Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

> Airbnb & YC, just fix this please:

Second that, and please do not try to instruct the victim in a way that can be construed as trying to cover things up, 'the cover up is worse than the crime' will come back to haunt you big time.

> 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 giant army of spotters.

Yes, and if what was written about 'a suspect is in police custody' was nonsense then apologize for that publicly and get it behind you as soon as possible. If it wasn't connect EJ to the right person at the police department. Your stories not being 'in sync' is a huge problem.

> 4. Hire her and pay her well (perhaps even with equity). She is obviously an excellent writer and an empathetic persona. But more importantly, she is an expert in addressing what is clearly the weakest link in your business model's chain.

That's one I really disagree with. She's not an expert in anything, she's a writer. AirBNB should not hire her, they should concentrate on fair compensation and then have her get on with her life as soon as possible. Any associations with AirBNB will likely be traumatic for her past the point where she's been compensated adequately.

After all that's done (and it should not take more than 72 hours starting now) if she comes around and writes a blog post on how great you guys handled this in retrospect that's great but do not ask for it and do not ask her to sign an NDA, it will make you look bad again.

Finally, make a point of linking to this story prominently (and how you dealt with it) from your terms of service / signup page as an example of how bad it can get (and let's be really happy she wasn't raped or killed, this is not the worst that could have happened by a long shot) and that you were able to fix this once but given that the people that own inventory on AirBNB have now been warned make it perfectly clear that you will not be able to do so again.

You may have to scale down a couple of notches but it's better to be sustainable at a slightly lower level than dead.

I'm not sure why this being downvoted. What liability does Airbnb have? Financially, the burden for the damage should be covered by the host's renter's insurance. If she wasn't properly insured, how is that the fault of airbnb?

I am in full agreement. I am not going to use AirBnB unless they do the right thing and stop spinning this. When EJ posts about how AirBnB found her a new apartment, hired a team of investigators and has used precious funding to get her life back in order, then I'll sign up. That will put them above the rest. THAT kind of action will show the world that personal care is more important to this company than dollar signs. If the world sees more care, AirBnB will take off like a rocket. This is very much an opportunity to seize, and EJ is worthy of help.

This is reminding me of the Soutwest Air response to the mistreatment they put Kevin Smith thru. When he went public, it was obvious they didn't give a damn about him and they were totally in damage control mode. Rather than apologize and recognize the error, they tried to turn it into a debate about whether fat people should fly, and they misrepresented the situation further.

I saw that comment on tech crunch and felt that Chesky was begin dishonest (based solely on having ready he previous blog post from ej) and now we see that AirBnB tried to get her to shut up!

As a frequent AirBnB customer (staying in a place rented via AirBnB at the moment, in fact) I'm finding that I'm having less and less faith in the company as these incidents unfold. (I'm not just talking about this, but Kutchner, the Craigslist, the fact that they keep their customers in the dark, etc.)

Frankly, as someone who has been online for two decades now, talking to people I can get a good feeling for how trustworthy they are. AirBnB inhibits this because it inhibits communication-- it can only happen thru their service which is not conducive to having a dialog.

The sole purpose of restricting this communication and restricting customer's ability to assess the risk in any of these transactions is AirBnB's desire to prevent the possibility that a deal might happen off of their site.

Reality is, this is silly. We found an apartment on AirBnB once and then found it on the internet (wasn't hard given knowledge of the details of the apartment.) We could have booked it that way and saved the AirBnB commission... but we booked it thru AirBnB anyway because we wanted them to escrow the funds. (Little did we know how little protection AirBnB provides in that regard.) But we were able to find out more about that apartment by looking at its website compared to the info on AirBnB.

And more importantly, having the owner's email address allowed us to discuss a lot of possible issues about the situation, and assess their trustworthiness... something impossible or difficult to do thru AirBnB.

Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?"