Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

chriskiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 377 posts

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#131

Post by cmsonger »

This sucks. I was doing exactly this yesterday and fortunately figured it out before sending money that I could not do the booking. Instead I told the people I wanted to stay close to me "book it and I'll send you the money."

I bet AirBnB people read hacker news.

Folks: I should be able to pay for another user's booking. It just can't be that hard. I set the dates, supply the payment info, anoint another user of your platform to reach out to the host.

Alternatively (if there's something with payment processing that I don't understand), the user who wants me to pay chooses the dates, writes what they want to say to the host, and then passes the baton to me for supplying payment info.

I've paid for friends and family to stay in hotels a zillion times. I was amazed that your platform does not allow this. Now I'm appalled that it allows situations like OP's to happen. And for the record, I was not thrilled to have to disclose what I was paying for my friends. Until this is fixed, will actively try to use hotels for this in the future. (This was a unique case.)

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#132

Post by JumpCrisscross »

srcreigh wrote: post #95
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have a friend use their account. Or make a new account. Or use VRBO or a number of Airbnb’s competitors. Or use a sock Airbnb account to connect with a host and then negotiate directly.

There was a thread this week (?) about how AirBNB will ban you for traveling with a banned person

> how AirBNB will ban you for traveling with a banned person

Why do they need to know?

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#133

Post by lotsofpulp »

Nextgrid wrote: post #108
lotsofpulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious how this would work. I have not heard of a US government forcing a business like AirBnb to do business with a customer unless there was a violation of discrimination against a protected class.

I think it's less about forcing them to do business and more about the regulator/consumer protection agency getting wind of what is obviously malicious and potentially illegal behavior from the company - a lot of companies will fold when a case gets anywhere near litigation/consumer protection/arbitration just to not attract attention. In this case, the chargeback was just the last resort solution for the customer be…

Sure, but refusing to do business with someone is legal in most cases.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#134

Post by barrkel »

AirBnB is like a no-recourse Paypal for random third parties of unknown psychological stability. You do not contract with AirBnB. I recommend staying well away from them.

I have my own horror story, involving an overflowing toilet and hysterical accusations from the host.

We noticed the toilet was backed up in the bowl in the morning and alerted the host. The person the host sent round to look at it found some kind of cosmetic wipe, then the host leapt the conclusion that we were at fault, thinking they were nappy wipes. We were not at fault; we use laundered reusable cotton wipes. In any case, this lead her to not fix the problem!

In the evening, after we came back to the apartment, the toilet started overflowing when the apartment upstairs flushed. Then the apartment upstairs had a shower; water was coming up out of our shower, out of the toilet, flooding out of the bathroom, into the living area. We had a toddler, and toilet water started flooding into his bedroom too.

After some heated phone conversations, the apartment upstairs was determined to be the problem (she was flushing cosmetic wipes), and still the host was incredibly nasty, because we weren't grateful enough that it was cleaned up late at night.

I deleted my AirBnB account after this experience.

It's not worth the risk. Not once.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#137

Post by latency-guy2 »

che_shirecat wrote: post #45
Nextgrid wrote: post #6

Charge it back via your bank and explain the situation. Worst case scenario, it gets denied, you don't lose anything either way. The initial misunderstanding was cleared up just one hour after the booking - it should be very reasonable for the host to offer a full refund, it's not like it was a last-minute cancellation where the host would struggle to get it rebooked in time and lose out. The host is clearly being ma…

Getting yourself banned off of Airbnb for $950 doesn't sound optimal unless you are swearing off short term lodging around the world (outside of hotels) for the foreseeable future. That's one of the negative externalities of capture-the-market VC investing - getting banned on one of these platforms cuts you off from almost the entirety of supply because of how marketplace dynamics work.

If a service stole $950 from me, the last thing I would be worried about is getting banned from the service

They would not get a single cent from me for the remainder of my life and in fact I would do plenty of things to cost them business at any chance I will get.

AirBNB is also not the only short term rental option out there. E.g. Vrbo

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#138

Post by wruza »

jeromegv wrote: post #59
nixpulvis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being banned from Best Western, for example, because you disputed a charge! Having a dispute, especially one which is so reasonable like this, being grounds for banning is insane to me. Companies as large as Airbnb cannot be just banning whoever they want. This whole notion of, we don't agree with you, so we'll just ban you thing has got to stop.

Companies want you to file the dispute through their support system using their existing process. Once you file a dispute through the credit card company, the dispute process is moved to the credit card company and now the company has a LOT less power on what might be happening. They also get severely impacted from having a high amount of charge back and hurts them the next time they want to negotiate their credit ca…

How can they avoid future trouble by not refunding a 1 hour cancel? The next person who makes a similar mistake will chargeback too, unless they aren’t aware of it. For a company, the only way out of it is to stay within common sense, because that’s what all their clients have in common.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#139

Post by dghlsakjg »

baremetal wrote: post #110
lotsofpulp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address, plus a lot of companies require SMS 2FA now, and most people do not have multiple phone numbers to burn. Besides that, I think AirBnb might require you to upload government issued photo identification too, but I am not sure.

>It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address, Everything is trivial when you aren't the one who actually has to implement it. If you ban a billing address: what if someone else moves to that address?

Haha. I had the same reaction. Clearly this person has never had to deal with addresses in a database.

There are any number of ways to represent the exact same address (apt vs. unit vs. suite vs. '#', 5 digit zip vs. 9- digit zip, st. vs. street), and there are cases where the same address serves multiple people (private/virtual mail boxes). A billing address is a loose identifier at best.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#140

Post by bombcar »

anadem wrote: post #42

Commenting as a "host" on Airbnb: yes, it's a reeaaally nasty company with absolutely horrible "support", from the hosting side as well as from the guest side. In this particular case it's an unkind and nasty host as well; they could perfectly well allow the guest despite Airbnb's policies, though Airbnb would say that their laughable "Aircover" "insurance" would not apply to the rental.

This is exactly what happened with eBay and PayPal. The scammers learn how to work the system and “innocents” on both sides get screwed.
Post reply on HN