Why Airbnb is dead to me • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#31

Post by ghaff » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

deveac wrote: post #13

>Airbnb do not care about guests and their safety at all. I don't know. It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn't even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting "no, it's cool, I know them"), and furthermore didn't even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred. It's nice that they…

I don't really blame the renters here although, in retrospect, they'd obviously have been better doing things differently.

At the same time, in the grand scheme of bad customer service from big Internet companies, Airbnb doesn't look like a huge offender here. Photos from balconies notwithstanding, there is apparently a lot of he-said, she-said to sort through here and it's really hard for an Airbnb (or an eBay etc.) to sort through that. What usually evolves over time (to the dissatisfaction of one side of transactions or another) is policies that strongly default to favor the buyer or the seller.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#32

Post by antr » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

scottmcdot wrote: post #28

Just tonight, my mother checked into an Airbnb in Vienna, Austria. She sent me photos of the bed which did not have new sheets, the towels which were not fresh, a band aid on the floor and some rubbish bins full of cigarettes and ash. The apartment was overall pretty dirty. The host's contact phone number goes straight to message bank (I also tried many times) and the host is not answering emails. In this situation,…

Back in May I went to Barcelona with a friend. We booked the apartment with Airbnb. Among other issues (the address Airbnb gave us was wrong, and had to wonder the streets for a couple of hours with no response from the host, then the host turns out to be a real estate broker of some sort)... once we found the place at 10pm, it turns out that the beds had no sheets, and the broker asked us for €15 for "fresh" sheets. I found this to be a real abuse... and the real problem with Airbnb: lack of quality control of product and service.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#33

Post by vchamakkala » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

I think there are a handful of hosts that do not care about their guest' experience and instead are mostly focused on the financial gain of renting out their place. That being said, I'm an airbnb host who has rented out my 2nd bedroom in nyc to some of the most amazing individuals I've ever met, and many of them are some of my best friends now.

It really depends on the host. And I think that 90% are fantastic.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#34

Post by deveac » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

Elessar wrote: post #22

deveac wrote: post #13

>Airbnb do not care about guests and their safety at all. I don't know. It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn't even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting "no, it's cool, I know them"), and furthermore didn't even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred. It's nice that they…

Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language? You really need to put yourself in the tourist's shoes. If I booked a tour and the host drove me to a different place to stay, that's all I can do. You rely on their ability to communicate, and if they're being kind and doing their best to make your stay comfortable, then that's fantastic. What you're suggesting is that you're going to s…

>You're also going to blow off the only person (the host) who cares at all about your situation.

Are we reading the same article? The host in this situation advertised a room for let, waited until his guests were on site in the city and contacting him to get the key, then yanked the listing. You're accusing the customer of blowing off the host in this hypothetical?

Any given hotel on any given street cares more than that host.

>What you're suggesting is that you're going to start making international calls with some website's support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own.

Sorry. Imo you're completely dramatizing how hard it is to inform Airbnb of an issue. If you've got either a cell signal or a data connection, the computer in your pocket can take care of this in the time it takes for the host to get to you. You can actually do this with your luggage beside you, and I'd argue that it's a better use of time than driving to an off-the-books apartment that you've never laid eyes on in a completely foreign city. Also, Aribnb provides a local 24/7 phone number in the original confirmation email so you don't have to just rely on the web form.

>Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language?

Yes I have.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#35

Post by chopete » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

My ongoing first time experience forced me to create this basic question set. The realization is airbnb is no different from craigslist. There are no minimum standards/rules. There are awesome deals out there. Only people with a good question set end up choosing a better deal and the rest get stuck with bad deals.

Room 1. Room size (width x length in ft) 2. What lighting do you have?. Or you have only one table lamp? 3. Is there a table? 4. Do you provide a towel? 5. Send me a picture of bed size and also the measurements. (width x length in ft) Please don't just say queen or king. I need the width and length. I have seen hosts mention the sizes incorrectly. 6. Do your personal belongins stay in the room?. Any don't touch belongings? 7. Does the room have a knob(inside) for privacy? 8. Is there a fan? 9. Total house built up area in square footage? (excluding garage)

Sharing 1. How many airbnb guests stay there? 2. How many guests I share the rest room with? 3. Is there space in the fridge for me?. How much (approx)? 4. What is the typical temperature maintained in the house?. Are there guests with a requirement to keep the room warm despite me sweating?

Cleaning 1. What is the cleaning schedule for house?. 1. What is the cleaning schedule for rest rooms?. 2. Who do we call if the shared rest room is soiled?.

Location 1. Are there any loud sounds/noises from surroundings/roads at night?

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#36

Post by scottmcdot » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

antr wrote: post #32

scottmcdot wrote: post #28

Just tonight, my mother checked into an Airbnb in Vienna, Austria. She sent me photos of the bed which did not have new sheets, the towels which were not fresh, a band aid on the floor and some rubbish bins full of cigarettes and ash. The apartment was overall pretty dirty. The host's contact phone number goes straight to message bank (I also tried many times) and the host is not answering emails. In this situation,…

Back in May I went to Barcelona with a friend. We booked the apartment with Airbnb. Among other issues (the address Airbnb gave us was wrong, and had to wonder the streets for a couple of hours with no response from the host, then the host turns out to be a real estate broker of some sort)... once we found the place at 10pm, it turns out that the beds had no sheets, and the broker asked us for €15 for "fresh" sheets.…

The reviews were all very positive, so I think this may have been because the host has been caught up somewhere or has been busy with something. But it's still very irresponsible.

I managed to find the host's Facebook and I would say he is around 24 years' old and studying at a university in Vienna. Had I known this, I probably would have told my mother to look elsewhere.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#37

Post by bachmeier » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #5

This is why hotel regulations popped up in the first place. If you don't want the government to crack down, you really need to protect your customers. If this happened to the son or daughter of a US Senator (I know it happened in Spain, but kids do take trips) then I would expect a whole world of problems.

Welcome to the lemons problem. Information problems are very real in the hotel industry. Most of the customers have limited information. Akerlof (husband of Fed chair Janet Yellen) got the Nobel Prize for starting the literature.

No, I do not have plans to use Airbnb. It sounded like a really bad idea from the start.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#38

Post by robbyking » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #25

I'm not trying to blame the victim here, but rule of thumb...never use AirBnB outside your own country and that goes double for Spain[1]. 1) - Go to google, type in "AirBnB Spain", then look at the auto complete.

I'm an American, and I used AirBNB a number of times in Italy this past spring. I only booked rooms with 4.5/5.0 ratings, and only from hosts who have hundreds -- or at least dozens -- of positive reviews. My experience could not have been better.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#39

Post by nikanj » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

This July, I went on a weekend trip to Victoria with my parents who I see two or three times a year. About an hour before we should have arrived at the accommodation, our hosts calls me and tells us his son needs the place so he needs me to log on airbnb and cancel our reservation. He was _very_ persistent and kept calling me and leaving messages, despite me telling him he needs to tell airbnb himself. I guess he wanted us to take the heat for cancellation instead.

I ended up spending most of my day communicating with airbnb, hotels and motels. Around 8pm I managed to score the last two hotel rooms in the city, and could finally join the rest of the family.

Airbnb did pay the difference between the hotel and our original reservation, but I still lost an entire day with my family.

Nowadays I only make airbnb reservations in big cities where coming up with on-the-spot backup is easy.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#40

Post by aianus » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

You have completely the wrong expectation of how Airbnb works. The hosts are randoms and Airbnb has no way to deliver a consistent quality experience like a hotel. Airbnb is like eBay, not Amazon.

You need to realize that when you get the last apartment in a city at conference-time (almost certainly not a superhost with good reviews), you're obviously taking a big gamble that it doesn't work out in order to save a few bucks.

> so we had to shell out 9 nights of walk-in rate hotel fees

So in this worst-case scenario you wound up in the same place as you would have if Airbnb didn't exist? Cry me a river.