel level security. Requiring a homeowner to retrofit sprinklers and fire doors, or provide 24-hour video surveillance or an onsite security guard?

A hotel is fundamentally different sort of facility than my house. Insisting they be regulated the same is pure rent-seeking on the part of the hotel industry.

If you rent it out you are a hotel. Or, possibly, a landlord (which comes with different but quite burdensome regulations in most countries).

What a lot of these startups do is expose areas of markets that may be too rigidly regulated. Perhaps the reasonable level of regulation for Airbnb renting is just working smoke detectors, a basic escape plan map and good insurance? Perhaps most of the remaining hotel regulations could be lifted? It’s very likely that the advent of “not quite hotels” and “not quite taxi” calls for new regulation. But what the established players “war” against is newcomers completely dodging regulation on account of being “not a hotel”, “not a landlord” or “not a taxi”.

> "If you rent it out you are a hotel"

This kind of semantic conflation isn't helpful. A house, rented or not, has almost nothing in common with a typical hotel with dozens of rooms and unrelated guests, complicated egress paths, commercial kitchens, industrial services and controls, etc.

It absolutely makes sense to require hotels to have automatic fire suppression systems, heavy fire doors in every room, video surveillance, or 24-hour guards. And then there's ADA, a whole other conversation.

Hotels aren't pushing for hotel regs to be applied to houses out of some even-handed desire to prevent loopholes. The AH&LA is a cartel trying to have their competition outlawed.

> Hotels aren't pushing for hotel regs to be applied to houses out of some even-handed desire to prevent loopholes. The AH&LA is a cartel trying to have their competition outlawed.

Sure, but the opposite is equally true. AirBNB, Uber, and others aren't blatantly lying about their core business out of some even-handed desire to prevent loopholes. They're doing it exclusively to illegally escape regulation -- regulations their competitors are all bound to by law. They're trying to replace a cartel with their cartel.

The question to the public at large is: would you rather have an existing cartel that is subject to regulation, or a new cartel that also believes it is above the law.

You make it sound like the regulations somehow bind and constrain the existing cartels. Another point of view is that the regulations are the mechanism by which the cartels keep competitors out.

I'd rather have "above the law" cartels than "makes the law" cartels.

When I say “hotel” I didn’t mean some particular category of operation - I meant “commercially by-the-night rented rooms”. Such as a 2-room inn above an English pub, or any 1-room B&B on the French countryside.

Obviously the regulations that should apply for a person renting out a single apartment on AirBnB shouldn’t be more burdensome than the very simplest Inn/B&B.

You've staked out a reasonable position here. But the Hoteliers' cartel doesn't share your position. In public they're careful to say things such as they only want the Hotel Fire Safety Act to be applied evenly, but in practice they're all too happy to push laws and regs design to kill all short term rentals by enforcing maximal regs on them. Take Tennessee, for example, where sympathetic authorities have declared that all short term rentals must be equipped with fire sprinklers [https://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2015/jan/3/cities-acro...]. There's likely a lot more of this nonsense to come.