111–120 of 399 posts
"They found my coupons for Bed Bath & Beyond and used the discount, along with my Mastercard, to shop online." Are you kidding me? Seriously.
My home was burglarized once and among all the serious stuff that they took they also took: tortillas, salsa, ground beef, and cheddar cheese. I still can't believe that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a rape victim that was targeted for lack of modesty. That's not really how it works.
It is a difficult situation...on the one. hand you can't blame victims for crimes. That responsibility lies 100% with the criminals. On the other hand, in some cases someone is negligent in taking some easy precautions; and it's hard not to comment on it. I think that's important too. As others have noted this sort of thing is inevitable, and I think it's productive to talk about ways to possibly mitigate it. AirBnB…
I always found AirBnB's model based on a surprising amount of trust - I for one would never be comfortable just handing over they keys to my place to a total stranger. Even if they didn't ransack my place completely, as happened to the unfortunate author - I would be concerned about unintentional damage to my property that I might not discover till too late. Renting out something as private as my primary place of res…
What happened to this person is awful and it´s understandable that she/he is very emotional at this point, but I don´t think the lesson is you can´t ever trust people, or that the AirBnB model is flawed. It´s more like: hope for the best, plan for the worst. There is always going to be some black swan risk even if AirBnB does do more vetting. There´s no reason for example to leave valuables anywhere in the residence…
So you're saying AirBnB should advocate against rentals while you're away?
Or are you saying, if you want to rent while you're gone for a week, that you should get a week's worth of self-storage (which I've never heard of, but might exist in a city), move all your important belongings to the self-storage unit, and move them back after the guest is gone? That seems quite onerous.
I think if you are going to do it, you really have to be careful.
1. You should probably be someone that works from home / is home often. At least then you can monitor your place more often. You wont be seeing inside the room, but you could at least hear if anything insane is going on in it.
2. You should not have much by way of valuables around your place, nothing easy to steal. The first place I rented on AirBnB was like this. There was no TV/dvd player/ps3, the host had a laptop which he took with him. It consisted mostly of cheap Ikea-ish furniture. This works in my mind because it mitigates what can/can't be stolen.
Hey everyone - we were shocked when we heard about this unsettling event. We have been working closely with the authorities, and we want to reassure our community that, with the help of our security infrastructure, we were able to assist the police in their investigation, and we understand from authorities that a suspect is now in custody. We've created a marketplace built on trust, transparency and authenticity with…
Always bound to happen. Up next, the host who fits spycams in his shower and posts pics of his naked visitors to porn sites.
That's what I would do. I once got a letter from my management company that said, "we are conducting random apartment inspections tomorrow. be aware." This bothered me because I don't really like people in my house, and they didn't give the 24 hours notice required by law. So, I set up some cameras, broadcast it to the Internet, and told my twitter followers to watch my apartment for me while I was at work. They neve…
Looks like a couple of reporters have already hit the comments area looking for more info for a story. It goes far, far beyond a basic theft or incident of vandalism and could easily blow up internationally and do a great deal of damage to the AirBnB brand. I don't know the blogger in any way at all, but have to admit that my first thought was to wonder if this might've been arranged by a competing industry or servic…
I don't think what you're suggesting is that paranoid. There has to have been some motive. Perhaps it was just somebody seeking revenge, either against the person whos flat it was, or against AirBnB.
If you want motive, here's one that you might be surprised to learn motivates a lot of crime: the guest needed money for drugs/debt/food/just wanted money, and thought he might get away with it.
Houses get broken into. People get mugged. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy for these things to happen.
Always bound to happen. Up next, the host who fits spycams in his shower and posts pics of his naked visitors to porn sites.