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Airbnb and security camera disclosure

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Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#281

Post by nicolas_t »

city41 wrote: post #239
philip1209 wrote: post #120

I've lived in Airbnbs full-time for about 18 months while traveling, and Airbnb has lost my trust repeatedly in terms of reliability, safety, and user-friendliness. - Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay. - Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their ph…

I consider Airbnb to be a menace to society. The hotel industry exists for a reason. I've been lucky and never had a truly bad experience with Airbnb, but I've had some lousy ones and never a top notch or even good one. Conversely hotels usually provide at least decent service and usually are great in my experience. What I really dislike about Airbnb is the feeling of being an invader in a neighborhood. Doing somethi…

> No one wants the house next door to them to become an Airbnb, so why do we support its practice by using them?

Well, my next door neighbor in my building rents his apartment on Airbnb about 8 months a year (he travels a lot for business so is not often there). Honestly, I don't really mind. There's been a few noisy guests but those are few and far between and apart from that I've talked to and met some nice guests of his.

That said, his apartment is a great apartment since he actually lives there part of the year. It's totally different from apartments that were built for airbnb and tend to be really bad with crappy furniture. And, since the guests are happy, they are more likely to be respectful I think.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#282

Post by debatem1 »

philip1209 wrote: post #225
alexhutcheson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your policy, your homeowners insurance or renters insurance (at your long-term home) may cover you for theft from hotels, Airbnbs, etc. If yours doesn't, you could shop around for one that does.

As a digital nomad, I have no long-term home. I literally live in Airbnbs. I tried finding a policy to cover me, but none exists. Policies also vary a lot with burglaries - eg some require signs of forced entry.

Have you considered starting this up as a business? Surely there's a market for it, and the claims data alone would make you a valuable acquisition target.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#284

Post by Klathmon »

zemo wrote: post #270
iabacu wrote: post #248

When I interviewed at Airbnb, they asked me about one thing I learned in the past that could be useful for Airbnb. I suggested that people who are developing the product should once in a while spend a few hours handling user tickets themselves (perhaps shadowing an actual customer representative), so that developers get to sense (at the gut level) the pain points. The interviewer did not seemed pleased with that sugg…

dunno if they still do it, but this was normal practice at Etsy when I was an engineer there (2013-2015). Every so often (once a quarter maybe?) I had to spend a day answering support tickets. We discovered (and fixed) a lot of bugs that way.

As a lead developer on some projects, I've explicitly asked to jump into the weeds and handle support.

You can learn SO MUCH about your application just by handling a bit of support. You learn UX issues, you learn what tooling the support people are missing that would allow them to do their job (a simple "send a screenshot to support" button in our app saved our support reps HOURS spending time trying to get customers to describe the problem or teaching them how to take a screenshot on their device).

Not only that, but often the easiest wins are those where you make a happy customer even happier. I saw one customer one time that did this like 10 step process to get some information from the app. They would switch to one user, go to a specific page, open it in a new tab and leave it there, then logout and login to another account, go to their overview page, and then bring the 2 tabs side-by-side to compare numbers.

We already had support for "manager" style accounts that could view info on multiple people, but it didn't have the information they were looking for. A few hours later I had a POC up on our staging system with the information they needed right there, and that person I was talking to became almost an evangelist for our software at their company. Just knowing that they had a problem in the first place was key, and the fix took me a few hours, but it saved them probably that much per week.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#285

Post by CamperBob2 »

umvi wrote: post #57
morpheuskafka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny to me, because AirBnB runs in to all the same problems we had with hotels a hundred years ago. We have dozens of taxes, rules, regulations, building codes etc now for hotels. I imagine at some point it will be the same for AirBnBs. What's old is new. An industry can only be disruptive for so long. Eventually, it will either fail, or be successful and become the new status quo.

> Eventually, it will either fail, or be successful and become the new status quo. The book "Animal Farm" is so prescient, it's scary. I know it was written about governments but it applies to a lot of different organizations and industries: "The creatures outside looked from to , and from to , and from to again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." Just swap out and with: Uber/taxis online streamin…

Uber at their worst still beats the heck out of taxis at their best. (Yes, that's an exaggeration, but only a mild one.) There is a reason why the taxi industry died almost overnight. Legalities aside, that simply doesn't happen to industries whose customers are happy.

However, I've never quite grokked AirBnB. I'm not a big fan of traveling in general, and when I do travel I prefer (and don't mind paying for) predictability and good customer service. Crashing in some random person's house doesn't seem very predictable, as threads like this tend to suggest, and responsive customer service is obviously out of the question.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#286

Post by yesimahuman »

philip1209 wrote: post #120

I've lived in Airbnbs full-time for about 18 months while traveling, and Airbnb has lost my trust repeatedly in terms of reliability, safety, and user-friendliness. - Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay. - Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their ph…

I tend to agree. I've grown tired of the poor-quality, soulless flips that are falling apart and barely cleaned that have completely taken over Airbnb. For business I find myself not wanting to deal with the uncertainty of Airbnb and just get a hotel.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#287

Post by hitekker »

iabacu wrote: post #248

When I interviewed at Airbnb, they asked me about one thing I learned in the past that could be useful for Airbnb. I suggested that people who are developing the product should once in a while spend a few hours handling user tickets themselves (perhaps shadowing an actual customer representative), so that developers get to sense (at the gut level) the pain points. The interviewer did not seemed pleased with that sugg…

>Did not seem pleased with that suggestion.

The interviewer was likely looking for an anodyne coding suggestion, not critical thinking.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#288

Post by brightsize »

ryanmercer wrote: post #143
thisismyusernam wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same is true for me. In my mid-to-late-twenties, I remember thinking "Damn, why are hotels so expensive? I'll just stay in this Airbnb, which is so much bigger anyway. This is the new way and it's disrupting hotels." Now at the outset of my thirties and a more settled phase of life, I will gladly pay a premium to stay in a hotel. In the same way, it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book a…

>it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app. Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get, the points of interest for example, if you spend that much time just trying to get licensed you're probably going to be more professional than random soccer mom trying to make money while the kids are at school. That's not the case with taxis in the…

>Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get

Indeed, the dedication required to acquire The Knowledge [1] is incredible, at least to me considering how the job of taxi driver is considered a fairly low-end, unskilled one here in the States.

"The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the "Knowledge of London" is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.

It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve "appearances" (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process usually averaging 34 months, to pass."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom...

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#289

Post by jedberg »

I just looked this up so I could be wrong, but as far as I can tell there are no regulations at the federal level or the state level that prevent hotels from having cameras in the room. There are 12 states with laws that prevent you from recording someone without their knowledge, which would apply to both hotels and AirBnBs, and anyone else.

So really, the only reason hotels are "safer" in this regard is because they seem to be more concerned with protecting their reputation.

Re: Airbnb and security camera disclosure

#290

Post by jMyles »

philip1209 wrote: post #120

I've lived in Airbnbs full-time for about 18 months while traveling, and Airbnb has lost my trust repeatedly in terms of reliability, safety, and user-friendliness. - Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay. - Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their ph…

The downfall of AirBnb's quality has been enormous, highly observable, and scarily rapid.

I have had similar experiences to yours (as, obviously, have many other repliers in this thread).

I have mostly switched to booking.com, which also has some homeshare type listings (or maybe that's only in Europe?).

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