Airbnb, the 21st century’s answer to Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes except with more cities laid waste, is involved in a trademark battle with a tiny six-room bed & breakfast on the Isle of Portland in the UK. The guesthouse was set up in 2024 to help fund an almost 20-year-old arts festival called b-side. Rather cleverly, the bed & breakfast just added “bn” in front of “b-side” — and, voilà, the brand bnb-side was born. But if Airbnb has anything to do with it, it’s time for bnb-side to die.
Airbnb has sent three legal letters since May 2026 demanding that the guesthouse stop trying to register the name it has used since opening, basing its argument on three separate legal grounds. Airbnb feels that consumers will confuse the two brands and that bnb-side will financially profit by misrepresenting itself as an official Airbnb service. The Silicon Valley behemoth also contends that bnb-side could benefit from or damage Airbnb’s reputation — though citizens of cities like Berlin, Madrid and Cape Town will want to add the rider “damage even further”.
According to that excellent data site The Outlier, Cape Town added more than 6,000 Airbnb listings in just two years, climbing from 20,583 in late 2023 to 26,877 listings by late 2025. By mid-2026, that number had reached 27,381, placing Cape Town eighth globally for Airbnb supply — surpassing tourist heavyweights like Barcelona, Amsterdam and Berlin. All of which makes life pretty unaffordable for actual locals.
This is a point the manager of bnb-side made to The Guardian. “It’s pretty bitter. We’ve watched other small, local hospitality businesses go under, and local people unable to afford homes here, who have been negatively affected by the force with which the Airbnb market has conquered Portland. One person owns eight properties on the island, all of which are rented out on Airbnb.”
As The Guardian drily put it: “Lawyers for the Silicon Valley titan say the name of the guesthouse, perched on an outcrop just four miles long by 1.5 miles wide, threatens the global brand of the $100bn heavyweight.” The owner of bnb-side said: “They won’t let us compromise by using a different case, an ampersand or an ‘and’. According to Airbnb, we can’t describe our BnB as a BnB at all.”
Serial litigator
Airbnb has targeted multiple small businesses over use of the generic term “bnb”. One of the funniest is probably a Scottish dog boarding start-up called Hairbnb, which Airbnb sued in 2019, claiming the name was confusingly similar to its own.
I searched for Hairbnb to see if it is still around and found the Instagram for a South African salon called Hairbnb, situated in Container 68, 344 Francis Baard Street, Pretoria. I don’t think Airbnb would have much joy suing it, but I’m sure it’s willing to give it a try. The Scottish dog business seems to still be going, if Yelp (a great place to list a dog kennel business) is to be believed.
Airbnb has fought this battle many times, with — and this is putting it kindly — inconsistent results, which might indicate that the term “bnb” is legally unstable. A US board has already ruled that “bnb” is just descriptive shorthand for “bed and breakfast” — wow, I bet you didn’t see that one coming — and that it predates Airbnb by decades.
But good ol’ Airbnb just keeps litigating as if it owns the letters. Other targets have included an Australian family-run linen and housekeeping firm called BNB Hire Linen. More recently, the US Trademark Trial & Appeal Board rejected Airbnb’s bid to cancel a small operator’s “Complete BnB” registration, ruling that “bnb” is highly descriptive and confusion was unlikely. A (presumably) miffed Airbnb is now appealing that decision in federal court.
Possibly the most South African trademark case involved the Laugh It Off T-shirt company’s parodying of brands for the purposes of satire. The most famous of those was the “Black Labour, White Guilt” parody of the Carling Black Label beer logo, which resulted in SAB suing for trademark dilution. The Constitutional Court sided with the satirists and protected free speech on that one.
There’s a long history of big brands litigating, or at least threatening litigation, against small businesses. Sometimes it makes sense, because trademarks are valuable assets and you wouldn’t want a precedent to be set that has the potential to dilute that value. But there’s something galling about Airbnb trying to trademark “bnb” when the only reason it’s in its name is that the term already existed. It’s bad enough that the company is stealing our lived environment from us; coming for our language is really not acceptable. Here’s wishing bnb-side a resounding victory.
