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

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

#161

Post by hef19898 »

rjsw wrote: post #137
VBprogrammer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Booking.com expanding into camping would work fine in Europe, most campsites are busineses with a defined set of facilities that they offer.

Depends on the camp grounds. Those with specified and defined places it should be rather easy to do (Italy, Croatia, Germany are among those regions were you tend to have a lot those, France is a mixed bag and I haven't been to GB or Scandinavia recently). Those without defined places, that's gonna be difficult...

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

#162

Post by pteraspidomorph »

ivankelly wrote: post #110
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #54

A 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 undergroun…

Since it's the responsability of the municipality it's impossible for me personally to tell, but I've been all over the country and the green (or grey, depending on location) containers are ubiquitous (or drop points with underground deposits, sure). If specific neighborhoods of Lisbon do it differently I'm afraid I wouldn't know. It's not impossible.

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

#163

Post by aliqot »

nebula8804 wrote: post #152
hourago wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 arriv…

You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.

Holiday!

Inn!

Express!

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

#164

Post by ghaff »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #16

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…

It's also exacerbated by a lot of people looking for a bargain however slight.

Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).

I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.

One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.

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

#165

Post by stewx »

bell-cot wrote: post #158
stewx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no good reason AirBnb could not offer proper support. Showing contempt for your customers like this is a choice.

Might you tell us about any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support? Yes, it's "a choice". Sadly, it's an overwhelmingly popular choice.

My employer chooses to staff our customer support lines with North American agents who know what they are doing.

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

#166

Post by ghaff »

hef19898 wrote: post #56
mcculley wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

A lot of B&Bs (in the sense of small inns) in the US do list on AirBnB.

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

#167

Post by ghaff »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #115
specproc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels are great. They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!

My sister uses AirBnB quite frequently because her and her partner are both Vegan. Having a kitchen is a big advantage over hotels.

There are suite hotels with kitchenettes if that's a priority.

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

#168

Post by jadamczyk »

My Airbnb in Portugal experience was almost identical to the one in the article. After some time it happened it got me almost laughing at this point. Fortunately for me I was able to be enough of a pain in the ass to get a full refund from airbnb and a coupon that made the monthly stay discount apply to less than a monthly stay. I had to spend more money in the end anyway. After this I try to avoid airbnb as much as possible.

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

#169

Post by dorchadas »

boringg wrote: post #153
mancerayder wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's also Airbnb themselves. It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited, this is something many people including myself have experienced. Any doubts, spend some time on the Airbnb subreddit, which is run by hosts, and check out both their attitudes and their advice about how to remove bad reviews. Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product. I used to love Airbnb and used i…

Hopefully those properties will come back on the market at a reasonable price so that we can offset some of the housing inequity that airbnb is directly responsible for.

Seriously. I can only hope the tide is turning and these AirBnBs will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. Sadly corporations will probably eat them up and let, though hopefully as long-term instead of short!

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

#170

Post by itsoktocry »

MikePlacid wrote: post #133
specproc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels are great. They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!

> Hotels are great. You got to be kidding? Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lo…

Some hotels are good/bad. Some Airbnbs are good/bad. Tremendous insight.

Did you even read the article? The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.

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