Get a hotel next time like an adult.
For a whole month‽
Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
291–300 of 427 posts
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#292Yep. Had an Airbnb setup this week in Atlanta, looked good, responsive host. We arrived, looked clean and decorated well enough, but had 4 glade plugins for a 500sqft place… seemed excessive like their might be a bad smell hidden. Sat down on a chaise which collapsed because of a leg attached by gum. Found a cockroach under said chaise. Reported it and the owner said it was treated the other day, so it should be fine…
> Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel. Of course this does not apply to exotic Airbnbs.
> If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident".
Some other residents will have broken plumbing, bad smells and cockroaches. You are living as they are?
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#293I don't think the interesting part of this article is that there are bad AirBnB hosts. I'm sure there are. I don't think they are the majority, and I'm basing that on my overwhelmingly positive experiences as a guest. So, that part of the article doesn't ring true to me. The interesting part is how much of a hellish experience AirBnB support was. If you're staying in an AirBnB, you likely do not have the time to spen…
All true, but at the same time, the user didn't do herself any favors by waiting until weeks(?) into a long-term (by Airbnb standards) rental.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#294Hotels are not without failure, too. I stayed in both the hotels and AirBnbs often (as a rough guess ~75 hotel stays and 30 airbnb stays) and saw hotels full on arrival late at night, noisy rooms, electrical failures and one flood from a guest upstairs, who managed from room 6XX vacate rooms 5XX 4XX 3XX and 2XX -- quite an achievment! I may be lucky, but all my AirBnb stays were pretty good to excellent. I book for c…
I'm guessing that some of your AirBnB success is because you seem to choose fairly carefully and not just on price.
That said, you also seem to have had bad luck with hotels. I've stayed in many hundreds and the percentage of memorably bad experiences I've had is tiny. I'm not sure if I have had the kind of record you have had even if I go back decades. I can't remember the last time a hotel gave away my room.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#295The problem with AirBnB is the rating system. I have booked many dozens of apartments on AirBnB and my approach these days is: 1: Never book an apartment with less than 50 ratings 2: Never book an apartment with an average rating of less than 4.8 stars The problem is that AirBnB has set up their system so that even complete garbage apartments have average ratings of over 4.5 stars. Because of that, people still book…
Airbnb also makes it difficult to rate someone poorly without being rated poorly yourself. You get almost no recourse if you do get a bad review.
I thought the ratings were done blindly? If not, that's terrible and obviously leads to problems.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#296for me airbnb is the last resort if nothing else is available...
For me its the first resort if I'm staying for more than a few days.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
It changed when it turned into a big VC thing. All of the “Uber for X” models are fundamentally evil at scale. The founders vision is irrelevant to the investors need for return. The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the…
These always remind me of the Stay Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. Like the most innocuous thing ever becomes terrible at scale. Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, Facebook all seemed like reasonable to great ideas and were really neat at smaller scale. And once they grew they started wreaking havoc in new and unexpected ways. It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like dest…
Exactly, I was so optimistic that the only path was one of human enlightenment because of the internet's ability to scale up the distribution of information and allow groups to collaborate instantly.
It all went horribly wrong.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#298It'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…
My family went to an Airbnb (basically they were selling themselves as sort of resort) and when my wife saw she had to cook, etc... She was really mad. The listing didn't say it. Long history short, never again. We're going to resorts and hotels ever since. The extra money is not that much since Airbnb basically ramping up their prices.
She was mad because she had to cook? Perhaps she didn't realize it was an AirBnB? I had no idea there were fully-catered AirBnBs.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent vacations in California this year, and noticed the same: housekeeping is every 5 days instead of everyday, hotel bars/restaurants are either closed or turned into fast foods (menu consists only of burgers, sandwiches and salads), amenities like gyms are closed. And all that for prices that are significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Hotels have definitely cut back on servicing rooms. Although honestly? I not infrequently stay in "serviced apartments" that are only cleaned once a week. And that's just fine. The housekeeper is more likely to interrupt me to clean the room than provide a service I actually care about.
I'm with you - I don't need (or even want, really) my room cleaned every day. It's friggin annoying. I always happen to be needing to access the room when housekeeping is in there. Just come once every 3-5 days if it comes to that, thanks.
Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
#300IMO this reeks of data-driven myopia. Slow bleeds to goodwill are incredibly difficult to properly capture into a model. Anything that isn't measured - or poorly measured - is liable to be traded off for what is measured.