Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

When I alerted AirBNB about a safety issue, they responded that they had completed their investigation (which apparently did not involve talking to me) and said the hosts were "elite" and basically took their side.

AirBNB is not safe.

https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexua...

https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sex...

If only there was some regulation for such services that would require some sort of standard. You know some sort of licensing by the state. /s

This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.

It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they possibly can. They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews.

The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.

How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.

Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.

I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees as they probably feel the pressure from an environment with increasing interest rates - without improving the service more than before.

Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, but I wonder that in front of the increasing fees for a decreasing added value, the pendulum will swing back and customers will revert back to direct contact with the service providers instead of using middlemen apps. The old way.

The account was clearly created just to share this issue, so using the other face from the picture is meant to help emphasize the false pick in the AirBnB posting.