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Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com

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Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#211

Post by vacri »

brianchesky wrote: post #186
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.

A tip for you: I work in support, and weasel words are the substance of our being. You tell the customer "Do A, B, and C, and that should get you up and running". They don't really hear the 'should', but it needs to be there because computers are fickle and anything can go wrong. In short, I guess I'm saying I'm a bit more practised at recognising weasel words for what they are - and in this situation, it's not really an "anything bad is possible from here"; the worst has happened. This is the point in support where you start giving the client the concrete steps that will be taken to solve their issue.

"again telling her" is the weasel words I'm referring to here. You've already told her this, and she claims that after saying this, all help evaporated - it's the cornerstone of her complaint, and you're announcing Round 2 of the same thing. This is a PR disaster for your company: it is not the time to engage in weasel words. Whether or not you plan on following through, you should sound like you absolutely will. Of course, you should follow through - if something like this happened in my company, the CEO would be absolutely roasting us for not following through and taking measures into his own hands, both because he's an honourable bloke, and because it's a giant PR issue.

jcunningham above points out other weaselly things. Again, whether or not you're giving her concrete messages about what kind of help you're offering her, you should also be announcing these publicly. "We are reimbursing costs of -foo-", "We are organising temporary accommodation of her own", "We are doing this and this to help the police", "We've assigned John Doe to manage her case and will be in contact this often". Be concrete, not hand-wavy.

The guy you're replying to gave five ideas for supporting her, and the response is a wishy-washy "we'll be there for her" - which is the kind of empty promise you hear drunk 20-year-olds tell each other before they sleep with each other's best friends. I don't necessarily think all the things the GP said are right, but using weasel words in this situation is a path to PR failure in my opinion.

EDIT: the reason why I wrote all the above is that I read your comment and felt angry because it sounded like another fobbing off, more promises that are not going to be upheld (as the first round was allegedly not). I do not think I'm going to be unusual in this.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#212

Post by nanijoe »

brianchesky wrote: post #186
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.

No offense, but you need to stop with the Politically correct BS statements and just go ahead and do the right thing.If figuring out what the right thing is , is too hard, then maybe you guys have a much larger problem. Like it or not, this may well turn out to be an inflection point for your entire business..its up to you to make it a turn for the better , not worse.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#213

Post by a3camero »

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…

I doubt it is a solved problem or AirBNB would be using it.

Imagine what the negotiations would be like. They need insurance for: -An open-ended number of people worldwide (constantly changing) -Any sort of property from shitty apartments all the way to fancy houses (no estimate of value possible, requires appraisers) -Damage/theft caused by people with unverified identities (all they have is CC, stolen?) -Any and all damage (including accidental death of people staying there?), including stolen identities and fire damage (to other properties as well?) -No security requirements for properties (fire alarms? carbon monoxide detectors? checking up on the place?)

I have a feeling that would cost more than 10%.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#214

Post by CaptainZapp »

brianchesky wrote: post #151

Brian Chesky (Airbnb CEO) here. My heart goes out to our host. My co-founder has contacted her multiple times, as recently as last night, and we have again offered to help her in any way that she needs. We will continue to make ourselves available to her to do whatever she asks of us in this time of need. We have encouraged her to reach us so that we can help her through this, and we are standing by.

And, is it true that you requested that she either take her blog entry down or limit access to it?

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but reading both sides of the story you guys don't come over as entirely truthful in this sordid affair.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#215

Post by a3camero »

pseudonym wrote: post #24
moonlighter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they might be concerned about setting a precedent." Well, they sure have set one now.

Here's hoping that "press blog users to take down negative reviews" is one they don't try and follow up on. This had "Streisand Effect" written all over it, even before this post.

To be fair we've only heard their side of the story on that. This is a very distressed individual and maybe their account is only one side of the story.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#216

Post by mhw »

brazzy wrote: post #172
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…

Please tell me you're not serious. What you're asking for goes well beyond taking responsibility and far into the realm of treatment given to pop stars. Yeah, Airbnb could probably afford doing this out of PR considerations this once . But not for every single problematic hosting. And I do not believe the extent and support and compensation for crime victims should depend on their ability / luck in drumming up a soci…

> What Airbnb does need to do is find a sustainable method of dealing with incidents like this in the future.

What Airbnb needs to do is find a method of preventing this type of incident in the future. They have to work out how to change the economics of the relationship so that the host isn't bearing all the risk and the visitor has some disincentives that keep their behaviour within acceptable bounds. At the moment their current business model is toast, because a large proportion of their potential hosts will start hearing about this kind of incident (search Google News for 'airbnb' and see how far the story has got so far) and think that the risk of it happening to them just isn't worth it, whatever kind of support they put in place to deal with the consequences.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#217

Post by jamesteow »

Firebrand wrote: post #93

Airbnb's Terms & Privacy section states that "We are not involved in the actual face-to-face contact between users," have "no control over the conduct of our users or the truth or accuracy of the information that users post," and " do not investigate any user's reputation, conduct, morality, criminal background, or verify the information that any user submits to the Site." It's a business, they're supposed to be mone…

Going forward, I think that Airbnb has to do a much better job at communicating this. Potentially a message as part of the flow just to reiterate this point.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#218

Post by Arjuna »

palebluedot wrote: post #192
ig1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a bit tacky that YC removed AirBnB's name from the title of the original story.

It should be noted that when they changed that story title, they were changing it to the actual title of the blog posting. That is pretty standard practice here, to prevent editorializing via the title. Although, I can see how it would come across wrong in this case.

Thank you for pointing this out.

The title was changed from "AirBnB: Crimes committed against a host" to "Violated: A traveler's lost faith, a difficult lesson learned" As you noted, this matches the title of the story on the blog.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#220

Post by danso »

cookiecaper wrote: post #128
danilocampos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. "Note: a second co-founder did email me for the first time around 2am yesterday, suggesting we meet for coffee as he 'would enjoy meeting' me. He made no inquiry into my current emotional state, my safety or my well being." Speechless. The lack of compassion for another human being here is staggering. Utterly oblivious — or indifferent. How does this happen to people?

Now this part I think is overdramatic. I agree with jrockway. Criticizing a person for stating he would "enjoy meeting" a person is more than a bit pedantic imo. I'm sorry if she "doesn't care" about what anyone else may "enjoy", but seriously, I don't think it indicates any lack of sympathy. It's not like EJ is bleeding all over her keyboard while people nonchalantly schedule appointments later in the week or someth…

Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out: this is why there are such things as trained spokespeople and customer service reps. I know these jobs aren't looked upon with much respect by those of us in the engineering and development community who would rather say things directly to the customer...but here, an innocent attempt to cut through the redtape and get to the bottom of things may have been misinterpreted by the customer to look much worse than it was...

I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation.

When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement.

The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point).

In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt.

But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.

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