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Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com

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Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#391

Post by ScottBurson »

quandrum wrote: post #363
tomlin wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's right or fair. I also think it's nonsense . You're thinking on the side of a smart entrepreneur, not a criminal. All a crook is interested in is hearing or seeing the headline: "Airbnb pays for loss and damages to rattled user", or other more clever narrative. If you're a criminal, details aside, you've got all you need to scheme up an assalt. Criminals don't work on high probability, if they did,…

I don't think this line of thinking works. Criminals aren't your customers. If you respond to incidents with non-customers in mind, you're going to create a negative response in current and potential customers. This was an opportunity for AirBnB to prove that their service is excellent and worth using. This was a chance to prove to potential customers that if the worst happens they'll be their. Instead they proved th…

Agreed. If AirBnB doesn't trust its customers, it can hardly ask them to trust one another.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#392

Post by pg »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #357
pg wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted. The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who'd been told by their…

Now that this has happened, how (if at all) would you revise this comment about Arrington: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2719086

This is the worst thing I personally have seen him do. So he is not looking quite so good to me now.

On the other hand, I still don't believe he's deeply evil. His big weakness is the length he'll go to to get information out of people. I think he crossed the line in this case. But I still don't think he's a bad person.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#394

Post by gobongo »

All of this discussion about what airbnb should or shouldn't do is ultimately moot now. Unless they can prove "EJ" is totally fictional and/or an insane liar the company is essentially dead in the water already (at least as a US operation). Not just because of the PR hit (though that is substantial), but because of the inevitability of media, lawyers & politicians circling the wagons around this story.

Airbnb's business will be explicitly illegal throughout much of the US by year's end, and honestly in its current incarnation I'm not convinced that it is a bad thing (for obvious reasons this is clearly a market which needs more regulation and process than they provide).

Nice experiment... too bad about all of that flushed away money though.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#395

Post by tptacek »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #390
tptacek wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they "just fix this" if her lawyer is saying "let's find the highest possible clearing price for this transaction"? In my experience, that's what a good lawyer is going to say. " This is just business. " Like in any negotiation, anything Airbnb offers is now the price floor. Her best interests are served by turning the pain dial to 11 for as long as the offer is on the table. You don't even have to know anythi…

If she was being coached by a lawyer, said lawyer would surely not let her write another word about it. That's his payday she will burn. I doubt she has one.

Why's that? What has she written so far that would jeopardize settlement negotiations, or her ability to bring a case to court?

Companies are invariably advised to clam up in the face of litigation, but that's because they have a lot to lose and because they have to maintain message discipline across the whole company. Also, because they usually don't want to talk about it.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#396

Post by dmlevi »

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…

So nicely put. I could not have said it better myself. Airbnb has the social responsibility to help restore this woman's life and make sure this doesn't happen again. Im concerned with all the attention this topic is receiving, that it will influence other bad people to leverage the missing link in their business model.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#397

Post by lawnchair_larry »

msluyter wrote: post #208

I guess I'm weirdly cynical, but I never though airbnb had a viable model. Perhaps for rental properties, but I would never rent my own home. I see a certain analogy between this and hitchhiking. Hitchhiking used to be safe in America, but now you rarely see it because it's perceived to be dangerous. I always figured airbnb would follow the same trajectory.

I think I remember reading that pg had the same reaction, and was surprised at how many users they got, then decided to invest. I too thought it was a terrible idea, and was (and still am) surprised that people would want to do this.

I am not saying this single incident is proof either way, but that was my initial reaction to the idea.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#398

Post by gobongo »

abcd_f wrote: post #366
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.

Very few people in distress can coherently answer an open-ended question such as "what can we do for you?" It also puts her in a position of, basically, asking a favor, and this is not something that a hurt person would be inclined to do. Give her a list of specific things you can do. Or rather just do them first, and then tell her. Rent and furnish an apartment for her and bring her the keys, for example. That will…

This post is spot on and the fact that airbnb keeps tripping over this point is just baffling. Are they ignorant or evil? They have to be one or the other.

Isn't it common sense that asking someone "What can we do to help?" is about as useful as yelling "Someone call an ambulance!" to a crowd? Anyone with half a lick of sense says "Hey, YOU (Point), call an ambulance" or "Here's what we're going to do to help you..." (and then actually do it). How can you be the CEO of what is supposedly a billion+ dollar company without realizing these basic things?

Madness.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#399

Post by llambda »

chc wrote: post #379
llambda wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham would have a lot to lose by making such a broad, unfounded statement...unless of course that's what he's been told and has good reason to believe it's correct. If so, why should we disbelieve the pg and Airbnb account? Simply because EJ's is loaded with emotional appeal? I don't see how a random blogger is more plausible than pg and Airbnb? I believe that most of her story is true (in the first blog post…

I really don't mean to imply pg is being dumb or anything like that — my experience is that even intelligent people tend to trust what their friends tell them. His comments seem to indicate that he hasn't been involved with the situation (which makes sense) and he's just repeating what he's heard from the AirBnB guys. I don't know, she could be lying. But she has little incentive to do so. It's possible that somebody…

We don't have a lot of evidence, so it makes sense to be tentative.

But both sides are saying the same thing: she was offered, in her own words, "emotional and financial" support.

Yes, Airbnb needs to make changes, but focusing only on how they handle her individual case for the moment: how is this not an adequate response?

Clearly she isn't lying. I don't believe Airbnb is lying either. But there is a possibility she is framing her situation differently now that there is a near-religious fervor throughout the Internet. Now she's saying they aren't helping her, that they haven't been helpful. While in fact it's evidently true they haven't put her in a new apartment and furnished it as promised, do we know this is because they failed to make good on their promise or because she turned them down or never followed up with them on that offer? We can't know.

Re: Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

#400

Post by brazzy »

indiefan wrote: post #355
ellyagg wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I greatly sympathized with her plight originally, I do note that she is somewhat disingenuous in her post today. For example, she quotes AirBnB as saying someone is in custody and then says local officials have not contacted her saying that's the case, implying that this somehow invalidates their claim. But then she goes on to show detailed knowledge of someone being in custody, even though they haven't been ch…

I had a similar reaction to this post. Surprised that she depicted the issue being escalated all the way up to the cofounder as somehow a reduction in customer service. Not that they've seemed to have handled this well by any stretch, but they certainly seem to be taking this seriously. Is it me, or does it take a significant amount of melodrama to negatively construe being asked to grab coffee with the cofounder of…

Is it me, or does it take a significant amount of melodrama to negatively construe being asked to grab coffee with the cofounder of the company with whom you have some dispute as bad customer service (he didn't ask if she was alright? really?).

It is you. She objected to what he said, which she perceived as superficial and focussed on reducing their PR damage rather than helping her. Who it was does not matter one bit when it's not helpful.

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