Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

He really doesn't, though I can see how you might get that impression. In the post you suggest I re-read, Paul is referring to financial assistance, which will reasonably take a period of days to offer. When Paul says "Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning," that may well be true.

But that statement does not dispute or otherwise speak to the fact that it was hard and time consuming for the customer to get in contact with Airbnb in the first place, just to get basic information and to let them know what happened. EJ said in her original post that it took 14 hours to get a call back from the "urgent" phone line -- and even then only after she contacted a friend who freelances for them.

(Edited for clarity)

What would you do if you had had the same sort of experience that EJ had? I think you might change your mind.

Let's look at your numbers... I'll guess that you charge $150/night (minus the $20 AirBNB fee = $130/night you had 100 nights in 18 months, for an average of ~$722/month.

That's a tidy sum. Is it worth the work, risk and headache? Would the value of the extra property you are keeping and renting provide a better return if you moved to a smaller place and put the value difference in another investment?

These are questions you have to ask yourself, and everyone will have different opinions. My opinion is that being a landlord means having illiquid assets that provide a low return with high risk and a lot of work.

The thing is, Paul; I am fully willing to believe that TC are grabbing the sensational as best they can - and twisting the story. I more than believe the spokesman spoke in careful legal terms and inadvertently caused the fuckfest. I can totally get that we are getting tiny snippets of the story - even from EJ herself.

however

EJ has posted a blog in which she clearly feels upset, distraught, confused and worried.

Whether legitimately or not she doesn't feel happy.

This is the point where a big corporation goes into PR drive. But a startup and indie company such as Airbnb should, and could, be doing this:

* Fuck laywers, who cares about legal when a person is upset and distraught

* The Company is in SF - go and meet her tomorrow, forget the internet and the blog, make the person feel safe and cared for

* Pursue the culprits like the plague, hire a PI and pressure the police. Call in your big-guns contacts in SF and the Valley. Get millionaires calling the PD until they have a task force on the issue. After all; it is the reputation of the company at stake

* Take this girl on an apartment hunting spree, buy her something nice and replace the kit she lost.

And then tell the internet about it!

Ultimately there are two factors to consider here. Firstly her welfare, of course. After that it is OK to think of the company. If you can combine these two factors then no one is going to moan at them. Yes, the ideas I set out there are "above and beyond" - but we live in this shitty culture where everyone seems to have to consult lawyers when the shit hits the fan. Speaking for myself, if I heard about this issue (even if I heard about it after the first blog post went viral) my first response would not be to call the lawyers and see what I could say, it would be to call the damn girl, find out she was in the same city and turn up on the damn doorstep with a lawyer and a phonebook of people to ring and fix the issue. Perhaps this is just me.

This company just got over $100m of funding; there appears to be cash to spare to make this right.

Going back to pont #1; for whatever the reason Airbnb have a customer who is feeling terrible, upset and distraught. And no amount of "we are working to help this women" comments are going to help that. Fix the girl's situation, the rest will follow naturally. Companies can be Samaritans as well.

I've seen plenty of people endorse the competition after being screwed by a company, so I don't think that's suspicious at all.

I feel badly for the person whose placed got trashed, and it seems Airbnb is doing what they can to remedy the situation - but am I the only one who feels there's a certain risk to be assumed with online transactions such as this?

If a girl meets a man on match.com who claims to be single, but after getting into a relationship with him she finds out he's married - is match.com to blame for this? Could they have done more to verify his background - perhaps, but that's also the risk we take.

It's an unfortunate incident, but trust me other than hacker news, techmeme and techcrunch (that's where the FT got it from) this is not really headline news, and it's not going to affect airbnb's performance in the long run.

On a separate note, I hope pg realizes with 423 comments on here it's hard to make heads or tails of what to read - hopefully the comments rating system will be brought back.