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Why Airbnb is dead to me

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Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#131

Post by pyre »

danmaz74 wrote: post #51
vinceguidry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AirBnB's job to do this, sort out these kinds of situations. It's not that hard to c…

AirBnB can't slap wrists of hosts without very clear proof of their wrongdoing - which wasn't the case here. In a p2p system like this, it's the bad ratings that need to make this kind of dealings unprofitable.

Well, a really good question is whether or not ABnB is recording all of these claims. If several people file similar complaints even without "proof" a pattern starts to emerge. If they are not recording these complaints, but ignoring them because they can't "prove" anything, then they are being reckless.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#132

Post by josefresco »

ghaff wrote: post #115
outside1234 wrote: post #2

Its equally bad as a host. I have a place that rents very well in the summer (its near the Ocean) and a group of people showed up, didn't like it for whatever reason, and AirBNB canceled the reservation with no penalty despite there being a super clear cancelation policy in place. No recourse (customer service blew me off: "sorry, renter didn't like the bed."), no way to rent it for a week on that short of notice, I…

But what should Airbnb (or any company managing rentals) do under that circumstance? The renter is doing the equivalent of a return for "item not as described." I'm perfectly willing to believe that this renter had some expectation or requirement that to your mind or mine was totally unreasonable. Or maybe they found a better deal nearby at the last moment. But there's no real way an Airbnb can start investigating th…

Day of arrival refunds don't work for any industry that relies on reservations, appointments, or rigid scheduling. It doesn't need to be "impossible" to get a refund, but being able to show up and say "no thanks" (for seemingly any reason) when the result is the business losing substantial revenue - is a bad situation for all.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#133

Post by dang »

bachmeier wrote: post #49
notlisted wrote: post #20

Hmmm. I won't repeat my qualms with AirBnB. I'm afraid that this comment will get downvoted/banned in a bit, and like any negative post/discussion about AirBnB, the discussion will mysteriously disappear from the front page…

I wondered why the story was dropping so fast. Currently, the story above it has 57 points, 1 comment, and was posted 4 hours ago. This one has 125 points, 45 comments, and was posted 1 hour ago.

The way we treat threads like this has been consistent for years. Here's how it works.

We penalize indignation and/or sensational stories unless there is something unusually interesting about them. Indignation does not gratify intellectual curiosity, which is the mandate of this site. It does, though, attract large numbers of upvotes—most consistently. That's a weakness of the voting system and a countervailing mechanism is needed. If we didn't have one, indignation would dominate HN, and that would be fatal. So we can't go by upvotes alone.

Second, we don't censor posts for being anti-YC. That's literally the #1 rule of HN moderation—it's the first thing pg explained to me. We get accused of doing so anyway, of course, but it's important to be able to answer in good conscience. So when an indignation thread is YC-related, we may still penalize it, but always less than we otherwise would.

(Why do we penalize them less instead of just staying completely hands-off? Because that wouldn't be good for HN. There are a bunch of concerns we have to balance, and giving anti-YC threads carte blanche would neglect those other concerns, e.g. the quality of the front page. It would also be a truck-sized loophole that people would soon exploit.)

Third, there is software to detect flamewars and downweight such threads. Since indignation breeds indignation, that often kicks in on such posts.

Finally, anything beyond the above is the effect of user flags. This sort of thread always gets a lot of flags as well as upvotes. If you see a post whose score is growing and yet whose rank is falling, that's usually because it's attracting flags as well.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#134

Post by whiddershins »

I must say, anecdotally, I have friends who have had similar, very scary, air bnb experiences, even in California. I stayed in an Air BNB in Baltimore with a dog that genuinely tried to bite me. I'm great with dogs, this one was crazy. And my girlfriend and I had a similar very uncomfortable experience in Rome, being moved from place to place and having our rooms double-booked ... I can't remember whether that particular reservation was booked through Air BNB or not, but the feeling is very unsettling not to mention a time and money drain.

I think the blog post is spot on, in that the customer and most vulnerable person in many of these instances should be thought of as the renter. Of course property damage to the host is a concern, but it can be seriously scary to be stuck somewhere strange feeling unsafe and with nowhere to go.

Compare to Uber. With Uber, if a driver gets many negative ratings, they are booted. Yet there are still many many drivers available here in NYC. I've talked with drivers, and they expressed a lot of concern about their ratings and how they are perceived.

Air BNB is failing to create a culture of accountability, and failing to step in quickly to make things better for people who use their marketplace. If at all possible, I think they should at least do more to address the edge cases. Unhappy, scared, customers are not going to use the service.

I love Air BNB, they are not dead to me, but if they don't address this well I am afraid competition or regulation might.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#135

Post by notvladputin »

potatolicious wrote: post #102
flippyhead wrote: post #10

I continue to use AirBnb but have been pretty disappointed in their customer service. I rent out a family cabin occasionally and someone who stayed there scratched the floor accidentally wearing winter boots with spikes on them. They admitted this, apologized and were generally totally awesome about it. It took me months to get Airbnb to figure out how to deduct money from their damage deposit. They first said I had…

This seems like a theme with pretty much all internet companies, big and small - undercut the competition by cutting corners on things that "don't matter", until they matter. Google for example has almost no way to reach customer service, even for their paid products. When it works it works great, when it doesn't God Help You. Ditto Uber/Lyft/other cab companies, where there seems to be no end of people who were put…

IME non-internet, big corporations, are no better than google. Try reaching someone at your health insurance provider, or almost any other 'customer support" / complaint line.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#136

Post by mistermann »

potatolicious wrote: post #102
flippyhead wrote: post #10

I continue to use AirBnb but have been pretty disappointed in their customer service. I rent out a family cabin occasionally and someone who stayed there scratched the floor accidentally wearing winter boots with spikes on them. They admitted this, apologized and were generally totally awesome about it. It took me months to get Airbnb to figure out how to deduct money from their damage deposit. They first said I had…

This seems like a theme with pretty much all internet companies, big and small - undercut the competition by cutting corners on things that "don't matter", until they matter. Google for example has almost no way to reach customer service, even for their paid products. When it works it works great, when it doesn't God Help You. Ditto Uber/Lyft/other cab companies, where there seems to be no end of people who were put…

The older I get the more cynical I get, and the further I drift leftward politically in favor of more government regulation, the underlying reason I think being that generally speaking, most cultures (and especially "high achievers" within) are fundamentally dishonest - like teenagers, they often cannot be trusted with serious responsibility. They have highly potent skills, but they don't have the corresponding maturity or morality to safely wield those skills.

And this goes not only for small startups, it is applicable across huge blue chip companies as well, the latest being VW (and now it appears other auto manufacturers).

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#137

Post by brazzledazzle »

mikeash wrote: post #106
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,…

Not defending the host's actions or AirBnB in any way here, but if you're not capable of getting a hotel on your own, then you probably shouldn't be traveling to foreign countries alone. Edit: well, that was unpopular. Am I wrong, or just saying it inartfully?

You're right, but it's still something they should account for. Some people just fall apart under stress and have no interest in resolving that before doing things they have no business doing. At the end of the day, right or wrong, those people are going to speak badly of your service.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#138

Post by phaemon »

bachmeier wrote: post #63
aianus wrote: post #40

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 fe…

> 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. Worst case scenario for this story is that the driver takes them out of town, shoots them, and dumps their bodies into a river.

This is Spain we're talking about. It has a homicide rate about one sixth of the USA. It's a safe western European country.

Re: Why Airbnb is dead to me

#139

Post by josefresco »

pbreit wrote: post #125

Sounds like a horrific experience but unfortunately, it's hard to assign much credibility to the OP. Sounds very difficult to deal with. Like, no, a random photo from a balcony in no way proves that you weren't staying somewhere else.

That fact that they were even asked to provide "proof" is insane on so many levels.
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