Perhaps the Thai government asked them to close the account.
AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
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Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#12Often in these articles, you read through to some sort of detail hidden at the end which reveals why the company actually did cut ties, and the aggrieved party is blind to it or trying to talk around it. In this case, there's nothing. My guesses were assault, theft or maybe some effort to actively sabotage Airbnb by promoting a competitor. But if any of those things happened, they're not detailed or hinted at all. I…
The sense I get is just that they don't cancel successful accounts very often; given the escalations, I have to believe they have some strong reason. It sounds like they will have some host community issues now, but what got me was how they cancelled guests. It sounds like they just used the host cancellation process, but if I found out AirBnB did that masked as the host, I'd go from annoyed at the world to very angry at AirBnB...
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#13Perhaps the Thai government asked them to close the account.
Sadly, this is probably the likely scenario and the reason why they are acting like it's a national security concern.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#14An obscure, not fully tested algorithm applies a filter to all users. Maybe it's an internal beta, maybe some integrator that should have considered account history pulled a blank table instead of real values. Whatever. It happened.
Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even can know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to happen like that in the first place. Nobody wants the responsibility for dealing with it.
So there you have it.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#15Airbnb is a short-term rental company, not a f *ing nation state. It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these Kafka-esque scenarios. Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
Commercial companies often seem to be more opaque and arbitrary than governments.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#16An obscure, not fully tested algorithm applies a filter to all users. Maybe it's an internal beta, maybe some integrator that should have considered account history pulled a blank table instead of real values. Whatever. It happened. Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even can know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to happen like that in the first plac…
If you have algos in place to flag an account and forget to implement the reason why that algo came to the conclusion, you should seriously rethink your setup.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading that article makes me furious -- of course, there are many things we don't know, and this person may be full of it, and she may have crossed a line (knowingly... or unknowingly), etc. But, even if that's true, not giving reasons why you're kicking users out is infuriating. No due process, no appeal, just a big "fuck you" with no explanation whatsoever. These companies apparently think it's a normal way of dea…
Indeed, Stripe for example built its entire business on people's frustration with similar behavior by Paypal.
Absolutely, yet they closed accounts for no good reasons too.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#18What a shitty termination notice and a shitty way of handling things from an account that has clearly been one of their better hosts. If you're going to ascribe the "superhost" appellation, you'd think they'd actually give a fuck before algorithmically cancelling the user's account, or maybe work through a warning or validate their concerns or literally ANYTHING before turning things up to 11 and nuking the account from orbit.
Even if AirBNB had a perfectly legitimate reason (which, to be clear, would make the author a borderline sociopath to publish like this, but isn't out of the question), the termination notice and the complete lack of transparency is so Kafkaesque and needlessly horrible that this just makes AirBNB look awful.
I've considered going the host route, but reading through something like this makes me seriously second guess using them. I understand that it's their platform and they can de facto rule by fiat, but that doesn't mean it's good policy and that potential hosts shouldn't have some sort of communication or chance to rectify an issue or any level of transparency.
It's also disappointing when a company effectively has to be shamed into taking anything resembling a human approach to a problem. It's been a week of "we can't tell you anything, sorry" which is bullshit. There's simply no reason for that, and it's disheartening to say the least.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#19Airbnb is a short-term rental company, not a f *ing nation state. It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these Kafka-esque scenarios. Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
Kafka-esque is the perfect qualifyer for this situation. Absurd things like this make me feel queesy, sort of like vertigo.
Re: AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
#20In the meantime you may upload your apartments in Housetrip, Wimdu, Booking.com, Homeaway and so on.
None is as good and smooth as Airbnb but they work.
When hopefully Airbnb reopens your account, keep these portals too, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket.