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Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

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Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#211

Post by bpodgursky »

blagie wrote: post #201
bpodgursky wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I would expect most operators to call the police and hire lawyers to ensure that their liability stays at 0, and not much else. AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the vic…

I'd take millions of dollars over unencumbered free speech! That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident. The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.

I think the 4 incidents a day is an exaggeration, but each "incident" is also not a rape or murder. Most are going to be for stuff like "the toilet overflowed" or "the power went out". $1k is not at all unreasonable for most "routine" emergencies.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#212

Post by staticautomatic »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #104
staticautomatic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s really surprising is that a stranger on the internet is an authority on my childhood and family. What else can you tell me?

You have to be in some serious denial or have complete lack of perspective to think having the means to bring a babysitter on your holidays is "solidly middle class"

You're entitled to believe that bringing a cheap babysitter on a family road trip a few times means we couldn't possibly have been middle class, but the assertion that I'm in denial or have a complete lack of perspective is uncalled for.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#213

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

runako wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traveling with kids and a babysitter I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.

This is a strong statement. In much of the US, an au pair can cost less than full-time professional daycare. Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips. Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich. [For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitt…

I knew a girl on tinder who did that. It's really neat and definitely takes away the "very rich" thing. I mean 1 extra plane ticket is expensive, but not prohibitively so if you want a babysitter that also gets a free ride to a new place.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#214

Post by mancerayder »

The censoring of negative reviews and the ease with which hosts can do this is a major turnoff for me. I've used AirBNB for years with superb results, but then a few years ago I started (in major European capitals) getting completely crappy apartments whose flaws (like being a studio and not a one bedroom, like having a toilet in a top floor Paris apartment needing stuff pushed down with a brush, like construction, etc.)

Then I understood. I went back to look at reviews and saw most of my reviews weren't there anymore. I was looking for one in particular, which was somewhat negative about location, and of course that was gone (the listing was still there with 5 stars). But others, too.

I spent a bit of time reading online about this, and came across Reddit forum messages in the AirBNB sub where hosts tell each other tips on how to remove reviews (there are a ton of messages on the topic). Then the other week Bloomberg wrote an article complaining about the same thing (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb...).

The horror stories in the linked article above are of course a bigger problem. But a company that censors reviews on a peer to peer system (it's not Walmart or Amazon selling goods) is worse. And it's not just peer to peer, it's where you fly thousands of miles to lay your head and bring your family.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#215

Post by mancerayder »

Havoc wrote: post #177

This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far…

You don't get space in a hotel unless you're a zillionaire. An AirBNB apartment offers a kitchen with a fridge and stove and a separate bedroom and living room area. A hotel offers a small fridge filled with the hotel's overpriced items and no room for ours on purpose, no stove, and a generic little desk with laminated cards on it and mirrors in front as the table-for-it-all.

Screw hotels unless the company pays (if it ever does). That's the appeal of AirBNB - unfortunately. They've offloaded customer service but they have the upper hand due to the superior real estate over the hotels with their tiny rooms - did I mention the lack of soundproofing between rooms.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#216

Post by mancerayder »

jjeaff wrote: post #146
debaserab2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very tired of the property investors that snatch up duplexes and turn them into quadplexes and then post them all on AirBnB with deceiving photos of the room layouts and amenities. The number of airbnb's that I've stayed at that have awkward rooms or incomplete amenities has been increasing year over year (such as a counter that prevents a refrigerator door from fully opening due to a hasty remodel, or a kitchen…

Shouldn't this kind of stuff show up in the reviews rather quickly?

As per a comment I posted above, they censor the reviews enormously. You can find hosts giving each other tips on Reddit on how to do this and recently Bloomberg posted about it (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb...).

It makes me quite furious as I've had tame reviews removed.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#217

Post by mancerayder »

rawtxapp wrote: post #115
Mizza wrote: post #52

Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_. I've found myself just using h…

I think airbnb is great for month long stays, anything shorter doesn't make too much sense once you factor in all the fees (p.s. use Australian version to see the prices with all fees included on the search page). I really like their direction of enabling month-long/flexible stays and considering whether I replace my lease with that so that I can move around more easily and see different places rather being stuck at…

Month costs around the NJ and NY area are extreme in price. Like 6-12k+ extreme, for anything not a dump, this summer.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#218

Post by clcuc »

latchkey wrote: post #172
jjeaff wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it truly unlimited? Or does it slow way down after x gb a month in traffic? I'm having trouble finding a truly unlimited hotspot on att's site right now.

That was my concern too. It appears truly unlimited. They send me threatening emails every once and a while when I do a whole bunch of big downloads, but they don't actually limit things. I doubt you can find information on the website...

1. Do you have pretty good lawyers? Those threatening emails don't make you think about stopping having that lifestyle? 2. Why is it that you decided to live that life in Vietnam? What area within Software Development do you work with?

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#219

Post by pentae »

rhino369 wrote: post #60
Mizza wrote: post #52

Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_. I've found myself just using h…

Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitchen is a huge plus. So for that, its really good.

I prefer Vrbo for this - unlike Airbnb it's for whole homes only (not rooms in someones house) so thats one less filter you need to select when searching.

They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher

And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.

Re: Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

#220

Post by piva00 »

rhino369 wrote: post #117
chrisseaton wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traveling with kids and a babysitter I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.

In my case, its just my father in law who lives with me and watches my daughter. But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much. Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.

> Average people don't really travel much

Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.

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