Another Airbnb Victim Tells His Story: “There Were Meth Pipes Everywhere”

Exactly this. The first blogger to go public with a report of a place being trashed by an Airbnb guest pointed out that with Craigslist, it is EASIER to contact the guest individually beforehand. Airbnb subtracts value from the typical transaction that would be arranged on Craigslist. That's because Craigslist makes its money from help-wanted ads and a few other ad categories, and doesn't need to monetize transactions for short-term stays in people's homes to keep right on making money.

Airbnb claims to be a force for disintermediating the short-term rental industry, but it desires to be market-leading intermediary. It isn't offering a market-leading level of customer service after a problem happens. Nor is Airbnb doing as much to prevent problems as other startup companies in the same space--several of those companies take much greater care to verify guest identities before setting up the transaction. What Airbnb appears to want, compared to other market participants, is to be paid as an intermediary without providing any particular value as an intermediary. That's nice work if you can get it, but that's a business model that is ripe for disruption and not a business model that I would invest in.

After edit: I hope everyone is reading the newly submitted article here for the details of what the Airbnb autoresponder message replying to the "urgent" help email address at Airbnb looked like not long ago. As the host thought after his place was trashed, "This freaked me out when I was frazzled. Hundreds of millions in venture financing, millions of dollars in fees, and no 24-hour help desk for emergencies? What am I paying them the exorbitant fees for?"

Edit: c'mon, you guys can do better than four downvotes.

That's what I thought as well (both are SF Bay Area), though it's only a guess. The combination of meth-heads and identity theft seems weird to be repeated. I would even tentatively guess at the meth-heads trashing apts being a cover for someone else who got the idea of using AirBnB to acquire documents for an identity-theft ring, but who knows, it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft, or who at least know someone to sell the documents to.

HN observers often assume we don't have a sense of humor around here. Actually, I've seen a number of funny comments upvoted, and have done so many times myself. It's closer to the truth to say that most people aren't nearly as funny as they think they are.