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How airbnb lost me as a customer

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#41

Post by papsosouid »

tptacek wrote: post #13

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all. (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to cens…

The irrelevance of (1) aside, you are making a huge assumption there. In Ontario for example, you need to tell your landlord, but they basically can't refuse.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#42

Post by thesausageking »

papsosouid wrote: post #38

This would be why the ycombinator startup churner is bad. It is entirely focused on having people with no technical skills create companies that rely very heavily on a solid technical foundation. My 8 year old knows not to send sensitive information over unencrypted channels, and that email is completely insecure. Why are people who don't know this making sites like airbnb?

It's not that they can't; it's that they don't care. Airbnb has a great engineering team who could definitely setup a more secure way to do this.

The issue is that they only do things that will make them money. Until a lot of customers complain and hurts customer acquisition or revenues, they're not going to change it.

This is exactly the MVP / "lean startup" approach: do the absolute minimum. It's a smart way to deploy capital. But customers of these kinds of companies should be careful but they're usually complete products (by design) and may have sharp corners.

I normally stay away from buying anything from startups for this reason.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#43

Post by toomuchtodo »

codegeek wrote: post #31
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen people photoshop utility bills, proof of insurance, etc. Requirements like this are hilarious.

except that if you are caught, it is a federal offense at least in the US to forge things such as utility bills etc. It is more of a deterrent than anything else against outright fraud.

Citation?

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#44

Post by radley »

As one of many start-up peeps here on HN we've very sorry you had to jump through those hurdles. Your post is on the main page and is certain to get the right attention quickly.

For the rest of us, the only responses required is someone who knows ABNB lets us know they contacted them, and then ABNB following up here with an apology to the user & HN.

Don't talk on and on about it. Just fix it.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#45

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #18
njs12345 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how (1) is relevant to the complaint at hand.

It's not, except to the extent that it might be hard to feel sorry for someone who is taking unfair advantage of his landlord and cotenants and then complaining about the poor customer service that he was provided when doing so. Again though: it's not. It's a mostly orthogonal point.

[deleted]

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#46

Post by moheeb »

mootothemax wrote: post #17

Look at it from the other side of things: how would you react if AirBnB weren't doing these checks? If I'm staying somewhere, I'm leaving my luggage, and there's plenty of opportunities for stuff to go missing, whether in the middle night or otherwise. That's just the petty crime aspect, leaving aside other opportunities for much more serious badness. It's bad that their customer service failed you, but I'd much rath…

I have a feeling the OP couldn't care less whether AirBnB were doing those checks. The OP knows he lives there, he doesn't need someone to verify that.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#47

Post by TheCapn »

brucehart wrote: post #33
jpdoctor wrote: post #15

> and a copy of a utility bill What a dumbass requirement. As if somebody with access to a printer would not be able to produce one.

I have never understood this either. These procedures must be a relic from a time when most people did not have access to laser printers. Similarly when I went to renew my drivers license, they required proof of my social security number. My old license (with a picture of me, holograms, etc.) wasn't acceptable, but a health insurance card that could have been printed by anyone with access to a laminating machine was…

If we're going to rally against archaic "security" practices can we start to jerk about signatures? I'm not sure how my scribbles identify me when the person looking into it has no clue if those are TheCapn's scribbles or Brucehart scribbling "TheCapn" all signature-like.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#48

Post by papsosouid »

thesausageking wrote: post #42
papsosouid wrote: post #38

This would be why the ycombinator startup churner is bad. It is entirely focused on having people with no technical skills create companies that rely very heavily on a solid technical foundation. My 8 year old knows not to send sensitive information over unencrypted channels, and that email is completely insecure. Why are people who don't know this making sites like airbnb?

It's not that they can't; it's that they don't care. Airbnb has a great engineering team who could definitely setup a more secure way to do this. The issue is that they only do things that will make them money. Until a lot of customers complain and hurts customer acquisition or revenues, they're not going to change it. This is exactly the MVP / "lean startup" approach: do the absolute minimum. It's a smart way to dep…

By definition they can not possibly be a great engineering team if they demonstrate that they are completely and totally incompetent like this. "I don't care about doing important things correctly" is a statement of incompetence.

Re: How airbnb lost me as a customer

#49

Post by k-mcgrady »

Although AirBnB customer service was bad here it seems you also were at fault. They asked for two documents. You didn't want to send one of them over email (understandable). At that point you should have cancelled the rental. Hoping they would get back to you and waive a requirement wasn't a good idea.

Not sure HackerNews is the right place for this. Emailing AirBnb's customer service/complaints department would be better.

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