"Living the Revolution", the criticized tour offered on Airbnb in Santiago de Chile

Airbnb, the popular short-term rental platform, removed a special tour to Santiago de Chile on Tuesday, offered in its "Experiences" section: the tour, called "Living the Revolution", cost 19,800 Chilean pesos (24 euro) and included a two-hour walk in some of the areas most involved in the protests in recent months, including Plaza Italia, where protesters came together every day to ask for the resignation of Chilean president Sebastian Pinera and the drafting of a new Constitution. Airbnb removed the tour for security reasons, claiming it violated the terms that all platform customers are obliged to comply with.

To propose this type of tour and publish it was not Airbnb but Sebastian Nieto, a thirty-year-old from Santiago who says he works in tourism and e-commerce.

Nieto told the Chilean site Dynamo that the idea had come to him after receiving the visit of some foreign friends who had been fascinated and intrigued by the protests: "I noticed that there were many spectators at the demonstrations, people taking pictures. It is not often said, but in the end the events are an event ". Organizing a tour of this kind, he added, "is a way to allow travelers to have access to a unique and generally different place to the one they can reach without being accompanied by a local resident".

However, after the tour was published on Airbnb, many people had begun to criticize the idea and ask the platform to remove it from its offers. Above all, two problems were identified.

The first concerned security. In fact, Nieto's tour reached Plaza Italia, renamed by the Plaza de la Dignidad protesters (Piazza della Dignita), the center of protests and often the target of tear gas and carabinieri charges. Since the start of the demonstrations, there have been 26 deaths, thousands injured and more than 300 people have lost an eye due to the rubber bullets fired by the agents. Going to Plaza Italia is dangerous and the risk of getting hurt exists.

The second problem was the fact that Nieto asked for money for the tour, which also included the explanation of writings and murals drawn on the walls of the cultural center named after the poet and feminist Gabriela Mistral, as well as the many visible in the Lastarria neighborhood, near Plaza Italia . Fac Ciraolo, the artist who designed Mistral's well-known mural with a feminist movement scarf and a black flag symbol of protests, he said, referring to Nieto's idea: "I find it horrible that he is trying to make money with this thing ».

Even Ciraolo, along with forty other street artists and the guide Francisca Sasso, has set up a tour that traces the protests through murals: it's called "Chile Desperto" – "Chile woke up", as the slogan of the demonstrations – but it is a free and previous tour to that of Nieto. Its creators were among the most ferocious critics of Nieto, who among other things accused them of copying their idea and then presenting it to Airbnb to make money from it.