We've been considering doing the whole AirBnB thing (also in Thailand), but the problem with all of these online services is that you just aren't in any control of your income.
I've kept only to business models where I bill directly. This rules out google adsense, Apple and Android paid apps, AirBnB etc. I won't even use anything like PayPal to collect money for me -- there's just far too much risk for capricious loss of the business through factors that you have absolutely no control over.
Building a business is hard, it seems utter folly to give another entity this sort of control over what you're doing.
Reading that article makes me furious -- of course, there are many things we don't know, and this person may be full of it, and she may have crossed a line (knowingly... or unknowingly), etc.
But, even if that's true, not giving reasons why you're kicking users out is infuriating.
No due process, no appeal, just a big "fuck you" with no explanation whatsoever. These companies apparently think it's a normal way of dealing with users -- and something they can do with total impunity once they have acquired near-monopoly status.
Airbnb is a short-term rental company, not a f*ing nation state.
It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these Kafka-esque scenarios.
Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
Some of the Stripe cancellation messages are the same. It might be that their bank partners requires this of them.
I tried to help a friend figure out why their account was terminated, and it would have been nice if their e-mail said: "Your account was terminated because you violated terms of conditions x,y,z".
Could be because they are afraid of lawsuits that they aren't more specific?
Often in these articles, you read through to some sort of detail hidden at the end which reveals why the company actually did cut ties, and the aggrieved party is blind to it or trying to talk around it. In this case, there's nothing.
My guesses were assault, theft or maybe some effort to actively sabotage Airbnb by promoting a competitor. But if any of those things happened, they're not detailed or hinted at all.
I imagine Airbnb are vague for legal reasons. But it must feel hugely unfair to be in the position of the author and lose a significant portion of your life and livelihood.
The sense I get is just that they don't cancel successful accounts very often; given the escalations, I have to believe they have some strong reason. It sounds like they will have some host community issues now, but what got me was how they cancelled guests. It sounds like they just used the host cancellation process, but if I found out AirBnB did that masked as the host, I'd go from annoyed at the world to very angry at AirBnB...
In the olden days they used to be called User Groups - most big tech corps had them, run mostly by the customers. But that's an unfashionable term these days, just like my beige cords and jumpers with elbow patches.
1. a unified body of individuals: as
a : state, commonwealth
b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself <the problems of a large community>
c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location
d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons>
e : a group linked by a common policy
f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community>
g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community>
2
: society at large
3
a : joint ownership or participation <community of goods>
b : common character : likeness <community of interests>
c : social activity : fellowship
d : a social state or condition
Notice that in the dictionary definition of community is that there is lots of references to "group of people", "unified", etc. but no reference that allows for a single entity to determine membership.
Therefore people hosting for AirBNB are not part of a community.
The dictionary definition clearly has no requirement that it be a mutually defined membership, just a common group of people.
You are saying "because the dictionary does not say one entity can control who is a member, it's not allowed".
But the dictionary definition neither requires nor disallows a single entity from defining membership, and definitions don't fall into the "that which is not referenced is not permitted" category of things.
In fact, it's the opposite. If you meet at least the minimum requirements of some definition, you are that thing. You may also be other things that are more specific.
So they are completely within the dictionary definition of a community.
They are a group of people with a common characteristic (they are airbnb hosts) scattered through a larger society.
Whether this is defined by airbnb or not doesn't matter.
Claiming anything else is simply ridiculous to me.
Do you also believe the daughters of the american revolution are not a community, because the daughters of the american revolution defines who is part of their membership?
Is hacker news not a community because contributing requires accounts HN reserves the right to remove accounts at any time (thus controlling participation)?
I'm not sure why you are not just willing to admit you are being silly.
A community is a body of people who respect and act in each other's best interests or for the collective good.
A company is not a community, it's a for-profit enterprise, and it does not give a fuck about respecting you or your best interests if there is profit to be made, or even if there is internal bureaucracy to be followed.
Loyalty to business and corporate interests is seldom well placed.
An obscure, not fully tested algorithm applies a filter to all users. Maybe it's an internal beta, maybe some integrator that should have considered account history pulled a blank table instead of real values. Whatever. It happened.
Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even can know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to happen like that in the first place. Nobody wants the responsibility for dealing with it.
If you have algos in place to flag an account and forget to implement the reason why that algo came to the conclusion, you should seriously rethink your setup.
That may not always be possible. For example, if you have a neural network doing the flagging, you might not be able to figure out exactly 'why' a particular account was flagged.
What a shitty termination notice and a shitty way of handling things from an account that has clearly been one of their better hosts. If you're going to ascribe the "superhost" appellation, you'd think they'd actually give a fuck before algorithmically cancelling the user's account, or maybe work through a warning or validate their concerns or literally ANYTHING before turning things up to 11 and nuking the account from orbit.
Even if AirBNB had a perfectly legitimate reason (which, to be clear, would make the author a borderline sociopath to publish like this, but isn't out of the question), the termination notice and the complete lack of transparency is so Kafkaesque and needlessly horrible that this just makes AirBNB look awful.
I've considered going the host route, but reading through something like this makes me seriously second guess using them. I understand that it's their platform and they can de facto rule by fiat, but that doesn't mean it's good policy and that potential hosts shouldn't have some sort of communication or chance to rectify an issue or any level of transparency.
It's also disappointing when a company effectively has to be shamed into taking anything resembling a human approach to a problem. It's been a week of "we can't tell you anything, sorry" which is bullshit. There's simply no reason for that, and it's disheartening to say the least.
In the meantime you may upload your apartments in Housetrip, Wimdu, Booking.com, Homeaway and so on.
None is as good and smooth as Airbnb but they work.
When hopefully Airbnb reopens your account, keep these portals too, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
This is a tough read, because someone's livelihood and in some part happiness combine with their AirBnB business, and losing it is painful.
The hell of it is that there are many circumstances in which the customer would not be allowed to know why the cancellation.
I'm most familiar with Bank Secrecy Act rules; some of which definitely apply to AirBnB.
So, for instance, an algorithm flags the house as a likely money laundering location. AirBnB response: notify FinCEN, Thai authorities, turn off customer account without explanation. In the US even telling your employees down the line why the account was canceled might lead to fines and jail time for the compliance folks. I am not making this up, or exaggerating. That's just how it is.
Or, perhaps a repeat customer is the target. Same stuff. Or, perhaps the owner is a small time pornographer / drug dealer / etc in Thailand, and Thai authorities notify the bank, which notifies AirBnB's bank.. Of all the employees contacted, only the CTO would know, but even he might be told "flagged, don't ask." And, that will be all. No matter how much he might care that a good customer stay happy and with the company, getting rid of them is infinitely better than being deposed over a BSA violation and information leakage.
Anti-money laundering regulation was my first guess as to why, but it doesn't really fit because companies are not allowed to do anything to warn customers that they are under investigation. Cancelling their account could certainly tip them off to this and so it seems unlikely that it would comply.
Having said that, I don't know what the Thai regulations are. Perhaps this fits better under those.
"Sharing economy" = shareCROPPING economy. (look up "sharecropping" to understand )
But basically, sharecroppers were exposed to all the risk, and the landowner got the initial first dibs on the crops. The landowner often times had complete ability to be completely arbitrary ( like AirBNB is in this case )
You are not running a business if you don't have direct access to your clientele. You are a shareCROPPER. Look it up.
Use AirBNB, as a marketing vehicle, not your only income source.
Woo hoo, I love these downvotes. Seriously, peeps...give me your hate. And while you are doing that - please tell me which bit of my statement is factually incorrect.
"a tenant farmer especially in the southern United States who is provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges"
There are no crops involved in the posted story. Further, AirBNB doesn't own the land so I'm not sure the term even makes sense as a metaphor.
The iPhone logging in all over the US sounds like it's probably the cause. The account may well have been shuttered for being a conduit of fraud or the like and thus the account got canned. It'll be interesting to hear any follow-up to this.
AirBnB's ability to handle failure modes is beyond bad.
If a host fails to accommodate you, you better have a hotel in mind for a plan B.
Their UK customer service phone line drops calls after 300 seconds in the waiting queue. Go and try it: +448435047257
Form replies to e-mails, never enough detail, multiple days' response times.
What's the procedure for documenting a host has checked in, or hasn't? That's right, there isn't one. They do everything by hand, and is't a he said/she said, I will take a week to deliberate, and then cut the baby in half kind of deal.
When I have had a host screw me over in a major city where finding accommodation in a peak time is incredibly difficult, I've complained to Airbnb very persistently and aggressively, and they've compensated me.
That's exactly the point I'm trying to get across: there should be a well-defined business process, reflected in the UI in their app/website, for getting refunds. That there isn't speaks volumes.
True of almost every large company until you complain like a bastard. I've been stonewalled by Dell, Airbnb, airlines, etc but eventually won through sheer stubbornness.
Quick read the AirBnB terms (termination). Seems like they can basically terminate you however/whenever they want.
IANAL but that seems rather flimsy. Aren't they essentially an infrastructure provider (website, app, booking etc.) that should have service contracts?
That pretty much means you should not and cannot depend on AirBnB as a major source of income. Risk management wise that's just insane.
It puts a decent amount of theoretical "extortion power" in their hands.
"Oh yeah we see you make X which likely means you heavily depend on this income. Would you kindly agree to these new terms/new rates or be screwed?"
Independent of all of this it is horrible style to terminate someone without further notice or reason. Writing this into ToS is a pretty bad sign.
It generally seems better to have a policy that defaults to explaining the reason for termination except in special cases (funny money laundering laws etc.).
Makes me wonder, is there is any "ToS" ranking site out there? X,Y,Z in ToS are a bad sign, here's why? Kind of like the sites calling out bad UX practices that are meant to trick people into buying extra stuff.
The problem here is that this sort of termination clause is basically standard practice these days. For instance, Google's TOS just says "Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time": http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ - That's pretty damn scary given that I (and most people I know) have a Gmail account as their primary contact!
Everyone just accepts it on the assumption that it's a last-ditch protection against 'bad people', and hopes that in their case if anything goes wrong the company will deal transparently and fairly with them.
Google is king of search and can cut you off without reason or explanation. AirBNB is king of home sharing and can cut you off without reason or explanation.
Companies that have a virtual monopoly can treat their ecosystem this way because there's no reason not to.
If this is the way they treat their very best hosts, can you imagine how rock bottom badly you'll be treated if you're anything less than a stellar superstar.
Imagine if they dealt with their employees in the same way.
Your fired, leave. I'm not telling you why.
The unicorn paradox:
1. Create a small startup to disrupt the corporations
2. Create a loyal user base
3. Ride the hockey stick on your unicorn
4. Treat your users as a commodity as you scale
5. Become a terms & conditions black box
6. Congratulations, you are a corporation.
You could embed a tracking pixel and email clients that don't block remote content will fetch it from the server where you'll see the number it's been accessed.
What was the point of having someone phone the account holder but not act like a human being? If you're going to hide behind the algo (and hopefully do an investigation and apology) isn't it better not to have any human contact? If you phone someone, the person on the other end tends to expect some humanity (ability to ask questions, commitment to investigate).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.7 ms ] threadI've kept only to business models where I bill directly. This rules out google adsense, Apple and Android paid apps, AirBnB etc. I won't even use anything like PayPal to collect money for me -- there's just far too much risk for capricious loss of the business through factors that you have absolutely no control over.
Building a business is hard, it seems utter folly to give another entity this sort of control over what you're doing.
This type of behavior on the part of internet giants is absolutely wrong.
But, even if that's true, not giving reasons why you're kicking users out is infuriating.
No due process, no appeal, just a big "fuck you" with no explanation whatsoever. These companies apparently think it's a normal way of dealing with users -- and something they can do with total impunity once they have acquired near-monopoly status.
Let's hope for a big backlash some day soon.
It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these Kafka-esque scenarios.
Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
I tried to help a friend figure out why their account was terminated, and it would have been nice if their e-mail said: "Your account was terminated because you violated terms of conditions x,y,z".
Could be because they are afraid of lawsuits that they aren't more specific?
My guesses were assault, theft or maybe some effort to actively sabotage Airbnb by promoting a competitor. But if any of those things happened, they're not detailed or hinted at all.
I imagine Airbnb are vague for legal reasons. But it must feel hugely unfair to be in the position of the author and lose a significant portion of your life and livelihood.
It's not a community - it's people meeting on a commercial platform who's in for the big money.
Still, as a previous host and renter, I am disgusted.
Communities are determined by a collective decision, not a unilateral decision.
Anyone one talking about the "AirBNB community" is lying to themselves or to the person they are talking to.
If AirBNB wanted a community, they would have visible, due process procedures in place that allow for appeals and the community to arbitrate disputes.
Says who? This is not any requirement of any commonly accepted definition of community.
You certainly can just make crap up and define words however you like, but you can't expect others to go along with you :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community
Community... "who mutually define that relationship (subjectively) as important to their social identity and social practice."
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community :
1. a unified body of individuals: as a : state, commonwealth b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself <the problems of a large community> c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons> e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community> g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community> 2 : society at large 3 a : joint ownership or participation <community of goods> b : common character : likeness <community of interests> c : social activity : fellowship d : a social state or condition
Notice that in the dictionary definition of community is that there is lots of references to "group of people", "unified", etc. but no reference that allows for a single entity to determine membership.
Therefore people hosting for AirBNB are not part of a community.
She should just take the educational value of being booted and realize that she needs to independently build revenue and marketing.
You are saying "because the dictionary does not say one entity can control who is a member, it's not allowed".
But the dictionary definition neither requires nor disallows a single entity from defining membership, and definitions don't fall into the "that which is not referenced is not permitted" category of things. In fact, it's the opposite. If you meet at least the minimum requirements of some definition, you are that thing. You may also be other things that are more specific.
So they are completely within the dictionary definition of a community. They are a group of people with a common characteristic (they are airbnb hosts) scattered through a larger society.
Whether this is defined by airbnb or not doesn't matter.
Claiming anything else is simply ridiculous to me.
Do you also believe the daughters of the american revolution are not a community, because the daughters of the american revolution defines who is part of their membership?
Is hacker news not a community because contributing requires accounts HN reserves the right to remove accounts at any time (thus controlling participation)?
I'm not sure why you are not just willing to admit you are being silly.
A community is a body of people who respect and act in each other's best interests or for the collective good.
A company is not a community, it's a for-profit enterprise, and it does not give a fuck about respecting you or your best interests if there is profit to be made, or even if there is internal bureaucracy to be followed.
Loyalty to business and corporate interests is seldom well placed.
- You fucked up badly in 2011 with that wrecked apartment in SF
- You cleaned up nicely eventually, introduced insurance and whatnot
Now, you absolutely seriously need to clean this up the proper way. The shitstorm is already brewing.
Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even can know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to happen like that in the first place. Nobody wants the responsibility for dealing with it.
So there you have it.
Even if AirBNB had a perfectly legitimate reason (which, to be clear, would make the author a borderline sociopath to publish like this, but isn't out of the question), the termination notice and the complete lack of transparency is so Kafkaesque and needlessly horrible that this just makes AirBNB look awful.
I've considered going the host route, but reading through something like this makes me seriously second guess using them. I understand that it's their platform and they can de facto rule by fiat, but that doesn't mean it's good policy and that potential hosts shouldn't have some sort of communication or chance to rectify an issue or any level of transparency.
It's also disappointing when a company effectively has to be shamed into taking anything resembling a human approach to a problem. It's been a week of "we can't tell you anything, sorry" which is bullshit. There's simply no reason for that, and it's disheartening to say the least.
It's because the normal rough edges of handling customer complaints is shoved out the door, because that didn't really matter, right?
"For your convenience your account has been closed. Do not reply to this email."
The hell of it is that there are many circumstances in which the customer would not be allowed to know why the cancellation.
I'm most familiar with Bank Secrecy Act rules; some of which definitely apply to AirBnB.
So, for instance, an algorithm flags the house as a likely money laundering location. AirBnB response: notify FinCEN, Thai authorities, turn off customer account without explanation. In the US even telling your employees down the line why the account was canceled might lead to fines and jail time for the compliance folks. I am not making this up, or exaggerating. That's just how it is.
Or, perhaps a repeat customer is the target. Same stuff. Or, perhaps the owner is a small time pornographer / drug dealer / etc in Thailand, and Thai authorities notify the bank, which notifies AirBnB's bank.. Of all the employees contacted, only the CTO would know, but even he might be told "flagged, don't ask." And, that will be all. No matter how much he might care that a good customer stay happy and with the company, getting rid of them is infinitely better than being deposed over a BSA violation and information leakage.
Having said that, I don't know what the Thai regulations are. Perhaps this fits better under those.
Reporting starts at 2 million baht ($56k)
http://www.bangkokbank.com/BangkokBank/WebServices/AMLRegula...
But basically, sharecroppers were exposed to all the risk, and the landowner got the initial first dibs on the crops. The landowner often times had complete ability to be completely arbitrary ( like AirBNB is in this case )
You are not running a business if you don't have direct access to your clientele. You are a shareCROPPER. Look it up.
Use AirBNB, as a marketing vehicle, not your only income source.
Woo hoo, I love these downvotes. Seriously, peeps...give me your hate. And while you are doing that - please tell me which bit of my statement is factually incorrect.
"a tenant farmer especially in the southern United States who is provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges"
There are no crops involved in the posted story. Further, AirBNB doesn't own the land so I'm not sure the term even makes sense as a metaphor.
If a host fails to accommodate you, you better have a hotel in mind for a plan B.
Their UK customer service phone line drops calls after 300 seconds in the waiting queue. Go and try it: +448435047257
Form replies to e-mails, never enough detail, multiple days' response times.
What's the procedure for documenting a host has checked in, or hasn't? That's right, there isn't one. They do everything by hand, and is't a he said/she said, I will take a week to deliberate, and then cut the baby in half kind of deal.
That pretty much means you should not and cannot depend on AirBnB as a major source of income. Risk management wise that's just insane. It puts a decent amount of theoretical "extortion power" in their hands. "Oh yeah we see you make X which likely means you heavily depend on this income. Would you kindly agree to these new terms/new rates or be screwed?"
Independent of all of this it is horrible style to terminate someone without further notice or reason. Writing this into ToS is a pretty bad sign. It generally seems better to have a policy that defaults to explaining the reason for termination except in special cases (funny money laundering laws etc.).
Makes me wonder, is there is any "ToS" ranking site out there? X,Y,Z in ToS are a bad sign, here's why? Kind of like the sites calling out bad UX practices that are meant to trick people into buying extra stuff.
Everyone just accepts it on the assumption that it's a last-ditch protection against 'bad people', and hopes that in their case if anything goes wrong the company will deal transparently and fairly with them.
Google is king of search and can cut you off without reason or explanation. AirBNB is king of home sharing and can cut you off without reason or explanation.
Companies that have a virtual monopoly can treat their ecosystem this way because there's no reason not to.
If this is the way they treat their very best hosts, can you imagine how rock bottom badly you'll be treated if you're anything less than a stellar superstar.
Your fired, leave. I'm not telling you why.
The unicorn paradox:
1)How can you track this in a reliable way? 2)So 350 read this email and did not answer it? Do I read that correctly?
I wrote this a couple of years ago:
"All Eggs in One Airbnb" http://www.adormo.com/blog/marketing/all-the-eggs-in-one-air...
because I keep meeting hosts who say "I'm fine with just Airbnb". The build a whole business based on a single website, a single failure point.
Disclosure: we help hosts be present in several platforms, including Airbnb.
Basically, it comes down to allegations made against him by a guest.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/homeowner-massaged-by-his-air...