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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

#21

Post by fareed79 »

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…

basically, author expects calibrated minimal services, good support, and a minimal standard of quality. This is what you call a classic hotel/lodge. I fully agree with you, and those living close to these miserable BnB businesses surely would agree as well. This "model" is rotting city centers and popular places. AirBnB will never care about that poor lady. AirBnB will know how to make her anger disappear into the zero-star reviews statistics - it is much more important to keep a large density of cheap appts in the center of Lisbon.

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

#22

Post by hardware2win »

dsego wrote: post #3

> The toilet was in a constant state of flowing. Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.

>Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood.

Does it make her opinion less important?

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

#23

Post by rypskar »

Huh1337 wrote: post #8
dsego wrote: post #3

> The toilet was in a constant state of flowing. Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.

It's pretty common to encounter a toilet where that part which closes the water flow is broken. No amount of whacking is going to help.

Might be a case of different meaning attributed to a word, whacking don't help, but jiggling often works when the gasket as starting to go bad (I promise I will buy a new gasket any time soon, but right now gently jiggling temporary solves the problem)

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

#24

Post by klabb3 »

olabyne wrote: post #19

In case like this, you must also report the case to the city housing department. European capitals are trying to regulate airbnbs, with mentions of fake ID and electrical hazards, I'm pretty sure Lisbon city will react more quickly than Airbnb

Airbnb is largely incentivized not to report at all, at least in the short term (Q3 earnings call coming up, we need everyone in the support staff to "improve" their numbers).

Airbnb is clearly in the money-extraction phase of the VC-funded b2c cycle, it's not like we haven't seen this before. This turd is usually served with a side of "acquiring every potential competitor", so that the con can go on for as long as possible.

I've been decreasingly satisfied with airbnb (no horror stories). I think I've done roughly a 50-50 split between them and hotels, depending on the area. It's not exactly hard to switch back to hotels either, airbnb which now has premium prices really only makes sense if the service is premium too. Peace of mind is a huge factor for vacations.

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

#26

Post by coffeeblack »

dsego wrote: post #3

> The toilet was in a constant state of flowing. Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.

Not sure what “common European household” you live in, but that is commonly not a problem over here.

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

#27

Post by kwhitefoot »

When I try to find a place to stay on Airbnb it looks like the prices are higher than what I can find on hotels.com or booking.com.

And the web site is useless. There is no option to sort by price, the filters for maximum price don't work.

It's going to have to be cheaper than a hotel or B&B to make it worth taking the risk and I'll have to be able to find it without scrolling all the way through the site.

So far I haven't found a compelling reason to try it regardless of the horror stories.

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

#28

Post by brabel »

I hope the OP is well and managed to find better accomodation. If it was me, I would bit the bullet and just write off the place and check into the nearest hotel as soon as possible.

But regarding fake hosts: I think this is standard practice on BnB. Nobody wants to expose their real names on Bnb and be subject to abuse by unhappy guests... unfortunately that's the reality of it. From the host's point of view, I can understand that... the host shouldn't matter anyway in most cases, right? Most people who own these places don't look cool and young as in the fake pics you'll see in most listings! But guess what: those cool pics do seem to make the place a bit more attractive to guests, so the incentive to use fake pics is strong (not sure if that's illegal though).

I stayed in a few wonderful places in California through BnB, but clearly, the listings were all under fake people (I think some even go to the effort to pay a real person to pretend they are the owner, as I googled one of them and she seemed like a real person... though I 100% doubt a young artist lady own a 3-storey townhouse in a good, quite central area of San Francisco).

My sister is about to list her apartment on Bnb and she's going to pay a company specialising in this to do all the cleaning, customer support etc... They take a 20% cut I believe... but it's probably worth it. Not sure she'll allow her real profile to be used for the listing, but I suspect that as long as it's not illegal, she should use some kind of AI-created profile or something.

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

#29

Post by plantain »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #15

We need a new AirBnB, what it promised to be initially. A club for ordinary (or extraordinary) people to find/share a room rather than an indistry-scale business platform.

For a short period of time, couchsurfing.com was that magical place.

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

#30

Post by lm28469 »

EZ-E wrote: post #18

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…

> I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees

They're running out of magic investor money and the reality is starting to hit them

> Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive,

Of course, they were totally unregulated, regulation caught up in most countries (airbnb taxes/time limits, better status for uber drivers, &c.). They were only profitable because they were abusing the people working for them

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