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Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

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Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#181

Post by mbrzuzy »

nbpoole wrote: post #179
mbrzuzy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a woman, it's a man. He even cleared that up in this article.

" It's not a woman, it's a man. He even cleared that up in this article. " From the blog post: " I do exist. I am a real person using a nickname my parents stuck me with long ago. I do not work for the hotel industry, though I admit I love a Four Seasons as much as the next girl. Oh and on that note, I am female. " Sounds like a woman to me.

Yeah, my mistake. I have a tendency to misread things (a lot).

Carry on.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#182

Post by scott_s »

wheels wrote: post #180
scott_s wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get exactly what you're saying, but what about point 6? What do you do when this happens again? And I see absolutely no reason why it won't happen again. Let me put it another way: I think this problem kills the business model. What they currently do is not sustainable. They can't swoop in and replace everything for every person who is a victim of a scheme like this with their current model. If that becomes their s…

> And I see absolutely no reason why it won't happen again. It will happen again. And it was clear that it'd happen at some point. And worse will happen. Shit happens, especially at scale. > I think this problem kills the business model. Nah. Let's do a little back-of-the-napkining: • Let's assume that this is the first incidence of such. • Let's assume that Brian's quoted 2 million nights of rentals is accurate. • A…

Once you do this as a matter of policy, you are open to fraud. Now you have to spend a significant amount of your resources on fraud detection - perhaps most of them. That's what I mean by they become an insurance company; their day-to-day operation would be indistinguishable fromt that of an insurance company.

Both ebay and PayPay went through this, and that's what they spend most of their time doing. But ebay and PayPal don't need to support the open-ended kind of claim - "My entire apartment has been ransacked and my identity stolen" - that AirBNB does.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#183

Post by 16s »

My advice would be to forget PR, forget trying to spin it. Just tell the truth, do the right thing for the victim, and figure out how to prevent it going forward.

That's all they have to do.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#184

Post by wheels »

scott_s wrote: post #182
wheels wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I see absolutely no reason why it won't happen again. It will happen again. And it was clear that it'd happen at some point. And worse will happen. Shit happens, especially at scale. > I think this problem kills the business model. Nah. Let's do a little back-of-the-napkining: • Let's assume that this is the first incidence of such. • Let's assume that Brian's quoted 2 million nights of rentals is accurate. • A…

Once you do this as a matter of policy, you are open to fraud. Now you have to spend a significant amount of your resources on fraud detection - perhaps most of them. That's what I mean by they become an insurance company; their day-to-day operation would be indistinguishable fromt that of an insurance company. Both ebay and PayPay went through this, and that's what they spend most of their time doing. But ebay and P…

Insurance (and by extension dealing with insurance fraud) for this sort of thing is a solved problem. They don't need to do it in house. They just pick up a policy from one of the institutional insurers and pass on the cost with a markup.

Edit: To clarify, by "this sort of thing" I don't mean "Airbnb like businesses". There's nothing particularly novel about insuring homes, their contents or vacation rentals. An institutional insurer can crunch some numbers (with estimates on the average values of contents, caps on liability, frequency of incidents, cost of claims inspection, rate of fraud) and figure out what the risk profile on that is and then mark that up and sell it to Airbnb.

What's actually unclear to me, however, after crunching out a revenue estimate for Airbnb (which I'd assumed was higher) is if they're a big enough fish yet for an insurer to bother with them.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#185

Post by Vivtek »

karlhiggins wrote: post #20

What's telling about this whole story is how Airbnb tried to "manage" her. I thought the whole point of being a startup is you don't need to fall in line with the dehumanizing bullshit that you find in big corporations. That's why I'm in a startup at least and it works for me on that level. But there's such a stench of insincerity about the Airbnb approach that I will never use their site now.

What's telling is not that AirBNB tried to manage her, but that a company allegedly valued at billions managed her so very incompetently. I am devastated to find that they are doing such a bad job at what arguably is the single most important thing for them right at the moment.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#186

Post by brianchesky »

edw519 wrote: post #141

Airbnb & YC, just fix this please: 1. Get a new place for EJ. Furnish it fully. Pay for everything. 2. Help her restore her virtual identity. Use any resources at your considerable disposal. 3. Help her find her irreplaceable stuff. A few private detectives and a small team of scouters can make more progress in 2 weeks that the SFPD can make in a lifetime. Publish pictures of her grandmother's jewelry to enlist a gia…

we are standing by, and we just contacted her again telling her that we will do whatever we can to help.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#187

Post by scott_s »

wheels wrote: post #184
scott_s wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you do this as a matter of policy, you are open to fraud. Now you have to spend a significant amount of your resources on fraud detection - perhaps most of them. That's what I mean by they become an insurance company; their day-to-day operation would be indistinguishable fromt that of an insurance company. Both ebay and PayPay went through this, and that's what they spend most of their time doing. But ebay and P…

Insurance (and by extension dealing with insurance fraud) for this sort of thing is a solved problem. They don't need to do it in house. They just pick up a policy from one of the institutional insurers and pass on the cost with a markup. Edit: To clarify, by "this sort of thing" I don't mean "Airbnb like businesses". There's nothing particularly novel about insuring homes, their contents or vacation rentals. An inst…

Then they're an intermediary for the same kind of insurance that hotels and bed-and-breakfasts have. I don't know if that's even possible to do - how do you approach a company for a policy that covers hundreds of thousands of homes around the world?

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#188

Post by silverlight »

palish wrote: post #121
willyt wrote: post #55

The internet is moving really fast, I've already seen non tech people I know commenting about this on Facebook. They might have lost already. When something like this happens I think you probably have hours to sort it out, rather than weeks. Remember that it was less than 24 hours from the story breaking that News Corp decided the best course of action was closing a business with ~7 million repeat customers. Of cours…

Which incident are you referring to?

The tabloid they owned that was tapping the phone lines of celebrities.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#189

Post by estel »

funthree wrote: post #116
snikolov wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that she is somehow out to get AirBnB or "hell bent on revenge" is ridiculous. She saw the facts being misrepresented by AirBnB for their own benefit, and she wanted to set the record straight. If someone is skewing facts about their interactions with you in a public forum to make themselves look good, wouldn't you be a little bothered?

I would be bothered and I believe I addressed that. But it's like I said. She is now "passing along" the same torment that the perpetrator inflicted upon her onto Airbnb. Setting the record straight is one thing and she has every right to do that. EDIT: Being the little guy is tough and I empathize with that, and I also empathize with the fact that she had something very bad happened to her apartment in by proxy hers…

> EDIT: downvotes for trying to explain myself diligently for you guys, thanks...

Perhaps people are just passing along the torment.

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