I'm not sure how serious to take this article. It's the author's only post and while they complain about the use of a fake profile picture, they literally use another person from the same stock photo they claim the landlord used.
Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
101–110 of 427 posts
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#102It'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…
> 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.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#103It'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…
This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve. I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young p…
> If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#104I think I've basically realized that I should simply not rent AirBnB, too many horror stories, including from people I know personally. It's hard to resist though, it's just nicer to have an apartment than a hotel room.
I guess I'll probably keep using it for times when it if it fails it doesn't ruin my life (not a month overseas).
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#105Quite surprised by the amount of pitchforks here. I certainly don't think of AirBNB as a failure and I doubt most others would. Is there a problem with scams? Totally. But that's hardly exclusive to AirBNB, wherever there's a market, digital or physical, there will be scammers. This was the case for all of human history and it's on you to vet your stuff. I've used AirBNB for long and short term stays, in Europe and i…
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Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve. I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young p…
What AirBnB missed was to include hotels in its listings, which would have allowed them to over a complete experience for travelers in general. booking.com started with hotels and included more AirBnB style listings.
Expanding into different niches like that is difficult. It's like Booking.com expanding into the camping market. They end up trying to shoehorn camping into the same database tables as hotel stays and it just becomes an abomination which misses many of the subtleties in the market.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#107If 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 yo…
Artificially lowering prices? You mean basic supply and demand? The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant. AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays. As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad acc…
For reference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33286238
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#108FWIW I stayed with my wife and 2 teenagers in airbnbs this summer in Norway, Germany, Czechia and Italy and they were all great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#109It'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…
Makes me think that there's a market for a 3rd party website for reviews for AirBnB hosts (and probably guests). But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with…
> But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#110A bunch of remarks: Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb. Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) l…
> Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.