How airbnb lost me as a customer • Hacker News Board

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#51

Post by andrewcooke » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 8:29 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

sorry to side-track, but it looks like i've misunderstood american english. i thought "apartment" was american for "flat". but apparently it means "rented flat".

so what do you call a self-contained living area (several rooms - like a house, but it's not stand-alone) in a larger building if you own it?

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#52

Post by tatsuke95 » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 8:33 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #38

This would be why the ycombinator startup churner is bad. It is entirely focused on having people with no technical skills create companies that rely very heavily on a solid technical foundation. My 8 year old knows not to send sensitive information over unencrypted channels, and that email is completely insecure. Why are people who don't know this making sites like airbnb?

>"It is entirely focused on having people with no technical skills create companies that rely very heavily on a solid technical foundation."

Disagree. I don't need to know how to send/receive encrypted information, just that I need it. Someone else can get their hands dirty on the problem. No "technical foundation" necessary, just common sense.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#53

Post by yummies » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

andrewcooke wrote: post #51

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

sorry to side-track, but it looks like i've misunderstood american english. i thought "apartment" was american for "flat". but apparently it means "rented flat". so what do you call a self-contained living area (several rooms - like a house, but it's not stand-alone) in a larger building if you own it?

it depends on the ownership structure, but usually a condo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium 'Colloquially, the term is often used to refer to the unit itself in place of the word "apartment". A condominium may be simply defined as an "apartment" that the resident owns as opposed to rents.'

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#54

Post by mcguire » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

andrewcooke wrote: post #51

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

sorry to side-track, but it looks like i've misunderstood american english. i thought "apartment" was american for "flat". but apparently it means "rented flat". so what do you call a self-contained living area (several rooms - like a house, but it's not stand-alone) in a larger building if you own it?

A "condo" or "condominium", for something like an apartment that you own the interior of, or a "townhouse", for something like a house that is attached to other townhouses. There's considerable overlap and general fogginess between the two.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#55

Post by tatsuke95 » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 8:41 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #41

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

The irrelevance of (1) aside, you are making a huge assumption there. In Ontario for example, you need to tell your landlord, but they basically can't refuse.

There are circumstances in Ontario, mostly relating to trying to terminate tenancy, where the landlord can't reasonably refuse a request to sublet the place. I believe the intent is that you don't get trapped in some lease when you've lost your job and have to move cross-country. The landlord is obligated to mitigate losses, and subletting covers that.

I'm going to assume "temporarily leasing my place to make $3,000" won't qualify, but I'm no lawyer. There are liability issues associated with people subletting, and I'm doubtful AirBnB has all those bases covered.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#56

Post by amino » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

I think this raises another point... shouldn't email be a secure method of communication? Do you think its time for mail servers to start supporting encryption as a default?

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#57

Post by clauretano » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 9:36 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

#1 is a common assumption, but really condos are a subset of apartments. "Apartment" can refer to a leased unit, a co-op situation, or an owned condo unit. The only thing that defines an "apartment" is that it is a housing unit contained within a larger unit.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#58

Post by ARobotics » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 11:05 PM UTC

It's too late for me to edit my original post now, but for posterity - airbnb contacted me and resolved the issue. The final customer service rep I spoke to was friendly and helpful, and they refunded the 3% listing/service fee as amends for the slow support.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#59

Post by 4clicknet » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 11:13 PM UTC

tatsuke95 wrote: post #55

papsosouid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irrelevance of (1) aside, you are making a huge assumption there. In Ontario for example, you need to tell your landlord, but they basically can't refuse.

There are circumstances in Ontario, mostly relating to trying to terminate tenancy, where the landlord can't reasonably refuse a request to sublet the place. I believe the intent is that you don't get trapped in some lease when you've lost your job and have to move cross-country. The landlord is obligated to mitigate losses, and subletting covers that. I'm going to assume "temporarily leasing my place to make $3,000"…

I've been a landlord in Ontario for 10 years and had a sublet request a few months ago. In Ontario, there are 2 stages: a tenant has to make a general request to sublet, and then a specific one. They can break the lease if the landlord refuses at either stage, but otherwise they have to provide a legitimate replacement tenant (as opposed to putting a random person forward as a pretext to break the lease) or stay until the lease ends.

Of course you could just stop paying rent and your tenancy will be terminated much faster and you won't have to go through the hassle of finding someone to sublet.

Edit: The above applies in the case of legitimate sublet request - a two week AirBNB guest wouldn't count.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#60

Post by whichdan » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 11:14 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #28

mootothemax wrote: post #17

Look at it from the other side of things: how would you react if AirBnB weren't doing these checks? If I'm staying somewhere, I'm leaving my luggage, and there's plenty of opportunities for stuff to go missing, whether in the middle night or otherwise. That's just the petty crime aspect, leaving aside other opportunities for much more serious badness. It's bad that their customer service failed you, but I'd much rath…

Heaven forbid they spend 10 dollars on a php upload script on SSL for this kind of information as opposed to "Scan you social security card and send it to customerservice@airbnb.com!"

Pedantic note: I'm not excusing them for lacking something as critical as a secure way to transmit sensitive information, but it's certainly more involved than "ten dollars worth of PHP."

You're probably looking at setting up a dedicated server to store the images (since you want the server locked down tighter than a normal web server, and you need to think about having different backups in place, etc) and then have one of the engineers spend a few days developing a system to upload the images and allow secured access to their support staff. Sure, writing the code to upload files is easy, but the security and UI take a good bit of effort. You're probably looking closer to $1k excluding the cost of hardware and the SSL cert.