Party crashers: Airbnb looks to scare off Ottawa Halloween partiers with AI

Those looking to rent an Airbnb to party this Halloween weekend might be prevented from doing so.

Airbnb has launched an artificial intelligence-driven anti-party system across Canada and the U.S. to "reduce the risk" of disruptive parties over the holiday weekend.

The vacation rental home platform said about 450 people in Ottawa were deterred from booking a home listing on Airbnb for Halloween of last year with the technology.

The help of AI scared off another 7,000 people in Ontario and 14,600 people across Canada from booking party homes.

"This is an issue that you will always have when you have a virtual app that runs smack into real world people," said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst.

"If you're tech savvy enough, you can probably work your way around these new restrictions, but it'll certainly catch a good percentage of them, and it'll go a long way toward reducing the already fairly small numbers even more."

The company says the technology looks at hundreds of signals to determine the risk of a booking, including the length of the trip, the distance to the listing and when the booking was made.

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“While disruptive parties are rare, we want to try to reduce the risk of them even more," said Naba Banerjee, head of trust and safety at Airbnb.

"Our AI anti-party system is an important tool in helping us to do that, and we’re optimistic it will have a positive impact for our community and neighborhoods this Halloween.”

The measures follow the company's global party ban, which it implemented last year because of complaints the platform was allowing wild parties to go unchecked and disturbing neighbours.

With files from CTV News Ottawa's David Charbonneau