Top travel websites offer unlicensed rooms

Popular travel websites are offering online bookings for unlicensed guest houses in Hong Kong, exposing tourists to safety hazards, a investigation reveals.

Websites such as TripAdvisor and Airbnb provide little to no information on the legality of holiday rentals that they carry. Names and full addresses, essential for tourists to cross-check with licensed accommodations listed on the Office of the Licensing Authority's webpage, are usually left out on both their Chinese and English websites.

TripAdvisor, whose subsidiary Flipkey powers the searching and booking of 170,000 holiday homes in more than 7,000 cities worldwide, listed 38 Hong Kong "guest houses" on its rental system. Names of these properties are not available on the pages.

Descriptions of these spaces are generic: "Comfortable Apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui Kowloon" or "Serviced 2 Bedroom Flat Near Central". No full addresses - which should include building name, floor and flat number - are listed. Only maps depicting their rough location are available. In many of the listed accommodations, the pointer on the map falls onto the middle of a street.

On another website, Airbnb, maps are so vague that they often cover several streets in a district. The full address is only provided when a booking is confirmed.

A quick search yields 1,210 results for Hong Kong rooms. Among the results is an establishment in Tsuen Wan that allows customers to stay in capsule beds. The ran a check on the accommodation, which turned out to be unlicensed. But it was still available for booking at time of publication.

As for the Chinese audience, website Hong Kong Lodge lists more than 100 flats in the city. Search results contain the names of buildings in which the rooms are located, but give no floor or flat numbers.