31–40 of 99 posts
'We Don't Want to Trade Security for Volume' = 'we don't want to be successful'.
"We don't want to trade security for volume" == "Your screw up is our marketing"
As someone else noted, I'd never heard of this company before, but now I have. Currently my only real impression is that they're NY focused and are security conscious. I think they'll take that introduction.
Any of Airbnb's competitors are going to use this to their advantage. Rightfully so too... I didn't even know about Roomorama until this story. The biggest part of the story though was thrown in at the end: The harrowing story of the Airbnb user EJ prompted Ms. En Teo to reach out to her competitors in order to set a precedent for sharing information about sketchy users, so if she gets a report about misbehavior she…
They have to be careful, though, as this kind of thing can be considered libel or slander if not 100% true, and collusion even if it is true. Having an industry-wide blacklist will almost definitely run afoul of the law.
I think this has nothing to do with Roomorama taking advantage of the situation for their own profit. If anything, these guys have every right to be pissed off that a careless competitor is tarnishing the whole industry.
Honest question: how is Airbnb or any of their competitors different than vacation rentals? You rent a house for a week when the owners aren't using it. Often the key's in a combo box or they mail it to you. The only real protection is a security deposit which you pay upfront. The concept has been around for ages.
AirBnb democratized the process by allowing anyone to rent out any portion of their property, contributing to supply and more competitive pricing, but with this set up you get into weird situations where owner's valuables and jewelry end up in the next room.
Honest question: how is Airbnb or any of their competitors different than vacation rentals? You rent a house for a week when the owners aren't using it. Often the key's in a combo box or they mail it to you. The only real protection is a security deposit which you pay upfront. The concept has been around for ages.
Vacation rentals (through Homeaway et al.) are typically set up just for that reason, and thus have combo boxes, carry some insurance, involve a cleaning fee. AirBnb democratized the process by allowing anyone to rent out any portion of their property, contributing to supply and more competitive pricing, but with this set up you get into weird situations where owner's valuables and jewelry end up in the next room.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, when mass media picks it up, the hotel industry will be made to look like knights in shining armor... the hotel lobby is big and powerful and media is corrupt. AirBnB's fiasco is not a long-term benefit for their direct competitors either.
Spot on observation. So, it is idiotic for the competitors to hit on AirBnB, since that is the biggest company in their budding niche and if that falls, well, nothing will remain. They should all try to minimize the damage to their biz model. EDIT: Let me elaborate: Firms compete among themselves in a given field and all's fair in this competition. However, when the whole industry is threatened, you should gather for…
It doesn't, for example, deal with stolen identity. A recently stolen card+ID would bypass all of those protections, and easily lead to a quick buck for meth-lab operations (which is what EJ's situation sounds like it was).
Honest question: how is Airbnb or any of their competitors different than vacation rentals? You rent a house for a week when the owners aren't using it. Often the key's in a combo box or they mail it to you. The only real protection is a security deposit which you pay upfront. The concept has been around for ages.
They aren't, it's just a "smaller" scale using the internet. The business idea is proven, AirBnB is just leveraging technology to stake out a significant market share. Nothing wrong with this at all.
There have been online vacation property rental sites for years.
AirBNB, however, sells itself as a mechanism for making some extra cash on your own actual day-to-day residence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The effort required to photoshop such an image (or paste your own picture on top of a stolen ID) is trivial compared to the effort required to forge or steal the ID in the first place. Thus, I don't understand how this would be anything other than an inconvenience to honest users.
Requiring IDs like this might actually facilitate ID theft because criminals could create fake host listings and then request all sorts of information like this in order to steal identities. Much easier than breaking into houses to steal them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if they don't, they'll come out stronger.
That is easily the silliest thing I've heard about this so far, and this is after reading AirBnB's PR statement. If they fuck this up, they won't "come out stronger", they'll come out with a sufficiently heavy PR backlash that people won't use them anymore. And that'll be that. As it stands now, the only thing people are hearing are negative things about AirBnB, and unless they take huge steps to fix that, there's go…
It's bad for airbnb, but shouldn't be a killer. From my point of view, my only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.