I'm somewhat surprised that this would be permitted by the card issuer.
Aside from that... why aren't Airbnb detecting when multiple properties have very similar photos and investigating this themselves? (Of course they may be, and these examples are cases where they didn't pull the fraudulent listing).
It's largely the card issues fault. They charge a fee for each chargeback and punish or increase the fees for merchants who receive many chargebacks, so merchants try to avoid chargebacks, which includes banning everybody who uses them.
The card issuer could easily institute a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts that forbids deactivating a user's account for a sustained chargeback.
> The card issuer could easily institute a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts that forbids deactivating a user's account for a sustained chargeback.
On the contrary, AFAIK some banks or at least payment processors now clearly state than some "sharing economy" services cannot be subject to charge backs, or payment reversals, like if you use Paypal for a Kickstater. So it's basically the opposite of what you wish.
I guess some is the key word.
It makes sense to disallow charge backs for Kickstarters and such, because that whole premise is: You pay me a certain amount of money, and I'll try my best to get you something in return.
> I guess some is the key word. It makes sense to disallow charge backs for Kickstarters and such, because that whole premise is: You pay me a certain amount of money, and I'll try my best to get you something in return.
Sure but at the same time, fraud is fraud. If a project is fraudulent, then who should bear the consequences? That's not that simple. Ultimately, backers do pay Kickstarter, never the project creator directly.
Right if you’ve been defrauded, there is the justice system for that. Skipping it and relying on the banks,is only an option if the banks have already predetermined the winner.
If a business bans customers who charge back after being defrauded then the fault is with the business, not the card issuer.
What surprises me is that the card issuers don't come down harder on businesses with this practice. I suppose Airbnb is a pretty large customer (of the card issuers) and so aren't so easy to influence, however...
You assume it's the business that committed fraud. In many cases talking to the merchant's support would resolve the issue (e.g. via a full refund) without having to escalate to an expensive chargeback.
There is also the fun technique of attacking a merchant (or charity) by sending them money from stolen credit cards, which will stick them with chargeback fees and an eventual ban by the card processor.
Please note that I said that the customer had been defrauded. I didn't say that Airbnb was the one committing the fraud--although they are certainly profiting from it!
I agree that customers should make reasonable attempts to resolve issues with merchants, and not go straight for the nuclear option of a chargeback.
However, if I deal with a company and they don't resolve issues to my satisfaction within what I consider a reasonable period, I do not hesitate to make it clear that I will be contacting my bank to dispute the charges.
Funnily enough, I have never actually had to do so: the mere threat seems to be sufficient to convey to the company that yes I do actually expect them to solve my problem.
The system works, at least for those privileged enough to be aware of their rights, and to have the ability to issue effective threats to merchants who don't respond to complaints within good time.
The bigger concern from the merchant's side is that they are almost always swallowing the refund. The refund is not being provided by the card issuer or payment network, they just remove it from the merchant's (in this case AirBnB's) account.
Declining a charge in this way is thus less insurance, and more telling the merchant "I am not paying you." While it may be justified (like in this story), the merchant is never going to be happy about losing those funds and losing the control over the funds.
I had a similar situation with the App Store where I purchased a subscription under a mistaken assumption and when I could not find any recourse through Apple or the publisher (I simply could not find any way to get in touch with anyone), I declined the charge on my credit card. This led Apple to block all activity with that card - so much so that I was unable to download any free apps until I added another payment method to my profile.
When I attempted to contact Apple to resolve this issue I was told that it was "for my security", to prevent further fraudulent transactions on my card. Explaining the situation, and that there was no fraudulent use of my card or account, just a misleading subscription did nothing to help. They insisted that the only way to resolve the situation would be if I reversed the dispute from the credit card (thus releasing the funds back to Apple), and only after that was completed would I be able to try to get a refund from Apple. Left with no other choice that is what I did.
The issue at hand here was obviously that Apple was refusing to give up control to the credit card companies. By effectively banning any user that disputes a charge they are able to force their users to keep all complaints within Apple's purview (and they do not provide a way to submit complaints digitally).
> the user still wants to be able to use the service in the future.
And this is why Airbnb doesn't care. This is insane to me that they end with "Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." after ALL that. It's like the author has stockholm syndrome. I can't wrap my head around why you'd ever use Airbnb again after an experience like that, esp. when hotels are about the same cost.
Are hotels really about the same cost? My last several vacations have used Airbnb for housing, mostly because I prefer to cook my own meals and like having some space to spread out. Booking a suite w/ kitchenette at hotels in the same areas would have been quite expensive, if even possible.
But, I've never been scammed on Airbnb. My experiences have all been excellent. That's one rental in the US and 5 across western Europe in the last 7 years. Not sure if it matters, but none of these were "cheap" rentals - they were all mid-priced. And almost all with "Super Host" rating (no clue if that gives any extra protection).
That's a fair question. I may have generalized a bit with that statement, however, from what I have seen lately if you use a hotel deal site, it has been about the same cost. On my recent vacations, after looking at options like Airbnb vs hotels in popular US cities, it has been an easy decision to get hotels over an Airbnb with the price difference averaging around $25-50 (esp. after you factor in all the crazy fees Airbnb does now, that you don't see until checkout). However, you do make a good point for your specific needs of the kitchen, that will obviously change a lot in terms of a hotel pricing with that amenity.
For what it's worth, I've also only ever had good experiences with Airbnb in the past when I have used them, but still my main point was if I was the author, I don't know how I could ever go back to using Airbnb after that.
I consistently stay in hotels for a good portion of the year and I rarely find AirBnbs cheaper nowadays. Really the only time I stay in one is when I want to rent a big house with a large group of friends or am in a remote area that doesn't really have hotels.
Probably because there are still legitimate offers on the platform, and they're still cheaper than hotels. So the author's brain thinks "I've figured out the scam, I'll be more careful next time and I'll be able to stay at (vacation spot) for 10 dollars cheaper". In the end, cheap still wins.
But did AirBnB help the scammer keep her $800? Still giving AirBnB business after that is indeed ridiculous.
I issued a chargeback to Qatar Airways/Expedia for $1700 and they tried to fight it. Bank of America told them to go to hell, and that I was getting a full refund.
I can still use Qatar and Expedia.
Airbnb should not be allowed to ban me for this reason.
The "ban-on-dispute" technique is popular with tech companies. Uber, AirBnB, and Steam (among others) all enforce this strategy.
With Steam, you lose your entire library when banned.
With Uber, you lose the ability to create an account tied to your phone number (i.e. you need to get a new phone number to ever have a new account).
I don't use AirBnB because it is a scam haven, so I can't comment on how their dispute process works.
FWIW, "back in the day" chargebacks used to be done in a manual way which made it harder to automate the banning process that tech companies utilize. But the likes of Stripe and other processors have made it part of their API so you can easily trace the chargeback to the transaction and determine what recourse you have.
The plane was delayed 3 hours, which meant I would miss the connection in Qatar (en route to Singapore)
The result would mean that 75% of my trip would be spent not in Singapore. So I requested to leave the plane because the plane had to go back to the gate to refuel, because of how long it waited on the runway.
Qatar tried to argue that this wasn't their problem, but BoA told them to eat the cost. Two sides of the same coin. I would have accepted a partial refund but BoA gave full refund.
Who cares if they get banned from a fraudulent business? Why would anyone want to continue doing business with a company if they treat you this way? When I'm at the point of doing a chargeback, it's a "burn bridges" move and I'm not going to be doing business with the company anymore, regardless of whether they ban me.
In the modern internet world, there's very often little/no choice of services. Initially there is competition; one gets an edge; everybody flocks to that service; the other services wither and die.
So the idea that "I can just take my business elsewhere" is maybe a dying notion, in this modern economy. They're not brick-and-mortar stores where you can just walk down the street to another one.
Hotels are brick-and-mortar, and there are a lot of them. If one treats you badly you can (sometimes literally) walk down the street and do business at another one. The travel industry is a particularly bad example of little/no choice since there is so much competition, including online.
Airbnb terms of service says you authorize them to collect the money from you, even if there are chargebacks, and they'll turn it over to third party collections.
For me this page redirects me to airbnb.co.uk and the relevant portion of the agreement (Payment Authorizations) says:
> In addition to any amount due as outlined above, if there are delinquent amounts or chargebacks associated with your Payment Method, you may be charged fees that are incidental to our collection of these delinquent amounts and chargebacks. Such fees or charges may include collection fees, convenience fees or other third-party charges.
I'd be interested to see how the wording varies between jurisdictions.
When you file a dispute, they send it off to a third party to investigate. They dig into the contracts and when you make the purchase, you state you are agreeing to all their terms of no refund, etc. So you will almost always lose the dispute.
They also have special partnerships with credit card companies so the companies are more likely to side with Airbnb as well.
Why don't companies like AirBNB who have a lot to lose (reputation wise) from a (small?) number of scammers sue those scammers into oblivion? Not only are they violating the TOS but they are committing fraud, and likely breaking a few other laws.
AirBNB must know who they are as those scammers are getting paid, right? It would be expensive for AirBNB (they would certainly lose money) but it can't cost more than the revenue they lose when people read articles like this?
AirBNB was built on spamming Craigslist and willful ignorance of local zoning and tenant laws. It is in their DNA to allow operations like this...like WeWork, just trying to make it to the IPO cash-out.
Why would they care? They're applying the Fight Club formula.
Take the number of listings, A, multiply by the small proportion of scam listings, B, multiply by the average refund we post, C. A times B times C equals X. If X ... well, who cares about X, it doesn't matter - people will still book with us anyway.
Plus they also get to kick the problem down the road. If they have to face it, they might as well do it later.
Airbnb should be held responsible via law, not via the expectation that they care about their image. As long as it’s the Airbnb website or app and they are getting a commission, shrugging off issues like this should not be legal.
Most people will never read this sort of article. And frankly it seems like Airbnb is perfectly happy to not rock the boat and continue to slurp up their fat percentage share of the fraud that they abet...
The vast majority of Airbnbs I’ve stayed in were illegal hotels/rentals... only a handful were legit renting out a spare room / couch surfing type deals and the first time I did that I had to pretend I was the host’s college friend.
Airbnb is basically built on shifting liability to shifty people running hotels out of rentals.
Also, pro tip, I’d guess at least 50% of the airbnbs I’ve stayed in do not wash the sheets in a washer (I’ve literally physically observed at least one host lint-roll follow by a spray of fabric freshener).
That being said I still use them to lower my own standards and prices below hotels, but I know what I’m getting into at least.
Even in localities where it is legal, the ratio of "hosts" running their operation in accordance with the law is comically low. There is a serious enforcement problem and it's largely because AirBnB does everything it can to not cooperate with local government.
> Also, pro tip, I’d guess at least 50% of the airbnbs I’ve stayed in do not wash the sheets in a washer
It happens at hotels, too, and it's why I always take the sheets off of the bed when I check out. Putting the sheets on is the worst part of making the bed but taking them off takes two seconds. My hypothesis: if lazy hosts/housekeeping are forced to go through the trouble of putting sheets on then they might as well use a clean set. And if the host/housekeeper was going to change the sheets anyway then maybe I've made their job just a little bit easier.
I stay in AirBNBs a couple times a year (used to do more) and I would agree it's mostly "illegal" rentals but interestingly, in the US I found more "company owns a bunch of flats" things and in the EU more "some dude owns this one flat or maybe two." (And in parts of the EU it's totally legal as long as your neighbors in the building have not managed to forbid it, which isn't always possible.)
I even have a friend who owns one flat, AirBNB's it, and rents another flat of about equal quality. In his case it's legal and a kind of interesting way to work the market; however it is ruinous to the rental market for locals.
I'm about to stay in one in Asia that very much seems to be a place someone lives about 1/3 of the time, and the rest of the time they rent it out. Apparently this is allowed there, but I'm curious what the vibe will be in a big luxury apartment building with many AirBNB listings.
I also agree that the AirBNB business model is impossible without shifting liability, but it seems like in many cases you're not so much shifting as removing it. Hotels are subject to all sorts of laws to ensure the safety of guests; these laws have developed over time and usually as the result of bad things happening; outside of maybe the US, nobody is kidding themselves that there is any meaningful liability on the part of a flat owner.
Why didn't the journalist contact Airbnb in the first place? Or after he arrived at the 2nd place and it wasn't the location listed/promised. (yes I can understand being tired, frustrated, etc)
Last minute host cancellation is the one thing they can actually something they help with since it ruins the marketplace for them.
As a host I've had my set of horror storied interacting with Airbnb. Most hosts do try really hard, but every marketplace has scams at some level, and I'm not sure how you could find them all once it's under some value/size.
Of course the scammers are good at "frog in the boiling water" level of scam, so it always seems like it will be easier and "I guess good enough" to just keep going.
But I don't think I would ever try to contact AirBnB "in the moment" (when I'm in a city not my own and need a place to sleep and trying to do whatever I'm in the city to do), since I've been trained to expect that any support from such companies is going to be very inconvenient, take lots of my energy, and take at a minimum hours (if not days) to resolve. Hours I don't have, when i'm trying to enjoy my vacation or whatever.
If AirBnB wants customers to contact the company immediately whenever anything looks fishy, they probably need to educate customers on that (with examples of what sorts of fishy things they'd like you to contact them asap about), as well as providing enough resources to customer support such that doing so actually helps instead of just adding more headache to an already painful situation. But I doubt AirBnB really wants customers to do that.
From the OP for instance:
> If a host asks a guest to stay at a property that’s different from the one they rented, Airbnb advises the guest to request a cancellation if they’re “not okay with the switch.” In both cases, the rules favor a would-be scammer and place the onus on guests who have just parachuted into an unfamiliar locale with their luggage and have nowhere else to stay that night.
I've been lucky (?) as a guest and never had a serious issue.
But friends have, and a phone call fixed the problem in the instance actually fixed the problem.
As a host I've had guests call airbnb and ask for exceptions for my cancelation policy (which is moderate) and have airbnb grant them and cancel booking at the last minute, or after check-in time and do 100% refunds. (or at least I get $0)
So while you might be trained that way, and it's understandable, they publish their number and make it pretty available to guests. Maybe the problem is labeling it an emergency number? (I take emergencies as huge deals so naturally avoid calling emergency numbers)
It's a shitty situation and I don't really want to blame the victim. I just really wanted to point out there's an number you can call for help and if you call it earlier they can help you. In case it helps someone nn the US its: +1-855-424-7262
>Why didn't the journalist contact Airbnb in the first place? Or after he arrived at the 2nd place and it wasn't the location listed/promised. (yes I can understand being tired, frustrated, etc)
She did:
>When I asked about the status of my refund, they ghosted, which led me to contact Airbnb. Though I had been moved to a flophouse and then told to leave early, Airbnb only refunded me $399 of my $1,221.20, and only did so after I badgered a number of case managers over the course of several days. The $399 didn’t even include the service fees Airbnb charged me for the pleasure of being thrown out on the street. But my power was nothing compared to that of a company valued this year at $35 billion, and I figured it was probably the best I could do.
The article details how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a refund from AirBnB:
>But Patterson didn’t care about that. She knew she had been scammed and wasn’t going to stand down until she received every penny back.
>“I’m an attorney, so I love to argue,” she said. “I just didn’t stop calling.”
>She eventually got her full refund, but it indeed came with a harsh review from Becky and Andrew for doing so. “We would NOT host or recommend her to the airbnb community!!” they wrote. Patterson couldn’t help but wonder how people with fewer resources and no place to crash would have fared in the same situation.
Sorry maybe I wasn't clear. Why didn't she contact airbnb immediately when the host suggested an alternate place that cost more. This is a big red flag, and a simple phone call probably would probably short circuited the article.
And yes this has happened to friends, showed up a place that wasn't as described/ready/etc. Called and complained and ended up having airbnb book them a hotel.
I've never read "I contacted AirBnb and they solved my problems!". It's always they dick you around and offer you very little of your money back to make you go away, happy that you got anything.
Well, this certainly makes me want to never book an AirBnB again. You'd think AirBnB would be more alarmed about the reputational and consequent business hit of this sort of thing. Maybe they will be after this article?
No, because fixing these scams would increase their expenses and/or decrease income, which would lead to the company being valued lower at their IPO.
The purpose of AirBNB right now is to give the current owners a nice exit. After that occurs, then they can worry about customer service and the related expenses.
> You'd think AirBnB would be more alarmed about the reputational and consequent business hit of this sort of thing. Maybe they will be after this article?
AirBnB is/used to be cheap. People want cheap. They don't want to pay $200 a night for a hotel room when they travel to Paris, AirBnB knows that so I think they are much more concerned about the size of their inventory than the satisfaction of the guest or their reputation.
What fascinates me is the ability of most of theses "start-up" to successfully straight out ignore local laws, with very little consequences, and manage to put all the burden of legality onto their users.
They must have very good legal teams that exploit the flaws of legal systems. Talking about Paris, the great majority of listing are outright illegal, or at least used to be. If I were to set up a similar operation on my own, in France, I'd be shut down in a heart beat for providing illegal hotels and rentals and go straight to prison.
Without knowing details about AirBnB's corporate structure, I assume they don't have any subsidiaries or offices or employees in France. That makes it hard (but not impossible) to compel them to follow French law, or local laws in France.
The easier option is to write a law that compels payment processors to disallow payments to or from a company that does XYZ, then declare AirBNB has done XYZ and cut off their payments. It's certainly possible to rent an apartment in Paris and have all the payments done outside of France, but it removes a lot of people from both sides of the market.
The other option is to work through courts internationally, but that's very slow and costly for things that aren't capital crimes. You basically have to get your government's diplomats to make the US State department care to do the interfacing.
The thing is that American and European law enforcement generally play "fair". They generally won't arrest employees travelling into their jurisdictions for things that are more "civil"-like offences - notable exception being the arrest of Huawei's CFO by Canada. Since there's basically no personal risk or deterrent, there is little or no incentive to fix bad behaviors.
Still not sure how localities in the US haven't bothered to shut down AirBnB.
Which is funny; not sure how it would work in France, but many US jurisdictions have profoundly vicious civil forfeiture laws, where a local (not even talking about state or federal, just a town/county/city) police force can seize property thought to be used in or related to criminal activity, and keep it for themselves. Or auction it off and keep the proceeds.
Running an unlicensed hotel is a crime in many jurisdictions. As is operating a hotel with fire-code or safety violations.
If you start seizing buildings from people, word will get around quickly. Especially in the nicer neighborhoods.
AIRBNB doesn't care a bit, since there are many more people out there who don't hear anything negative. I prefer to stay at real BnBs or hotels less likely to be scams. I moved into an apartment complex a few years ago and wondered why the apartment down the hall had cleaners almost every day. It was an illegal rental. In fact I found a couple more on the AIRBNB site with my identical kitchen countertops. The apartment complex shut them all down. One had reservations for 3 years already.
> If a guest stays even one night in a rental, for example, it is difficult to obtain a full refund, according to Airbnb’s rules.
You don't even have to stay one night... I ran into this exact scenario where upon arrival, the place had no electricity, wifi, and construction for a few blocks outside. I was unable to contact them until the next day since my first instinct was to look for another place ASAP and rest from the long flight. Sure enough, they threw their ToS at me and stated that I wasn't eligible for a refund. I contacted AMEX, but they partner with AirBnB so I was denied a credit there as well. I ended up paying an entire week for a place I didn't stay at.
> I contacted AMEX, but they partner with AirBnB so I was denied a credit there as well.
Thanks for that, didn't realize they deny chargebacks in cases of fraud and misrepresentation. Partnering with a company that engages in widespread global fraud and illegal activity is an interesting choice for Amex.
Mentioned this in another comment, but it blows my mind that the author ends with:
> "Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel."
After an experience like that, I'd spend so much effort warning everyone I know to avoid Airbnb, even with the off chance something like this could happen to them. THIS is exactly why Airbnb doesn't care, the user is so brainwashed into still using the platform even after all that to potentially save a few bucks (which honestly, from what I have seen these days, Airbnb is basically the same cost of a hotel if you buy from any hotel deal site). I just don't understand that logic at all. Fool me once...
Even after a >>>month<<< of digging through public records...Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel."
It's constantly amazing to see how little people value their time when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while.
That time got converted into this article for which the author was presumably paid. And I would guess that the author didn’t spend the entire month on only this one thing. But maybe that’s wrong
I'd rather track down and expose a scam for free than to get paid $5 from TaskRabbit to put someone's IKEA furniture together. Sometimes it's about more than money...
But you shouldn't consider your free time to be worthless.
I'm not saying go out and drive an Uber every free minute you have, but value the time you aren't working and don't spend it chasing down stupid shit and taking a mental toll on yourself to get back $100.
If everyone knows you can rob or scam me for $50 and I'll hand it over and not go to the cops (because doing so isn't worth my time) there's really no downside to robbing or scamming me.
On the other hand, if everyone knows when robbed or scammed I will doggedly pursue every avenue until a much higher price has been extracted from the robbers or scammers, the downside is nonzero.
It wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that someone who took the time to intentionally study and go into journalism, would have more than a monetary interest in "investigating things." Or that someone who had been personally scammed would have more than a monetary interest in investigating that particular scam. In other words, investigating is probably fun for her, and the added element of revenge/justice only adds more fuel to the fire.
Heh, you know, the funny part is that I'll spend just a little extra on my hotel stays (Meaning, I'm not staying at the Howard Johnson's behind Walmart, even if it is $40 a night). I've never had very few bad experiences as a result.
It costs money to run a hotel well. From the front desk to the cleaning staff. If a stay costs you $40 a night, you have to ask yourself "What are they skimping on? Are they not washing the sheets? Vacuuming? Cleaning the showers/toilets?"
Sure, there are some economies of scale at play. But by and large, it takes quite a bit of money to make sure things are well maintained. That is what often gets reflected in your hotel bill.
This person is a journalist and wrote a successful trending news article about it (seriously -- #1 on Twitter right now). You should consider this part of their job, not free time wasted.
I've been the victim of a similar scam then the one mentioned in the article.
Having said that, I still use the platform.
Why? I've traveled a lot and generally on the cheap, and I have run into scammy/terrible hotels. I mean, at one place the hotel owner tried to scam me by claiming I broke something that was clearly broken when we arrived. One time, I had a hotel room with hookers outside, a broken beer bottle under the bed with beer still in it, and a slice of pizza literally still on the floor face down. This last one had good reviews on one platform, terrible reviews on another.
My bad airbnb experience made me much more careful about who I stay with and how on the platform. But I haven't given up on it. I've had some amazing airbnb experiences, both renting full houses with friends as well as staying in a room in a house with locals and getting the 'real local experience', I won't leave it. Maybe for people going to high end hotels it won't make sense to airbnb? At least for me, going to cheap hotels and cheap airbnbs, the overall reliability has been not too dissimilar.
I wonder whether there is some sort of penny-wise pound-foolish mentality at work with most AirBnB users that causes them to continue choosing AirBnB to save money over hotels even after being majorly scammed like the people in this article were?
I agree - I found the final "We'll all just keep using AirBnB forever" paragraph (after doing all that work in the opposite direction) kind of infuriating. Are we in the throes of heroin addiction here? Are we married to AirBnB, trapped there come-what-may, for the children's sake? It's like how people are with Facebook, Uber... et al. There are other ways of doing things, people! I dunno, apparently I've built up some cumulative frustration with people.
For many people, AirBnB and hotels don't necessarily provide the same thing, so switching from one to the other is not as easy as you'd think.
When I travel, I often approach it like imagining I lived in that city. So often I'll get food and cook it and have some days where I just lounge around. This doesn't really work with most hotels which are absolutely tiny in major cities and don't have working kitchens or living rooms. Even if they do the furniture is so generic, cheap and awful that it kind of breaks me out of the experience.
There's no real alternative for the apartment-like living experience AirBnB provides, unfortunately.
Its a reasonable risk/reward calculation. If this is your only 2 week vacation for the year, having a bad experience is a huge cost in time and probably money. If you're traveling regularly and save $X 95% of the time by using airbnb. That occasional bad experience is pretty bad, but more tolerable.
There are also some smaller-time scams hosts run. I was forced to pay a three-figure cleaning fee by an AirBnB in DC earlier this year because they claimed I left a stain on their couch -- which I never even sat on (also, I was by myself, so it's not as though another one of my guests did something to it). I appealed and asked for photos of the supposed stain, but they ghosted me and in the end AirBnB ruled in their favor and automatically charged my credit card for the amount.
I disagree. I've been both a host and customer for many years, and in general I've found the customer service to be good or even very good for resolving issues either as a host or as a customer.
In fact, many 'scare' articles about airbnb puzzle me, because it seem seems that the problems could have been avoided if the guest had read the reviews and/or booked with a superhost (or other host with a history of good reviews).
Having said that, I do think it's insane that the reviews are no longer listed in chronological order (or at least with the option to view them in chronological order).
But how can I trust that the reviews are good if, as this article talks about, people are hesitant to post anything but good reviews for fear of receiving a retaliatory review?
Uhm, that sounds even worse: so your bad review won't show up until a host responds, so they can simply decide not to, and your bad review never shows up.
No, because there's a fixed time limit to submit a review, afterwhich the review is posted irregardless. Hey, I guess airbnb put more than 10 seconds of thought into the design of the process, what do you know.
You act like people’s real names and contact information are not exchanged. AirBnb has no quality enforcement mechanism to protect your privacy, the quality of your stay, or the resulting fallout from a conflict.
The mechanism for preventing most bad stays is called the reputation system, which is based on reviews. As for exchanging real names, do you think the system would be improved if all participants were completely anonymous? There's a reason a hotel knows your real name and contact information as well. You sound like a troll.
Where are you getting $1000 from? He says 3 figure so it's in the hundreds, I'm assuming lower. Everyone has there point where they'd be fine burning the bridge. To me the ability to get a place quickly with an app from anywhere has a good amount of value, but I'd have trouble putting an exact price on it.
you have no self worth if you're willing to be defrauded out of hundreds of dollars, then the company sided /with the fraudster/, and you're /still/ unwilling to part ways from the platform
don't bother posting the following, please:
- there aren't any alternatives: legal hotels/hostels existed before, and will after
- cheaper: that you're willing to ignore the law for people who actually live there in order to save money is more telling of your non-existent principles. in many cases this isn't true anyway
From a consumer that's fine - you've got your scammed money back (and they do not have the evidence that the payment was valid), and creating a new account is easy enough.
One screw up isn't going to keep me away, as I've had mostly good experiences with Airbnb.
Is it worth a one time screw up of $200 for my years of positive experiences? For me, yes.
If the ratio of positive to negative experiences starts going down, I'll be finding other ways to vacation.
Likewise, if a grocer messes up once, but I've been going to them for years without issue, I'm going to let it go. If it starts happening more often? I'll look for other ways to get my groceries.
(Side note: I've been booking more hotels recently. But that has to do with cost and convenience mostly, not false listings or false cleaning fees or anything else like that).
Because they control a huge part of the market, and the cost of accepting the fraud is often lower than the cost of losing access to that part of the market.
That's essentially what I was thinking even when reading the article. Get a good credit card company that's on your side (Amex has been best for me, Discover too), and let them deal with it. They absolutely will not screw around with stuff like this.
Yup, fraud like this is exactly what chargebacks are for. Companies don't listen to anything but money. AirBNB counts on you being a pushover and not disputing the charge. I don't understand this "Well they charged my credit card so there's nothing I can do!" attitude.
Just be aware that a chargeback is an instant bridge-igniter with the company or platform you’re filing it against, most considering it a breach of the TOS and banning your account.
You might find it hard to reverse charges. Credit card companies will absolutely reverse fraudulent charges. However, they don't like to get in the middle of price disputes in my experience. If you say you agreed to pay $10, but that you were charged $20, the credit card company may tell you to work it out with the merchant.
It really depends on the card. As mentioned, Amex and Discover really seem to be the best. I've only disputed a handful of times, and each time they refund the money immediately while they figure out who was right.
This can work, but beware that the company may send the charge to collections. It's a slimy thing to do, but we are talking about a company that's built its success on evading all manner of legal responsibility. (And outright law-breaking by many of its hosts.)
I charged back a fraudulent charge to a local company, and they sent it to collections. Immediately sent the collection agency a registered letter demanding they validate (prove) the debt as required by the FCRA and California law, then another one a month later after they ignored me, and that was the end of it.
There's often no reason to fear these shenanigans. Companies get away with it when people don't understand their rights regarding credit and debt and cave in to the shenanigans.
My kid had exactly the same thing happen. The host was local and attentive, but after the visit, they attempted to stick the guests for huge bill for a water ring in the finish on a wooden kitchen table that was already there when they checked in. This was not fine furniture, just generic 90's poly'd oak or veneer. The host was claiming the table needed to be replaced so the charge was high three figures. I'm not sure what the resolution was but the guests fought it.
Also avoid tiny rental car companies for this same reason. You'll find them listed on the major travel booking websites and they'll have names that you've never heard of. They often appear to be cheaper than the large rental companies, but they frequently have a chipped windshield or a tiny dent in a body panel.
Even if you point it out during the pre-rental walkaround, they won't mark it on the contract. That's the scam. Then when you return they charge you for a new windshield or a body panel/paint job, which of course they never actual have done because they want to scam the next person too.
Yes, you rented your car with your VISA and VISA will cover these charges eventually (takes about 3 months and you're on the hook for the charge for that time, and you'll never get the hours back that you spend sorting it all out).
You could say that you could just make sure all damage is marked before you sign the contract, and that's good advice at any rental agency, but it's still better to pay a little more up front to one of the major car rental companies who make their money on actually renting you a car instead of the company trying to find a way to scam you out of an additional $1000+.
Take a slow motion video inspecting the car at the start of the rental. I've supplied screenshots from the video, along with the full video itself, to my credit card company when disputing charges from the rental company. Took about an hour of my time, and a few weeks later the charge was reversed.
> you're on the hook for the charge for that time
I'm not really sure I consider having some of my credit blocked out while the charge is disputed, as being the same as being on the hook for the charge. The credit is essentially in escrow until a decision gets made, but it definitely hasn't impacted my bank balance in any way.
So is that what it's come down to for ABnB users? Record everything and CYA for an adversarial relationship?
Corporate really needs to step up here and enforce its rules and empower its rating system to drive this out. Otherwise it's not worth my energy to use the platform.
> The credit is essentially in escrow until a decision gets made, but it definitely hasn't impacted my bank balance in any way.
That's perfect, but I guess our mileage may vary. I was charged the amount and VISA later credited it when everything was resolved (about 3 months start to finish). I didn't miss the $1300, but I'm sure it would be a concern to some.
I carry a small bright flashlight in my work bag now, just for dark airport garages where rental cars are often parked. I've never had a problem with a major agency but I don't need a first.
That's really unfair, and I definitely think you should've got your money back. However, looking at it from a business standpoint, it's more expensive for them to lose a host than to lose a customer. So that's why I'm guessing you got the short end of the stick.
Looking at it from a "business perspective", if this becomes prevalent behavior, visitors stay away from the business and your "hosts" become worthless.
This scam actually works only in so far it is not prevalent and relatively small scale (100 listed properties is arguably not small scale anymore, but compared to the total number of listed properties...). However, now is the time for the platform to ensure this does not become a common experience, or they risk losing it all.
Had the same happen to us, host inventing damage and trying to force a fee through AirBnB. However we disagreed with the fee and AirBnB never charged it.
I have to think that the hosts have their own trustworthiness rating in AirBNB's system. One guest disputes a charge after you've rented dozens of times? Probably the guest's fault. Every other guest disputes the charge? Almost certainly the host is doing something scammy.
This makes me feel so much better about just paying to make it go away (I was charged for "17 carpet spots"), thinking it wasn't worth the time or aggravation.
These places (airbnb, vrbo, its all the same stupid schtick) are emphasizing the rights of idiots to rent over the rights of renters to have a safe, enjoyable time while paying lots of money. They got the product they built.
I try not to be too paranoid a person, but whenever I get into and leave an AirBnB (or rental car for that matter) I walk through and take a video of everything using my phone. Takes a minute, I've never needed it, but it may save my ass some day.
Does this article really contain a referral link for "overstock.com barstools"? I'm not sure if I should be appalled that they inserted an ad into a journalistic piece, or respect them for doing it despite how negative the reference is.
You are likely correct, it's probably Vice doing that not the author. Reddit tried it for a bit. They had software that would automatically transform relevant retail links into referral links. They stopped the practice as it wasn't making as much money as they thought it would.
I was in Chinatown (NYC) about a month ago helping at a event when this German woman walks over asking for help (very poor Spoken English). Three German tourist with their luggage dead tired and long story short their host canceled on them one hour before their flight was scheduled to land. They phones did not work in the US so they could not jump on expedia to look for a hotel. The best we could do was hail a cab for them to take them to a hotel where they would be charged $400 a night. Now they did not book through AirBnB but it was through some other similar service. I think they had paid about $1500 for a week. Really makes me not want to use services like this and just go to a hotel. Yes it is more money but I rather not deal with the hassle.
I wonder why AirBnB doesn't pay people Uber-style to inspect properties. $5-10 to go to an address and check that it can be accessed and matches the photos as an unannounced spot check? Send someone out on first listing, periodically, and every time a host cancels for a "maintenance issue" to verify the claim.
Verifying listings is not a hard problem, Airbnb literally just doesn't want to, it takes a "we are just a middle man, hosts are responsible for their listings" approach. This is what makes them money, I don't think an Airbnb with only verified legal listings would be very profitable.
>I don't think an Airbnb with only verified legal listings would be very profitable.
I think it absolutely could be. As I said in a post above, I've used it once, to stay at a private home (with the family living there) when I traveled to Europe last year and the hotel rates in one particular city were absurd. It was a great experience for me, though of course staying at a private home is very different from staying in a hotel, and very limiting in some ways. For people wanting to do this, "legal" hotels just don't offer that same experience, and I think such a service can certainly be profitable.
However, it's not going to be mega-profitable like Uber or any other well-known tech companies with giant IPOs and huge valuations. And this I think is the problem: greed. Why can't the owners just be happy with something that makes a tidy profit and provides a nice service to people who want a different travel experience than what you get staying in a bland hotel room?
They don't need to - the customers that paid market rate for the room are already doing it. They just need decent customer support and consistent policies to prevent scams from both sides.
Yes, this isn't only happening to guests, check the AirBnb hosts reddit - the horror stories there about guests and Airbnb support not helping out are constant
- Destroy the flophouse
- Leave a 5 star review on your original booking saying how nice the place was
- If the scammers attempt to complain to AirBnB or charge fees, kindly tell them that's not the place you stayed and you have never seen that location. Refer them to the original listing for the beautiful home where your reservation was.
Scammers would be claiming you destroyed a place that AirBnB has no record of you ever staying in.
I have had this happen to me twice. The inconvenience of putting up with this bullshit outweighs the $50/night I save. It happens frequently enough you do have to consider it in the equation.
wow, I have seen the same when I have been looking for a house at Airbnb on Corfu. Because I have been checking many places on this island, in different areas, I found some houses with the same bathrooms (just photographed from different angles). I found it must be scam and I have chosen different place. That one if I remember clear I have reported to AirBNB
Did it have any reviews? I haven’t been scammed at all (yet) but I was always cautious knowing it’s not as consistent an experience as in hotels and relied heavily on good reviews. So far so good. I wonder if and how those could be scammed similar to whats been plaguing amazon..
You have destroyed the rental apartment market in my city. You profit from taking advantage of loopholes in legislation, legislation which protects consumers from unscrupulous, dangerous, and untrustworthy properties.
The sooner every city enacts laws limiting "airbnb" apartment rentals to 30 days per year per apartment, the better. Otherwise it is abused at scale.
Wow. I had my own bad AirBnB experience, and privately decided never to never use them again. I wrongly assumed it was just me.
This is sad, I thought AirBnB were one of the good guys, and had a good experience 4 years ago.
Is there something about doing things at scale that makes things go bad? It seems like so many companies are great at start, but go downhill when their assumption that "fraud is a rare exception" does not hold.
Airbnb 4-8 years ago was a quirky thing that biased towards tech early adopters. Because it wasn't wildly profitable, it didn't become a magnet for scams yet.
As the community grew, the population includes more diverse people (including the bad actors). Once bad actors find it's easy to get around the loopholes, they tell others and the scams become prevalent.
Which is why I always stay at hotels, proper and good hotels that have reputation at stake, where upon checking in I do a cursory check and promptly but politely report if I see any issues. Upon checking out I request a person to actually sign-off on the room.
It's becoming very clear why the company has resisted going public for years. Increased scrutiny and visibility is going to show everyone exactly how shady their business is. You can almost guarantee a FTC investigation within a year of going public.
Also, why don't people issue charge backs with their credit card companies? Airbnb customer service might suck, but credit card companies almost always side with their customers if there's a modicum of proof showing something henky.
Self reply since I can't edit, but the FBI has recently contacted the article's author. First, FBI investigation for criminal activity. Then FTC case for ongoing consumer deception and fraud due by failing to police their platform and turning a blind eye to obvious criminal activity.
There have been a few threads about AirBnb lately with a lot of people reporting negative experiences so I will add my own $0.02. I have stayed in many AirBnbs. The reason is, I find it is the only way to have a tolerable family vacation is when everyone has their own sleeping quarters. When we are all piled into one (often overpriced and not so clean) hotel room, it makes for less than ideal sleep and everyone ends up grouchy. Plus when you travel with children, it is really nice to have a kitchen and a way to do laundry. At any rate, my observation for all my AirBnb stays is most of them are quite nice. Many hosts go to great lengths to have their guests have a nice stay. There have been a few crappy experiences, but not many. The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.
Yeah I've stayed at lot of airbnbs (20-30 a year) and only had good to great experiences. I've met a lot of hosts that I specifically look up when I visit their city again. I've had plenty where they weren't exactly what I expected, like thinking a cabin I was renting was in the woods from the pictures but it was on a gravel driveway with trees in the background, but my trip wasn't ruined or anything. I've unfortunately had reservations cancelled in the 24hr window and had to rush to find something else, or accepted an insta-reservation but never heard back from the host. I've not looked over the fine print, seen airbnbs with pictures of ovens and shown up to microwaves (this is my fault but the pictures don't help). Those are my biggest host issues.
I will say though that I dread what you said - analyzing listings. The airbnb.com UX is atrocious. I thought it was pretty sub-par when I'd look at listings just planning trips for myself. But now I try to plan trips with my partner through it and she has her own account, so I share lists and listings within lists. It's awful. I recently went on a 2 week road trip and stayed at different places every day. I'd have to have google maps open to plot distance between airbnbs and parks, I couldn't go back into a listings actual ad to see its details once I confirmed a reservation (I had to search for the listing again and go to it, the reservation details don't show the actual posting), I'd have to keep a separate app open just to keep notes of each listing, I use my todo list, which I then also had to share with my partner separately because there's not really a way to thumbs up/down/leave comments on listings. I'd send her listings and she'd get errors or they'd just never end up on her account. If I add her to a listing I don't think it shows up in her reservations so I still had to send all the info to her, she'd just get an email about it.
Does anyone do this sort of stuff on any of the other sites? Vrbo, etc? Is there a really good roadtrip planning app? Are they easier to use in these situations? I honestly don't want to deal with it again it was that frustrating.
Also, while I'm here ranting, and as an ex-airbnb host and very avid airbnb user. Please, chill out on your cleaning fees. I cannot believe some of the cleaning fees I find. Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. Nothing turns me off from a place more than putting a reservation together and noticing that my 2-3 day stay will incur $150+ in cleaning fees. I would rather pay a slightly higher daily fee than $45-80/day in "cleaning" when I'm a single person renting your studio just so I can spend 80% of my day hiking outside of your place. I can't remember if I could control this based on the number of guests staying but if you can, please do it.
A "great" hotel experience I had recently was when I happened to casually mention to someone in the hotel restaurant that it was my wedding anniversary tomorrow. When I came back from touring through the city the next day, the reception staff gave my wife flowers and wished us a happy anniversary. Then when we entered our room, we found a small cake with anniversary wishes.
That kind of attention to detail is what I would classify as a truly "great" experience.
Having a fixed cleaning fee and a per-night charge actually reflects the property owner's costs. They have to pay someone to clean, do laundry, re-stock the
crackers and cheap wine. Of course this can be taken too far, but I actually prefer this cost structure because I get a price break if I have a long stay vs an average flat fee per night.
Source: I know several Airbnb owners, and the people who clean their properties.
I think the point is less about the existence of the cleaning fee and the fact that the site doesn't include the fee in the mapping UI. It makes it very difficult to compare properties when there are large fee differences that you cannot see until clicking through.
I usually search with specific dates for a stay, so it's weird that they don't summarize the listings by total cost instead of the nightly rate leaving out the fixed costs. That'd fix the problem, right? (Of course they could divide that total cost by the night count if they can't let go of normalizing to nightly rate. The point is to not incentivize accounting shenanigans.)
Overall I've been happy with airbnb as a traveler, but if they don't step up their game it's going to be like having been happy with the early web, or Amazon reviews in the early days when it was easy to ignore a few fakes. That general problem of evolving predators is hard, but this particular change seems easy.
I used to be an active Airbnb host for a vacation house I own. For reference it was a 4 bedroom Victorian.
I had to pay $150 to clean the house each time I had a booking, that's what it cost me. I passed it along to guests at exactly that cost.
Not sure if it was "worth it" for some guests, or people staying only one night. But that's what I had to pay, it wasn't part of any nefarious strategy. In developed countries it's going to cost to clean that place, that's just the way it is. You don't have the economies of scale that a hotel has with a team of maids.
I'm clearly not a single guy renting 4 bedroom victorian homes. I'm more talking about the people who charge you $80-150/night to clean a 1 bedroom studio, especially if it's a guesthouse in their back yard and I'm asked to do half of the work (put dishes in dishwasher, take out trash, take sheets off bed, etc) and still charged more than I know it costs to clean. Also the fact that it doesn't show up on the map when plotting trips, I have to go into the listing and wind up rejecting half of the options after.
At that point unless I'm looking for a specific experience (cabin in the woods, victorian 4 bedroom home) I'll probably just get a hotel to not have to deal with it.
I think my biggest issue is the DAILY clean fee. I'm fine with a one time clean fee if I'm there for 3-5 days. Hosts aren't coming in and rolling my sheets every night.
Fair enough; not everyone is abusing that feature, and I can understand how a large home like that would legitimately cost $150.
But many are, and Airbnb isn't doing anything for the UI that lets you adapt for that and sort by total cost. There's almost an arms race for how much of the cost you can obfuscate that way.
> Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches.
When looking through search results, my eyes always go straight to the total cost, which factors in the cleaning and service fees (but not the occupancy taxes and fees).
>> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.
In my view this is major. To describe it better - need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties.
Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys. Then the list goes on.
AirBnb expects and encourages misrepresentation of properties and misleading descriptions to stimulate cash flow. Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.
How is this different from a hotel? From rentals in general?
I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.
Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews.
During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week.
This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation.
But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background.
And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.
HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved.
Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.
In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.
In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.
HotelTonight always had awful customer support. They sold me a hotel room during February fashion week in NYC. Some sort of mistake happened with either HT or the hotel, and the room was not available upon my 11pm arrival.
Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable.
After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city.
Had a similar situation and ended up having to book someone a $2000 a night hotel room. It’s no joke being out of a room in a place where hotels are 100% sold out, or non existent. This is one of the reasons I refuse to use Airbnb in most normal situations. It’s a wild card.
The good news is that now there's a simple solution: if this happens in the future, you book a $200 Uber helicopter, $100-200 room at the airport, then another helicopter back in the morning, and you save ~$700. Easy! :D
I had an issue with HotelTonight last year after the hotel I was staying at ended up charging my "incidentals" credit card for the entire room+tax for the night (vs what I paid HotelTonight for).
Between HotelTonight and the actual property (a Kimpton Hotel), it was resolved in under 90 minutes.
Look -- I've had issues with Hilton, Marriott, and HotelTonight -- that just comes with the territory when you spend 200+ nights a year in hotel rooms. How they deal with the issue is what brings you back (and honestly, it's why I'm lifetime diamond at Hilton, even though I did a LOT of work for marriot.com a few years ago).
One important difference is that hotels get much larger review volumes than a single AirBnB, meaning sites like TripAdvisor can give you a good picture of what the place is really like.
Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general.
A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.
Not sure I feel the same way in my experience. I find airbnb photos to be accurate for the actual place I’ll be in, even if they might be leaving some details out.
I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up.
Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.
With a hotel, if you complain and write a harsh review, you don't get penalized yourself. In OP, people complained and got B.S. made up about them, which impacts their future ability to travel. The author didn't even write a review. The incentives are all there to only write the happy stuff for future travelers. You, as that future travel really can't trust the reviews. At least at a hotel, with its more numerous but possibly fake happy reviews, you can look at what the bad ones say, because they won't be incentivized out of existence.
It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.
You can usually leave a negative review for a hotel even if you didn't stay at it. AirBnB doesn't allow it.
Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.
I have seen the automated messages along the lines of "host canceled booking 24h before check-in" on many or even most Airbnb listings. Is this not still a thing?
You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.
Yes, that's indeed nowadays happening. In practice if they cancel two days before you arrive and you have fly to another continent to stay somewhere, it still sucks. Add to that for example a fair like CES and no normally priced hotel alternatives, and it's a big issue.
> Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.
-I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country, but after using AirBnb 30+ times traveling with wife and three kids in Northern/Central Europe, I’ve only had two issues - once the place we were to stay was double-booked (and we arrived last!); the other it turned out what was described as a ‘bedroom’ in the listing was a storage room with no windows, hot water tank, a few shelves packed with all sorts of junk and barely room for a dirty mattress on the floor.
In both cases AirBnb promptly decided I was due a refund, my only minor gripe being it took a couple of weeks before the money was actually refunded.
I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. (good customer service says the replacement will be better, hotels try to reserve their best suites until last just to ensure that they have the better room around just in case). I'm some new city and I want to get my family to sleep...
>I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW.
-Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have no fuss at all - but when a bad experience occurred, AirBnb were better than I had feared with regards to setting things right.
The double booking was after a ten-hour drive with kids aged 10, 5 and 3 in the back seat. I didn’t need that.
Luckily, the host had friends nearby who shacked us up for the night, so disaster was averted - but this was way out in the Swedish boonies and I envisaged having to drive another couple of hours before finding a hotel.
To me it sounds as if you are saying "I want the charm\location\social experience of staying with a local resident AND I want the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of the hotel industry AND I don't want to pay for the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of a hotel."
Airbnb has functionally became where it is expected to get the latter two. When I've used Airbnb I have never expected nor cared about the "charm" or the "local resident", it's been a de-facto hotel. If there was a problem, of course I would expect Airbnb to do their job. Why wouldn't you?
I'm not defending AirBnB, because they totally enable and profit from scams as documented in the original article. But it is just the user expecting to get hotel services (rebooking and room swaps) from a non-hotel (whether genuine homestay or micro-hotel-entrepreneur).
AirBnB wont play down that expectation because again they profit more from it, but from the website and concept it is clear that you are dealing with random unprofessional strangers with a minimum of guarantees. Its kinda like the Uber contractor-vs-employee categorization for drivers.
AirBnB should definitely do a better job, but I maintain the risks are inherent in the business model, and you and the other users want the benefits of the risk (lower prices), without accepting the consequences of the risk.
To be fair, I expect the major corporation to have the "resources of a hotel" and handle the rebooking/room swap. They get a big fee on every booking, right? Am I just paying tens-to-hundreds per booking for the privilege of using their search engine and (apparently worthless) rating system?
I completely disagree. I never start an Airbnb search assuming that the hosts are hospitality professionals. I don't expect hotel-level standards. In fact, my spidey-sense goes into yellow-alert when I come across a listing that appears to be for a hotel.
I don't want to stay with a local resident - in fact the only times I've stayed at an AirBnB (twice so not a significant sample) I never saw the owner, we just got the code to the lock box and used the house for a few days. This is a hotel.
I'd stay with a hotel (and sometimes do) if they would offer me as many bedrooms and a kitchen to work with.
When my fiance and I stayed at a place in Paia on Maui, the place looked immaculate from the pictures. But when we got there it was full of cockroaches. We had literally just gotten in at like 4 pm, put groceries down on the counter, and the little buggers were on them almost immediately.
We were exhausted and didn't have the energy to really do anything after our 6 hour plane flight. The hosts came in and tried to resolve things first by removing all the appliances and then by offering us a bribe. I had documented all of this on the AirBnB website via private messages, taken pictures of the cockroaches, and found a can of bug spray(the hosts knew they had an ongoing problem and still rented to us!) to spray the roaches with. They were falling out of every crevice that I sprayed in the kitchen.
We ended up spending a very restless night there, and in the morning I found a single roach in the bathroom. We were going to move out the next day, but ended up scrambling to find a hotel room in Maui that afternoon after driving the road to Hana.
When I called AirBnB to report the cockroaches the representative basically said he couldn't guarantee me any kind of refund, and moreover that I should be used to staying in "less than clean conditions" as a bachelor who has traveled for business. I was flabbergasted.
They eventually got us a refund but I have never had such a terrible customer service experience from any company, period. I will never stay in AirBnB again. Evidently they don't enforce any standards of cleanliness and they take all hosts at their words as to the fitness of the property. The CSR that initially handled my case was a huge asshole and made me feel like he didn't care about me at all. The later CSRs were better. Staying in an AirBnB was the most stressful vacation experience I have ever had and I will never trust them again.
As an aside, you should make it a point to call their support line during the hours of business in the EST or CST timezones. Their day shift CSRs actually seemed to care about the problem. But their night shift appears to be an overseas call center, and they treated me like shit.
I had a similar experience in Honolulu. AirBnB with baby German cockroaches.
I was not happy but at some point reality has to set in. Cockroaches are somewhat normal in tropical zones. I Googled around and found several tourists advising others that cockroaches are a reality in these locations. Even proper hotels had quite a few reviews involving cockroaches.
I would have been fine with one or two adult cockroaches. I've killed them before in my apartment. But this was an established infestation, with adults and nymphs of various ages crawling all over. They were crawling on the bath towels, in the appliances, in the kitchen etc.. Moreover, a hotel would not knowingly list or rent a room with a massive cockroach infestation.
> Their day shift CSRs actually seemed to care about the problem. But their night shift appears to be an overseas call center, and they treated me like shit.
This was my experience as well. Called in the evening about the listing not being described. The CSR was pretty useless. Called the next morning and got someone from California who was far more helpful.
At least cockroaches don't bite. We got an Airbnb once in Belize that was effectively open air (it was too hot otherwise and there was no A/C) and the bed had mosquito netting around it which didn't go all the way to the ceiling. The host said "Oh just use the fan. Mosquitos hate fans." Of course the fan didn't work. We vacated that place quick. I still don't know whether this was a scam or simply a case of the locals being completely used to something an out-of-town guest would find horrifying.
Oh, the problem was the host, not AirBnb. She’d registered with more than one service and had forgot to update her AirBnb calendar with the booking from $SITE, whichever it was.
The problem is that a property is listed on multiple sites and the different sites have incentive to not play nicely with each other. It's up to the owner to manually black on dates as they are booked on the other services. Most of hte time it works fine but since it's humans involved things can slip through the cracks.
> -I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country
Would not be surprised if it did. I remember one rental in the Netherlands where the english text said free parking, but the dutch text said parking available. The problem was AirBnBs translation and they refunded my parking expenses.
> need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties.
I've never had a problem with this, but I also don't bother staying anywhere that doesn't have a 4-star or better average. If you just set your filter at >= 4 stars, then these problems go away, and we also comb through the reviews of our top picks to make sure there's nothing unexpected. Consequently, we've had nothing but good experiences.
TFA addresses why reviews are inflated and misleading:
>Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future. Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review. Choose the latter option, and you could come across as too demanding by other prospective hosts, or, in extreme cases, even receive a retaliatory review.
What's going on here is that Airbnb has essentially made a pass/fail review system, where 5 stars is pass and anything less is fail. Thus, short of a visit being completely terrible and the host awful, I would feel bad giving anything less than a 5 star review, since it would adversely affect the listing and the host.
On one hand, this does encourage hosts (and guests I suppose) to do their best. On the other hand, this eliminates honest reviewing, making reviews either "Best stay ever!!!!!1 (5/5)" or "This place sucks! The host is terrible!(1/5)"
A review system should just be a series of factual questions that are aimed at determining whether a potential customer is likely to have problems, be satisfied, or enjoy their stay. And the scores should be subjective; e.g. if you're single then the questions that impact a family should be eliminated from calculating the score.
For example, down the hall, there's a dog with a persistent high-pitched bark. If I'm reviewing them, ideally, I just answer a simple question, "are there persistent noise disturbances from neighbors?" Yes.
I think the reason it's not done this way is because you'd have to put a lot of thought into maintaining the questions.
I meant that the review score should tell you whether or not you need to read between the lines. If you don't want to read between the lines, stick to results with 4+ star reviews (maybe 4.5+ star reviews). I _also_ read other reviews out of an abundance of caution and to give some insight into how the top results differ. We should be able to agree that this is not meaningfully "reading between the lines" even if we don't agree about the reliability of average review score as an indicator.
Yes. I'm in charge of booking a ski trip for ~15 friends each year, and the amount of reading between the lines I have to do to make sure everyone has a comfortable place to sleep is crazy.
Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.
This isn't foolproof either, though. I booked a hotel for 2 people in Chicago for an anniversary trip. We arrived to find the hotel had 4 very narrow and short bunkbeds. I checked the booking and it makes no mention of this.
The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.
What ridiculous is when you try searching for 'whole homes' and you end up getting 'apartments' which are nothing more than someones basement. Airbnb seems to encourage this too by letting people put whatever tags they want. It's kind of a joke. In addition, hiding the address makes it hard to double check on google street view.
Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.
I get that they want to hide the address to total strangers, but I'm sure it would be easy for Airbnb themselves to pull up the google streetview and have it as a static image on the listing.
Now you'd need to add some AI in to blur house numbers and $identifying_features - Street View's own AI knows to blur signs but leave house numbers intact (I only just realized this) so you can positively ID somewhere you're looking for.
I have even seen this on Zillow recently. Searching for rentals, choose type as House, and then it's the upper floor department in a house and the listing reads "you will be sharing the top floor with me".
I rarely book for more than two people, but when I have I found that filtering on "2+ bathrooms" very quickly gets me the flats that really have several bedrooms.
I suggest reading "whole home" to mean "whole space". In fact, that's basically what I see on Airbnb now - "Entire place". Personally, I have no issue when that turns out to be a separate apartment in a larger house, as long as I'm not sharing the entrance/exit and living space with others.
> Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys
Sadly that sounds like mort advertising of everything, so I can't say I'm surprised.
> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.
How do you corroborate the information on those properties? The clean, affordable, well-placed hotels I've stayed in had reams of reviews and news articles from various sources to confirm they were indeed clean, affordable, and well-placed. The cost of faking all those sources must be orders of magnitude greater than faking property images/reviews on AirBnB.
You use common sense - I have been a host of properties and I would say Airbnb does not go to any lengths to encourage you to misrepresent. In fact they do the opposite - with your listing you are building a contract so they encourage you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible. They also strictly govern guest interactions so you can’t provide a phone number or email address during negotiations to side step the system. Overall I think the people who are saying it’s a scam are amplifying a bad experience to suggest that it represents the whole system. It clearly doesn’t and I say that as having seen how it works both as a host and a user.
While AirBnB nominally "encourage[s] you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible", in reality, the way it handles feedback and complaint resolution discourages the candid reporting of problems, as was evident in several places in the article. The root cause of this problem is that AirBnB makes no attempt to determine the truth of any complaint. Nor, apparently, is it doing much to identify patterns of abuse.
I only stay at Airbnb's that have at least some reviews. It doesn't take too long to determine if reviews are sock-puppet-generated or genuine. You have to actually stay at the property to write a review, which means paying for the stay since Airbnb process the payment. Obviously you can create wash transactions but the transaction fees would still be significant.
Another approach is to sent a question to the property manager. Invent some pretext to ask a question. I find that people trying to scam customers on the product also have poor customer service skills. So if I don't get a prompt, cogent and polite response, I move on..
> How do you corroborate the information on those properties?
There is no way to corroborate. For most listings, Airbnb is the only source. However, I've never found this to be an issue. I don't believe I've ever been "scammed" by an Airbnb host in 40+ bookings.
I would second this experience. We travel with our five kids and its sometimes impossible to find a hotel that can accommodate us. That said, I did experience a switcheroo in Chicago similar to the article. However that’s where the similarities end. The place was in the same neighborhood, it was comparable to the listing but the only catch was we were told not say Airbnb to anyone in the building but to say guests of xyz. I felt like a criminal but otherwise the place was very nice and the host was super-responsive even though it was clear he was running multiple properties. Another time in Chicago, the bath tub hardware was broken off when we arrived. My side hustle is house flipping so I fixed it for the owner and they were thankful. I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is the rise of “420 friendly” and the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. That’s just beyond ok. As for 420, I just have an issue that if I’m going to take my kids someplace that I’d want reasonable assurances that it’s clean but with cities like LA where there’s a huge number of 420 listings, I’d rather just pay for adjoining rooms in a hotel than take the chance. As far as being an investor in Airbnb, I think a lot of ink has been dedicated to how Airbnb is going to upend the hospitality industry. It’s clear at the beginning the hotels had no response, but I do see hotels adjusting their brands and as someone who uses both hotels and Airbnb’s I’m increasingly more likely to just stay in a hotel. The exceptions are when we vacation in groups... we visited Toronto this summer with family and it was absolutely awesome to have a giant house on the beach for about half of what we would have spent on hotel rooms if there even had been a hotel in the beaches neighborhood. I see a place for both styles of accommodation but given that Airbnb is likely more of a class of property among many rather than an upending of the entire industry, I think valuation is going to be a real challenge.
I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is ... the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed.
Yeah, it's policy that you have to disclose any cameras inside the room in the listing. It's not clear what happens when you do find one though. You spend all day traveling and are in a strange city. On the one hand, you're entitled to get out of there with no penalty, but on the other, it might be hard to find alternate accommodations.
If I was not traveling internationally, I would absolutely file a police report. Pretty sure it’s a felony to record guests even in your house unannounced, and probably compounded if the area being filmed is one where you could reasonably be naked.
Cameras are problematic for AirBnB due to the tremendous scam potential. Consider these scenarios:
1) I'm a scammer. I stay in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room, and proceed to make a big deal out of "discovering" it. The room is refunded and the host is penalized or worse.
2) I'm a pervert. I spend the night in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room. I get off by watching the resulting footage, get paid by selling it, or both.
3) I'm a renter. I spend the night in an AirBnB. In the morning, I find the camera left by Pervert #2, possibly months earlier. I scream bloody murder. I get refunded, and the host is penalized or worse. Pervert #2 simply goes back to Ali Express and buys another camera.
There are probably numerous other variations I'm not devious enough to think of, all of which leave the host holding the proverbial bag.
Yep. But ultimately what's at stake isn't just a few extra bucks for the host with a spare room or ADU in their back yard, it's the whole AirBnB business model.
I was on board with this, but doesn't more or less all of this apply to traditional hotels just as much as AirBnB? I don't make a habit of checking my hotel room for hidden perv-o-cams but how often are the housekeeping staff checking inside light fixtures, above wardrobes, etc? Guess I've got one more thing to worry about, so uh, thanks?
I'm surprised you still seem to recommend AirBnb despite these experiences. As a family of 5 (3 kids) I know it can be frustrating and expensive to find hotel accommodations that work. But the strange (switcheroo, don't mention AirBnb to anyone!) to downright disturbing (cameras above the bed?!) experiences would never have me using AirBnb again. Maybe I just have issues trusting people... I'm sure there are great hosts but I don't like to gamble.
Curious were the cameras in the bedroom pointing at the bed and attempting to be concealed? Huge fear of mine having some psychopath watching videos of my wife and I getting (un)dressed or intimate.
I don’t think I endorsed Airbnb as much as just tried to relate my experiences. In both cases I was traveling alone or sans kids and didn’t give either situation much thought. That said we’ve had many delightful experiences and have come to get to know real people who are sharing their homes. At the same time I don’t buy the story that Airbnb is going to upend the industry. Hotel chains have gotten pretty good about adding properties with suites / extra room at reasonable prices. So I tend to see Airbnb as filling a property category rather than a industry disruptor. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them start to book traditional hotel properties as more and more communities and hoa’s regulate the home sharing business. I can also see where they might branch into fractional ownership for customers that need to live in multiple cities and don’t want to have to lease/own a property they aren’t going to use full time. Right now both cases can be achieved with some workarounds but I can see maybe a class/designation within the system emerging over time. But as I read through the comments the real issue is trust and I would agree that there’s probably more work to be done there - I’ve seen recently a new category for homes that have been verified... so all in all I’m not ready to dismiss the platform but I would agree there are some issues.
I haven't stayed at Airbnbs in the US but it has been a common experience in Europe to be instructed to say we're guests of the owner if asked. I assume this is about either HOA rules on subletting, or tax/insurance/regulatory issues.
I doubt that would hold up for insurance purposes. Also, I think it's relatively unlikely that tax inspectors come around and talk to suspected guests, at least compared to the common situation of HOA/lease policies restricting subletting.
I think it makes more sense. If you just say "I am at the airbnb", it's confusing. Maybe they don't know what unit you're talking about. If you say "guest of blah blah" there is some clarity. Eg. even if they don't know their neighbors, it's likely that the host's name is at least on the buzzer or mailbox. And if you remember your host's name, you may know which buzzer to hit at check-in, for example.
I've definitely had that "If anybody asks you are guests of Tiffany" from the bearded guy doing the checkin. Apparently the building management was hostile to AirBNB, but the funny thing is that we saw the occupants of two other apartments on the same floor that were clearly people on vacation just like us. I had a strong suspicion that most of the building was bought up by foreign investors and turned into AirBNB rentals.
But the location was in walking distance of the major attractions in downtown and cost a half of what the local hotels were charging for "three" bedrooms (really two bedrooms and a closet with a bed crammed into it) vs. a single room with a pair of doubles at a hotel. It even had free parking, unlike the hotels that were charging $40-$50 per spot per day.
I mean yeah, it feels sketchy as hell, but the place is nicer and literally hundreds of dollars cheaper than a hotel.
He said he was told at checkin, your options are pretty limited at that point. Especially when you have only soft/anecdotal evidence it is actually in some vague way not legit. “If anyone asks, you’re guests of Tiffany” is not a definitively incriminating statement, and the fact that building management is hostile to Airbnb doesn’t mean any lease or city code is being violated.
Ideally there would be an anonymous review system to let people disclose this sort of fuzzy evidence though because who wants to be party to a sketchy situation? Not only are there legit Airbnb’s, there are long-standing legit vacation rental markets (think summer cabins) where Airbnb is taking over from the old alternative sites. So it’s not like every Airbnb listing is circumventing the law.
> I had a strong suspicion that most of the building was bought up by foreign investors and turned into AirBNB rentals.
I push back against this in my own building. I obviously refuse to let random people into the building, and I've left through the back exit to avoid obvious AirBnB "friends"¹. (Although having read the article, I now see people are much more reluctant to leave a bad review than I thought.)
Short-term sublets are against the contract in my building. Apartments in nice European city centres are for people to live in, not visitors on a weekend break.
I've just reported the current listings to the owner of the building. Last year their leases were terminated pretty quickly :-)
¹ Or whatever bullshit term AirBnB's marketing uses.
The place is cheaper precisely because it is sketchy as hell and doesn't have to spend to meet any of the requirements and regulations hotels are subject to.
Its only a matter of time before authorities catch on and it isn't so cheap anymore
Sounds like they did the switch to avoid getting caught running an illegal or otherwise somehow contract-breaching Airbnb. If they used their correct address, their building would figure it out and shut them down.
If I had to fix a bathroom fixture on my own on a vacation, it would definitely piss me off enough to never use the service again. I'm surprised that you're so nonchalant about it
Well I just stayed in a hotel in Vegas and the air conditioner didn’t work. It was 2 am when I arrived due to late plane. The last thing I wanted to do was wait around for a repair guy or pack it all up and change rooms. At least with the faucet it was a pretty easy fix I could do in about two minutes and it helped the homeowner out. After reading through most of the thread below I would agree I’m generally more nonchalant that many others. I guess I never appreciated the range of awful experiences people have had and how they feel about it. Travel can be rough... I just had a flat tire in the Mojave desert and had to pay $55 to fix it at midnight. The rental car company initially wanted to accuse me of doing donuts or riding off road but once I got someone sane on the phone they gave the straight up policy on these situations. Upon return I showed the repair receipt and they deducted $100 off for the inconvenience. That was cool. I guess you just have to take each experience differently and assess the situation you’re in.
With the amount of research you may be nearly just as well off searching craigslist. I'm bitter about my experiences and won't subject myself to abnb any further.
Funny, having young kids is what has sent me back to hotels (at least for the time being), simply because they are mostly designed with accessibility and some level of child-proofing. Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Cooping the kids up in a grown-up oriented space with fragile table decorations they can't touch can be exhausting.
Depends on how many kids, and their ages. Between the ages of ~2-8, they're going to bed much earlier than you, and they won't fall asleep if you're still in the room. Add multiple kids—especially different ages with different bedtime routines—and a single room (or even a suite) can be challenging.
We have a favorite AirBnB listing in one town we visit frequently (to see family that doesn't have space to host us) that has some fragile decorations. When we arrive, we do a quick sweep and put them all up high. We're also up-front with the host that we have small children, so they're free to reject our stay if they'd prefer. So far, it's never been an issue.
Because I have kids (they're smaller, under 7) I can't really risk getting shafted at an AirBnB. Our experiences were so up and down that I rarely look to the site anymore for options. Suite hotels are prevalent, and work great for families, and you can be relatively certain it'll be a fine place to hang your hat for the night.
For longer-term rentals, I find it's best to work through local property managers or maybe VRBO, where you're dealing with the person more directly. That said, the destination probably makes a HUGE difference in terms of how you are treated.
The fact that AirBnB's rating system is so gamed that you can't trust any reviews, and the fact that their policies for refunds skew towards the property owners and not guests means that my trust in the site is low. I'd probably only risk it again if there are hotels around as backups. That said, I'm also typically looking for cheaper places, so the scam-level density is probably higher.
I've stayed at 22 airbnb's 11 were fine. 11 had issues most with false advertising in some form or another. One listed the wrong location and if they had listed the correct location I would not have rented even though the room's interior matched. A few claimed to include onsite parking but didn't which of course is very inconvenient. The last one that did that claimed "Easy Street Parking" as AirBnb's blatant lie. I usually had to park a mile way or pay for a $25 a night garage a few blocks away. One claimed wifi but was actually just stealing it from the neighbors and it only worked in a corner of the apartment if lucky. Another who I asked if their heaters worked, because a previous one was cold, said yes but when I got their the heater was as loud as a vacuum cleaner and their wifi had a notices "don't use much as it will run out". This for a place I expected to get work done. AirBnb in Japan is full of listing claiming 2 or 3 bedrooms but that actually only have 1 and this isn't a cultural issue. Look at any J-apartment rental site and there is zero ambiguity about what 1, 2, and 3 bedrooms are.
It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund. It's totally within their power to say in so many words "be evil and we'll pull your funding and report you to the authorities". IMO AirBnB is complicit in these issues. There is no punishment for bad listings and often AirBnB doesn't even have the options in their system to list them correctly. They even removed my review that included pictures of proof.
I have a similar rate with AirBnb -- 50% were great, the rest had "issues," which ranged from exaggerated claims ("minutes from downtown") to serious safety problems. Agree that Airbnb's policies (or lack of them) are contributing to the situation -- for instance, no serious punishment for false advertising.
But I have a hard time dumping bad policies on YC's plate, or demanding that YC "report you to the authorities" unless criminal activity/negligence is involved.
I would say that YC has a relatively large cultural impact, given its investment size. People outside of SV barely even know who Sequoia is, let alone care about who they fund. But a lot of people know about YC and what they are doing. While financially, YC pulling funding wouldn't have a big impact, culturally it'd be a huge bomb.
They likely do have the power to disassociate themselves from Airbnb though.
(Like, I don't think that Y Combinator owes me anything or gives a shit about what I think or whatever, I just think "they are a minority owner" is weak sauce)
The value of YC as an investor is not the cash they offer but the advice and guidance. As such their influence is disproportionate to their investment.
Compare that to 100% of My priceline bids being accepted by hotels that were much better than expected and at rates about half what you'd book directly.
I'm so glad now after years of never booking an airbnb I can say that with pride. I never gave this scummy company a single dollar. I knew who they were from the first experience.
I've gone 100% Booking.com/Agoda and been really happy with all my bookings, and I've traveled at least 4-6 weeks every year for the last 3 years. I like being able to read 100s of reviews and not just relying on owner provided information.
PG wrote an essay about how he and and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams, as long as they aren't too evil.
Remember that AirBnB's first marketing campaign was hiring women (or men using female names online) to violate Craiglist ToS to spam people posting housing listings.
>...Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. ...They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
>...we asked [Sam] what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers.
That's what you meant?! I can't see which other part you might mean - it's only 750 words. Describing it as "an essay about how he and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams" seems as misleading as the worst of the deceptive AirBnB descriptions written about on this page. Maybe you meant to link to a different essay.
I think the parents is somewhat justified, there is a very fine line between "hacking" as described here and scammy. It is almost inevitable it gets to AirBnB level if that is your thought process. Would be interesting to hear their take on issues like airbnb are facing, and if they thinking this "room owners" in these cases are also "hacking".
Has this ever affected anything before? Just about every organization has "we are ethical" in some document somewhere. "We always comply with local regulations" is often spouted by companies immediately after being busted for breaking regulations.
I really used to like Airbnb, but for the same usage - family vacations. But after couple of bad experiences, where host canceled while we were on the way, I prefer holiday homes which are professionally managed and have better contracts.
The only bad experience I had was a decent looking apartment type room in a house (from the pictures), but it ended up being the moldy basement of the house, and the bedroom didn't have an egress window. It wasn't unbearable, but it wasn't good either.
However, you can't go wrong with superhosts. I've never had a bad experience with them.
I use a Chrome extension to show the true cost per night on Airbnb. I find the fees variable enough that I want to see the real price as part of my analysis of listings.
This used to be an issue with Airbnb, but I believe they fixed/changed that a year or two ago. The one line item they leave out of the total price on the search results is "Occupancy taxes and fees", which I can understand.
What does this have to do with the artice? You've had luck with Airbnb. You're just saying oh it's a company fraught with fraud and deception since its inception, but that's fine. My kids get their own room.
This company has no moral compass. Why are you advertising for it? Distracting from the reality of the company described in the article?
You know it has illegally ruined communities in the name of profit, right?
I also have had great experiences on Airbnb, with only a few less than desirable ones, but the fact that Airbnb isn't refunding these people, and not paying the extra cost for the last-minute accommodations they had to take in is extremely disturbing and makes me completely lose faith in the platform.
If Airbnb would take fraud seriously and refund people who have been defrauded on their platform, it would be fine. The fact that they push the risks of fraud to the customer and refuse to pay for reparations is not acceptable.
I also have repeatedly used AirBnB in the past to try to make life easier with children. After getting burned repeatedly, I gave up. You can book a place like Embassy Suites for a similar amount of money and have a bit more space than a standard hotel room. It just isn't worth the hassle of researching AirBnB listings and dealing with the fallout from the bad ones to me anymore.
If you haven't tried recently, a lot of traditional booking sites (like Booking.com) now have a pretty extensive apartment rental catalogue. When I'm going somewhere for more than a couple of days, I'd much rather have an entire apartment. I used to use AirBNB to book a full-fledged apartment. But now I just use Booking.com for everything.
It also used to be the case that AirBNB had some really nice places for pretty cheap. I think now that the business is more mature, it's not as easy to find really great discounts. Any more, it seems like the better value is on Booking.com, too!
Exactly this. For one or two people, Airbnb isn't lot cheaper than hotels. The big win is when the traveling group is more than two people. That gets very expensive at hotels because you usually have to book more than one room.
As a family we do the same, but never in the US, we've been caught in a couple of scams the same as this article, fortunately when we were traveling for business not as a family, but still.
AirBnB in Australia, Japan & the UK has never been a problem for me. The USA has a 50% scam rate so far.
Yeah, if it is me and my wife we go hotel 90% of the time at least now. If it is more family members coming, like my parents or her parents, we will book an airbnb so everyone can get their own room and we can eat together etc.
I'm sure most people have fine experiences, but this is more than just "reporting negative experiences". This is a probably super profitable scam, and I'm sure it's not the only one, since there really aren't performing any sort of checks on hosts or properties.
>The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.
I just spent 7 days (20h total) trying to make one booking. Tons of reading between the lines and analyzing involved, as well as bad or non-responsive potential hosts. To top it off, AirBnb Support the whole time was very poor.
There are hotels with laundry rooms; and many chains have suites that give you an extra room, including doors, or connecting rooms. Very often the price difference isn't that significant. (Given how expensive some Airbnb's are, booking with points or through various deal sites is often much cheaper for a proper hotel rooms, too.)
> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.
Completely agree. If you don't want to put in the time or effort required to analyze for “assumed”, “missing” , and “bonus” amenities, scrutinize each listing’s description, photos, and guest reviews, and sniff out the nature of each Airbnb and the host’s motivations, I say stay away from Airbnb. More thoughts here - https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo...
The more negative comments I read here, the more I think that most people shouldn't use Airbnb. With that being said, I've been happy with Airbnb, warts and all.
Yeah, I stopped using Airbnb a loooooong time ago, and only use it when the price diff is something like 4 fold. Too many bad experiences.
Yay booking.com and normal hotels
One time a hotel - which I had fully paid for a week earlier - kept badgering us for money throughout our stay. They said that we had been given too low of a rate due to some error. The rate wasn't even low, they were just trying to scam us. Furthermore, they had our booking for 1 week and they chose not to contact us about the issue until we arrived (making it really infeasible to change hotels on such a short notice).
Another time our hotel room was smelling like a sewer and the hotel refused to fix the issue or move us to another room.
Just two examples there. Hotels are generally awful.
I've only used it once, about a year ago. I wanted to visit Nuremberg, Germany, but I picked a terrible time of the year when the hotel rates were atrocious. So I looked on AirBnB and found an older couple renting a bedroom in their private home about 30 minutes away from the city for only about $45/night. It turned out to be a really nice experience, and I think this is what at least some people are looking for. Staying at a private (and very nice) home with some hosts (who actually live there) in a spare room is an international experience you won't get with a hotel or even a hostel. For me, it was mildly inconvenient that I had to take a train 30 minutes to get to the city those two days, but it was well worth seeing a small town I wouldn't have seen otherwise, and getting to meet actual German people and see how they live and attempt to talk to them in my broken German.
I guess you just really have to be careful when you use a service like this. It's like eBay in a way: you can get ripped off on there, but if you're careful and only buy from reputable sellers, you can get some great deals.
I hit a variation of this scam. I wasn't baited on a different space, but the listing was heavily misleading. I even had roommates even though the listing didn't state it!
The listing had 5 stars because of a network of shill accounts leaving fake reviews. Additionally, there is no penalty for deleting a listing and recreating it when the fake 5-star status runs out.
I contacted Airbnb about the shill account network, and the scam, and they didn't do anything about it. Although I got a refund, I wasted 3 hours of my life trying to get into a locked apartment that had my things in it before a plane took off. The shill accounts still exist.
Haven't used Airbnb since. I might gamble for a chic destination listing for fun, but never again for casual/business use.
I got surprise roommates once too. An entire family living in one of the bedrooms in what I booked as a 2 bedroom unit. Turned out the place had 3 total bedrooms, and while I would have understood if the host lived in the third, this was a totally unrelated tenant with multiple children. I contacted Airbnb and they said sure I can cancel, I just need to get the host to agree. Which he obviously did not want to do. This took hours to resolve.
It's always interesting to see scammers at work. The nature of scammers, atleast the ones that get caught, put in 95% effort, and it's that last 5% that gets them caught.
In this case, imagine if instead of trash furniture and minimal decor in the "switch" property of "bait and switch" they put in half decent stuff. Renters would probably all accept the story of a plumber and move on. Instead, they fill the property with crappy furniture and leave unhappy customers. They could have gotten away with it.
They did get away with it, over and over again. And when the scam was discovered, they went dark. They could have even switched to alternate accounts, alternate platforms, or even a different scam that utilizes those empty properties.
Not getting away with something in perpetuity is not the same as not getting away with it. Had they been more timid with their margins, maybe they would have been busted before making the money they did make.
This plumbing switch-er-roo scam is not new. A hotel tried the same thing on me in Paris in 2000. I booked a hotel in district 1 and they tried to move me to one on the edge due to flooding. Luckily I had been warned by a friend and refused. After I made a fuss the manager magically found an open room for me.
“If I had another choice, I would not use Airbnb again,” he told me. “I was very put off by getting scammed. But at this point, I feel like if I want to travel, there’s not really much else I can do.”...how about HomeAway, vebo ? There are other options.
Also of course airbnb is to blame for handling the support issue poorly, however my experience with airbnb has been nothing but amazing.
Same nonsense can happen at any 2-3 star hotels.
Never book airbnb without some research. If any issues come then file a complaint before your trip ends and ideally within first 24 hr.
This scam is common in Europe as well. Something very similar happened to me in London where I was seemingly renting from a nice regular person who had a single well reviewed listing. Once I arrived I was met by some guy from a property company who said he "worked with" the lister and he was going to move us to some place better. He showed us a total dump with dilapidated Ikea junk. He basically threatened us with poor reviews/no refund when we didn't take it. Airbnb did literally nothing. I had to reach out to friend that works there to get traction.
Same thing happened in Florence to friends the following year. Luckily that time I had already bailed on Airbnb and got a hotel. But after I helped them look into it I found several instances of the photos/description from their well reviewed host used on other accounts.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 455 ms ] threadAside from that... why aren't Airbnb detecting when multiple properties have very similar photos and investigating this themselves? (Of course they may be, and these examples are cases where they didn't pull the fraudulent listing).
The chargeback is for the exact fraudulent type of activity described in the article, and the business who allows it should be punished.
Heck, that is the primary reason I use my credit card, for this type of protection.
On the contrary, AFAIK some banks or at least payment processors now clearly state than some "sharing economy" services cannot be subject to charge backs, or payment reversals, like if you use Paypal for a Kickstater. So it's basically the opposite of what you wish.
Sure but at the same time, fraud is fraud. If a project is fraudulent, then who should bear the consequences? That's not that simple. Ultimately, backers do pay Kickstarter, never the project creator directly.
What surprises me is that the card issuers don't come down harder on businesses with this practice. I suppose Airbnb is a pretty large customer (of the card issuers) and so aren't so easy to influence, however...
There is also the fun technique of attacking a merchant (or charity) by sending them money from stolen credit cards, which will stick them with chargeback fees and an eventual ban by the card processor.
I agree that customers should make reasonable attempts to resolve issues with merchants, and not go straight for the nuclear option of a chargeback.
However, if I deal with a company and they don't resolve issues to my satisfaction within what I consider a reasonable period, I do not hesitate to make it clear that I will be contacting my bank to dispute the charges.
Funnily enough, I have never actually had to do so: the mere threat seems to be sufficient to convey to the company that yes I do actually expect them to solve my problem.
The system works, at least for those privileged enough to be aware of their rights, and to have the ability to issue effective threats to merchants who don't respond to complaints within good time.
Declining a charge in this way is thus less insurance, and more telling the merchant "I am not paying you." While it may be justified (like in this story), the merchant is never going to be happy about losing those funds and losing the control over the funds.
I had a similar situation with the App Store where I purchased a subscription under a mistaken assumption and when I could not find any recourse through Apple or the publisher (I simply could not find any way to get in touch with anyone), I declined the charge on my credit card. This led Apple to block all activity with that card - so much so that I was unable to download any free apps until I added another payment method to my profile.
When I attempted to contact Apple to resolve this issue I was told that it was "for my security", to prevent further fraudulent transactions on my card. Explaining the situation, and that there was no fraudulent use of my card or account, just a misleading subscription did nothing to help. They insisted that the only way to resolve the situation would be if I reversed the dispute from the credit card (thus releasing the funds back to Apple), and only after that was completed would I be able to try to get a refund from Apple. Left with no other choice that is what I did.
The issue at hand here was obviously that Apple was refusing to give up control to the credit card companies. By effectively banning any user that disputes a charge they are able to force their users to keep all complaints within Apple's purview (and they do not provide a way to submit complaints digitally).
And this is why Airbnb doesn't care. This is insane to me that they end with "Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." after ALL that. It's like the author has stockholm syndrome. I can't wrap my head around why you'd ever use Airbnb again after an experience like that, esp. when hotels are about the same cost.
But, I've never been scammed on Airbnb. My experiences have all been excellent. That's one rental in the US and 5 across western Europe in the last 7 years. Not sure if it matters, but none of these were "cheap" rentals - they were all mid-priced. And almost all with "Super Host" rating (no clue if that gives any extra protection).
That's a fair question. I may have generalized a bit with that statement, however, from what I have seen lately if you use a hotel deal site, it has been about the same cost. On my recent vacations, after looking at options like Airbnb vs hotels in popular US cities, it has been an easy decision to get hotels over an Airbnb with the price difference averaging around $25-50 (esp. after you factor in all the crazy fees Airbnb does now, that you don't see until checkout). However, you do make a good point for your specific needs of the kitchen, that will obviously change a lot in terms of a hotel pricing with that amenity.
For what it's worth, I've also only ever had good experiences with Airbnb in the past when I have used them, but still my main point was if I was the author, I don't know how I could ever go back to using Airbnb after that.
But did AirBnB help the scammer keep her $800? Still giving AirBnB business after that is indeed ridiculous.
I can still use Qatar and Expedia.
Airbnb should not be allowed to ban me for this reason.
With Steam, you lose your entire library when banned.
With Uber, you lose the ability to create an account tied to your phone number (i.e. you need to get a new phone number to ever have a new account).
I don't use AirBnB because it is a scam haven, so I can't comment on how their dispute process works.
FWIW, "back in the day" chargebacks used to be done in a manual way which made it harder to automate the banning process that tech companies utilize. But the likes of Stripe and other processors have made it part of their API so you can easily trace the chargeback to the transaction and determine what recourse you have.
The result would mean that 75% of my trip would be spent not in Singapore. So I requested to leave the plane because the plane had to go back to the gate to refuel, because of how long it waited on the runway.
Qatar tried to argue that this wasn't their problem, but BoA told them to eat the cost. Two sides of the same coin. I would have accepted a partial refund but BoA gave full refund.
So the idea that "I can just take my business elsewhere" is maybe a dying notion, in this modern economy. They're not brick-and-mortar stores where you can just walk down the street to another one.
https://www.airbnb.com/terms/payments_terms?hide_nav=true
Also there's a binding arbitration clause there too just for good measure.
> In addition to any amount due as outlined above, if there are delinquent amounts or chargebacks associated with your Payment Method, you may be charged fees that are incidental to our collection of these delinquent amounts and chargebacks. Such fees or charges may include collection fees, convenience fees or other third-party charges.
I'd be interested to see how the wording varies between jurisdictions.
They also have special partnerships with credit card companies so the companies are more likely to side with Airbnb as well.
AirBNB must know who they are as those scammers are getting paid, right? It would be expensive for AirBNB (they would certainly lose money) but it can't cost more than the revenue they lose when people read articles like this?
Take the number of listings, A, multiply by the small proportion of scam listings, B, multiply by the average refund we post, C. A times B times C equals X. If X ... well, who cares about X, it doesn't matter - people will still book with us anyway.
Airbnb should be held responsible via law, not via the expectation that they care about their image. As long as it’s the Airbnb website or app and they are getting a commission, shrugging off issues like this should not be legal.
Airbnb is basically built on shifting liability to shifty people running hotels out of rentals.
Also, pro tip, I’d guess at least 50% of the airbnbs I’ve stayed in do not wash the sheets in a washer (I’ve literally physically observed at least one host lint-roll follow by a spray of fabric freshener).
That being said I still use them to lower my own standards and prices below hotels, but I know what I’m getting into at least.
Tokyo has a similar registration requirement as SF now, and even in Taiwan I almost always have to identify myself as a relative of the host.
It happens at hotels, too, and it's why I always take the sheets off of the bed when I check out. Putting the sheets on is the worst part of making the bed but taking them off takes two seconds. My hypothesis: if lazy hosts/housekeeping are forced to go through the trouble of putting sheets on then they might as well use a clean set. And if the host/housekeeper was going to change the sheets anyway then maybe I've made their job just a little bit easier.
I even have a friend who owns one flat, AirBNB's it, and rents another flat of about equal quality. In his case it's legal and a kind of interesting way to work the market; however it is ruinous to the rental market for locals.
I'm about to stay in one in Asia that very much seems to be a place someone lives about 1/3 of the time, and the rest of the time they rent it out. Apparently this is allowed there, but I'm curious what the vibe will be in a big luxury apartment building with many AirBNB listings.
I also agree that the AirBNB business model is impossible without shifting liability, but it seems like in many cases you're not so much shifting as removing it. Hotels are subject to all sorts of laws to ensure the safety of guests; these laws have developed over time and usually as the result of bad things happening; outside of maybe the US, nobody is kidding themselves that there is any meaningful liability on the part of a flat owner.
Negligently allowing fraud on your platform and taking a cut of the proceeds should make you an accomplice and get you criminally investigated.
Last minute host cancellation is the one thing they can actually something they help with since it ruins the marketplace for them.
As a host I've had my set of horror storied interacting with Airbnb. Most hosts do try really hard, but every marketplace has scams at some level, and I'm not sure how you could find them all once it's under some value/size.
But I don't think I would ever try to contact AirBnB "in the moment" (when I'm in a city not my own and need a place to sleep and trying to do whatever I'm in the city to do), since I've been trained to expect that any support from such companies is going to be very inconvenient, take lots of my energy, and take at a minimum hours (if not days) to resolve. Hours I don't have, when i'm trying to enjoy my vacation or whatever.
If AirBnB wants customers to contact the company immediately whenever anything looks fishy, they probably need to educate customers on that (with examples of what sorts of fishy things they'd like you to contact them asap about), as well as providing enough resources to customer support such that doing so actually helps instead of just adding more headache to an already painful situation. But I doubt AirBnB really wants customers to do that.
From the OP for instance:
> If a host asks a guest to stay at a property that’s different from the one they rented, Airbnb advises the guest to request a cancellation if they’re “not okay with the switch.” In both cases, the rules favor a would-be scammer and place the onus on guests who have just parachuted into an unfamiliar locale with their luggage and have nowhere else to stay that night.
But friends have, and a phone call fixed the problem in the instance actually fixed the problem.
As a host I've had guests call airbnb and ask for exceptions for my cancelation policy (which is moderate) and have airbnb grant them and cancel booking at the last minute, or after check-in time and do 100% refunds. (or at least I get $0)
So while you might be trained that way, and it's understandable, they publish their number and make it pretty available to guests. Maybe the problem is labeling it an emergency number? (I take emergencies as huge deals so naturally avoid calling emergency numbers)
It's a shitty situation and I don't really want to blame the victim. I just really wanted to point out there's an number you can call for help and if you call it earlier they can help you. In case it helps someone nn the US its: +1-855-424-7262
She did:
>When I asked about the status of my refund, they ghosted, which led me to contact Airbnb. Though I had been moved to a flophouse and then told to leave early, Airbnb only refunded me $399 of my $1,221.20, and only did so after I badgered a number of case managers over the course of several days. The $399 didn’t even include the service fees Airbnb charged me for the pleasure of being thrown out on the street. But my power was nothing compared to that of a company valued this year at $35 billion, and I figured it was probably the best I could do.
The article details how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a refund from AirBnB:
>But Patterson didn’t care about that. She knew she had been scammed and wasn’t going to stand down until she received every penny back.
>“I’m an attorney, so I love to argue,” she said. “I just didn’t stop calling.”
>She eventually got her full refund, but it indeed came with a harsh review from Becky and Andrew for doing so. “We would NOT host or recommend her to the airbnb community!!” they wrote. Patterson couldn’t help but wonder how people with fewer resources and no place to crash would have fared in the same situation.
And yes this has happened to friends, showed up a place that wasn't as described/ready/etc. Called and complained and ended up having airbnb book them a hotel.
The purpose of AirBNB right now is to give the current owners a nice exit. After that occurs, then they can worry about customer service and the related expenses.
AirBnB is/used to be cheap. People want cheap. They don't want to pay $200 a night for a hotel room when they travel to Paris, AirBnB knows that so I think they are much more concerned about the size of their inventory than the satisfaction of the guest or their reputation.
What fascinates me is the ability of most of theses "start-up" to successfully straight out ignore local laws, with very little consequences, and manage to put all the burden of legality onto their users.
They must have very good legal teams that exploit the flaws of legal systems. Talking about Paris, the great majority of listing are outright illegal, or at least used to be. If I were to set up a similar operation on my own, in France, I'd be shut down in a heart beat for providing illegal hotels and rentals and go straight to prison.
These people seem truly untouchable.
That's the strength of these services.
Without knowing details about AirBnB's corporate structure, I assume they don't have any subsidiaries or offices or employees in France. That makes it hard (but not impossible) to compel them to follow French law, or local laws in France.
The easier option is to write a law that compels payment processors to disallow payments to or from a company that does XYZ, then declare AirBNB has done XYZ and cut off their payments. It's certainly possible to rent an apartment in Paris and have all the payments done outside of France, but it removes a lot of people from both sides of the market.
The other option is to work through courts internationally, but that's very slow and costly for things that aren't capital crimes. You basically have to get your government's diplomats to make the US State department care to do the interfacing.
Which is funny; not sure how it would work in France, but many US jurisdictions have profoundly vicious civil forfeiture laws, where a local (not even talking about state or federal, just a town/county/city) police force can seize property thought to be used in or related to criminal activity, and keep it for themselves. Or auction it off and keep the proceeds.
Running an unlicensed hotel is a crime in many jurisdictions. As is operating a hotel with fire-code or safety violations.
If you start seizing buildings from people, word will get around quickly. Especially in the nicer neighborhoods.
You don't even have to stay one night... I ran into this exact scenario where upon arrival, the place had no electricity, wifi, and construction for a few blocks outside. I was unable to contact them until the next day since my first instinct was to look for another place ASAP and rest from the long flight. Sure enough, they threw their ToS at me and stated that I wasn't eligible for a refund. I contacted AMEX, but they partner with AirBnB so I was denied a credit there as well. I ended up paying an entire week for a place I didn't stay at.
Thanks for that, didn't realize they deny chargebacks in cases of fraud and misrepresentation. Partnering with a company that engages in widespread global fraud and illegal activity is an interesting choice for Amex.
> "Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel."
After an experience like that, I'd spend so much effort warning everyone I know to avoid Airbnb, even with the off chance something like this could happen to them. THIS is exactly why Airbnb doesn't care, the user is so brainwashed into still using the platform even after all that to potentially save a few bucks (which honestly, from what I have seen these days, Airbnb is basically the same cost of a hotel if you buy from any hotel deal site). I just don't understand that logic at all. Fool me once...
It's constantly amazing to see how little people value their time when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while.
The math to get an approximate hourly rate from a yearly salary is really easy:
Just divide yearly salary by 2000. Thus if you make 100,000 a year, your hourly rate is approximately 50.
I'm not saying go out and drive an Uber every free minute you have, but value the time you aren't working and don't spend it chasing down stupid shit and taking a mental toll on yourself to get back $100.
On the other hand, if everyone knows when robbed or scammed I will doggedly pursue every avenue until a much higher price has been extracted from the robbers or scammers, the downside is nonzero.
It costs money to run a hotel well. From the front desk to the cleaning staff. If a stay costs you $40 a night, you have to ask yourself "What are they skimping on? Are they not washing the sheets? Vacuuming? Cleaning the showers/toilets?"
Sure, there are some economies of scale at play. But by and large, it takes quite a bit of money to make sure things are well maintained. That is what often gets reflected in your hotel bill.
Having said that, I still use the platform.
Why? I've traveled a lot and generally on the cheap, and I have run into scammy/terrible hotels. I mean, at one place the hotel owner tried to scam me by claiming I broke something that was clearly broken when we arrived. One time, I had a hotel room with hookers outside, a broken beer bottle under the bed with beer still in it, and a slice of pizza literally still on the floor face down. This last one had good reviews on one platform, terrible reviews on another.
My bad airbnb experience made me much more careful about who I stay with and how on the platform. But I haven't given up on it. I've had some amazing airbnb experiences, both renting full houses with friends as well as staying in a room in a house with locals and getting the 'real local experience', I won't leave it. Maybe for people going to high end hotels it won't make sense to airbnb? At least for me, going to cheap hotels and cheap airbnbs, the overall reliability has been not too dissimilar.
I do wish they would monitor their platform more.
Read the rest of the comments here, and there are many others with similar reasons.
Also I loath high end hotels - saccharine service with lifeless interiors and a walking dead ambiance.
When I travel, I often approach it like imagining I lived in that city. So often I'll get food and cook it and have some days where I just lounge around. This doesn't really work with most hotels which are absolutely tiny in major cities and don't have working kitchens or living rooms. Even if they do the furniture is so generic, cheap and awful that it kind of breaks me out of the experience.
There's no real alternative for the apartment-like living experience AirBnB provides, unfortunately.
In fact, many 'scare' articles about airbnb puzzle me, because it seem seems that the problems could have been avoided if the guest had read the reviews and/or booked with a superhost (or other host with a history of good reviews).
Having said that, I do think it's insane that the reviews are no longer listed in chronological order (or at least with the option to view them in chronological order).
But how can I trust that the reviews are good if, as this article talks about, people are hesitant to post anything but good reviews for fear of receiving a retaliatory review?
Yea? Do explain your confidence.
you have no self worth if you're willing to be defrauded out of hundreds of dollars, then the company sided /with the fraudster/, and you're /still/ unwilling to part ways from the platform
don't bother posting the following, please:
- there aren't any alternatives: legal hotels/hostels existed before, and will after
- cheaper: that you're willing to ignore the law for people who actually live there in order to save money is more telling of your non-existent principles. in many cases this isn't true anyway
Would you keep going to a grocer who fraudulently billed your credit card, just cause they were cheaper?
How much cheaper than a hotel was your stay after a 3 digit cleaning fee?
Is it worth a one time screw up of $200 for my years of positive experiences? For me, yes.
If the ratio of positive to negative experiences starts going down, I'll be finding other ways to vacation.
Likewise, if a grocer messes up once, but I've been going to them for years without issue, I'm going to let it go. If it starts happening more often? I'll look for other ways to get my groceries.
(Side note: I've been booking more hotels recently. But that has to do with cost and convenience mostly, not false listings or false cleaning fees or anything else like that).
Are people really so afraid of being banned by a company such as Airbnb that they will just suck up when defrauded?
It's a vacation rental company, and not very good at that. Why are people so afraid of it?
Genuinely curious..
There's often no reason to fear these shenanigans. Companies get away with it when people don't understand their rights regarding credit and debt and cave in to the shenanigans.
If there's fraud occurring then a police report should be filed.
Even if you point it out during the pre-rental walkaround, they won't mark it on the contract. That's the scam. Then when you return they charge you for a new windshield or a body panel/paint job, which of course they never actual have done because they want to scam the next person too.
Yes, you rented your car with your VISA and VISA will cover these charges eventually (takes about 3 months and you're on the hook for the charge for that time, and you'll never get the hours back that you spend sorting it all out).
You could say that you could just make sure all damage is marked before you sign the contract, and that's good advice at any rental agency, but it's still better to pay a little more up front to one of the major car rental companies who make their money on actually renting you a car instead of the company trying to find a way to scam you out of an additional $1000+.
> you're on the hook for the charge for that time
I'm not really sure I consider having some of my credit blocked out while the charge is disputed, as being the same as being on the hook for the charge. The credit is essentially in escrow until a decision gets made, but it definitely hasn't impacted my bank balance in any way.
Corporate really needs to step up here and enforce its rules and empower its rating system to drive this out. Otherwise it's not worth my energy to use the platform.
That's perfect, but I guess our mileage may vary. I was charged the amount and VISA later credited it when everything was resolved (about 3 months start to finish). I didn't miss the $1300, but I'm sure it would be a concern to some.
I carry a small bright flashlight in my work bag now, just for dark airport garages where rental cars are often parked. I've never had a problem with a major agency but I don't need a first.
This scam actually works only in so far it is not prevalent and relatively small scale (100 listed properties is arguably not small scale anymore, but compared to the total number of listed properties...). However, now is the time for the platform to ensure this does not become a common experience, or they risk losing it all.
These places (airbnb, vrbo, its all the same stupid schtick) are emphasizing the rights of idiots to rent over the rights of renters to have a safe, enjoyable time while paying lots of money. They got the product they built.
I think it absolutely could be. As I said in a post above, I've used it once, to stay at a private home (with the family living there) when I traveled to Europe last year and the hotel rates in one particular city were absurd. It was a great experience for me, though of course staying at a private home is very different from staying in a hotel, and very limiting in some ways. For people wanting to do this, "legal" hotels just don't offer that same experience, and I think such a service can certainly be profitable.
However, it's not going to be mega-profitable like Uber or any other well-known tech companies with giant IPOs and huge valuations. And this I think is the problem: greed. Why can't the owners just be happy with something that makes a tidy profit and provides a nice service to people who want a different travel experience than what you get staying in a bland hotel room?
It'd be a small fraction of minimum wage if it took an hour. It should not take an hour.
Yes, this isn't only happening to guests, check the AirBnb hosts reddit - the horror stories there about guests and Airbnb support not helping out are constant
- Destroy the flophouse - Leave a 5 star review on your original booking saying how nice the place was - If the scammers attempt to complain to AirBnB or charge fees, kindly tell them that's not the place you stayed and you have never seen that location. Refer them to the original listing for the beautiful home where your reservation was.
Scammers would be claiming you destroyed a place that AirBnB has no record of you ever staying in.
This has pushed me back to traditional hotels.
You have destroyed the rental apartment market in my city. You profit from taking advantage of loopholes in legislation, legislation which protects consumers from unscrupulous, dangerous, and untrustworthy properties.
The sooner every city enacts laws limiting "airbnb" apartment rentals to 30 days per year per apartment, the better. Otherwise it is abused at scale.
This is sad, I thought AirBnB were one of the good guys, and had a good experience 4 years ago.
Is there something about doing things at scale that makes things go bad? It seems like so many companies are great at start, but go downhill when their assumption that "fraud is a rare exception" does not hold.
Airbnb 4-8 years ago was a quirky thing that biased towards tech early adopters. Because it wasn't wildly profitable, it didn't become a magnet for scams yet.
As the community grew, the population includes more diverse people (including the bad actors). Once bad actors find it's easy to get around the loopholes, they tell others and the scams become prevalent.
Works like a charm, never had an issue!
Also, why don't people issue charge backs with their credit card companies? Airbnb customer service might suck, but credit card companies almost always side with their customers if there's a modicum of proof showing something henky.
We've passed peak airbnb.
I will say though that I dread what you said - analyzing listings. The airbnb.com UX is atrocious. I thought it was pretty sub-par when I'd look at listings just planning trips for myself. But now I try to plan trips with my partner through it and she has her own account, so I share lists and listings within lists. It's awful. I recently went on a 2 week road trip and stayed at different places every day. I'd have to have google maps open to plot distance between airbnbs and parks, I couldn't go back into a listings actual ad to see its details once I confirmed a reservation (I had to search for the listing again and go to it, the reservation details don't show the actual posting), I'd have to keep a separate app open just to keep notes of each listing, I use my todo list, which I then also had to share with my partner separately because there's not really a way to thumbs up/down/leave comments on listings. I'd send her listings and she'd get errors or they'd just never end up on her account. If I add her to a listing I don't think it shows up in her reservations so I still had to send all the info to her, she'd just get an email about it.
Does anyone do this sort of stuff on any of the other sites? Vrbo, etc? Is there a really good roadtrip planning app? Are they easier to use in these situations? I honestly don't want to deal with it again it was that frustrating.
Also, while I'm here ranting, and as an ex-airbnb host and very avid airbnb user. Please, chill out on your cleaning fees. I cannot believe some of the cleaning fees I find. Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. Nothing turns me off from a place more than putting a reservation together and noticing that my 2-3 day stay will incur $150+ in cleaning fees. I would rather pay a slightly higher daily fee than $45-80/day in "cleaning" when I'm a single person renting your studio just so I can spend 80% of my day hiking outside of your place. I can't remember if I could control this based on the number of guests staying but if you can, please do it.
That kind of attention to detail is what I would classify as a truly "great" experience.
Source: I know several Airbnb owners, and the people who clean their properties.
Overall I've been happy with airbnb as a traveler, but if they don't step up their game it's going to be like having been happy with the early web, or Amazon reviews in the early days when it was easy to ignore a few fakes. That general problem of evolving predators is hard, but this particular change seems easy.
I had to pay $150 to clean the house each time I had a booking, that's what it cost me. I passed it along to guests at exactly that cost.
Not sure if it was "worth it" for some guests, or people staying only one night. But that's what I had to pay, it wasn't part of any nefarious strategy. In developed countries it's going to cost to clean that place, that's just the way it is. You don't have the economies of scale that a hotel has with a team of maids.
At that point unless I'm looking for a specific experience (cabin in the woods, victorian 4 bedroom home) I'll probably just get a hotel to not have to deal with it.
I think my biggest issue is the DAILY clean fee. I'm fine with a one time clean fee if I'm there for 3-5 days. Hosts aren't coming in and rolling my sheets every night.
But many are, and Airbnb isn't doing anything for the UI that lets you adapt for that and sort by total cost. There's almost an arms race for how much of the cost you can obfuscate that way.
In my view this is major. To describe it better - need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties.
Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys. Then the list goes on.
AirBnb expects and encourages misrepresentation of properties and misleading descriptions to stimulate cash flow. Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.
I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.
Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews. During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week.
This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation.
But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background.
And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.
It is more accurate to say "You don't get what you don't pay for".
Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.
In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.
In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.
How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?
Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable.
After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city.
Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.
Between HotelTonight and the actual property (a Kimpton Hotel), it was resolved in under 90 minutes.
Look -- I've had issues with Hilton, Marriott, and HotelTonight -- that just comes with the territory when you spend 200+ nights a year in hotel rooms. How they deal with the issue is what brings you back (and honestly, it's why I'm lifetime diamond at Hilton, even though I did a LOT of work for marriot.com a few years ago).
Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general.
A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.
I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up.
Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.
It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.
That would never happen with a hotel.
That said, in December my ex wife had an Airbnb cancel just before her trip. She had to find another place in a hurry at twice the price.
Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.
You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.
-I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country, but after using AirBnb 30+ times traveling with wife and three kids in Northern/Central Europe, I’ve only had two issues - once the place we were to stay was double-booked (and we arrived last!); the other it turned out what was described as a ‘bedroom’ in the listing was a storage room with no windows, hot water tank, a few shelves packed with all sorts of junk and barely room for a dirty mattress on the floor.
In both cases AirBnb promptly decided I was due a refund, my only minor gripe being it took a couple of weeks before the money was actually refunded.
-Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have no fuss at all - but when a bad experience occurred, AirBnb were better than I had feared with regards to setting things right.
The double booking was after a ten-hour drive with kids aged 10, 5 and 3 in the back seat. I didn’t need that.
Luckily, the host had friends nearby who shacked us up for the night, so disaster was averted - but this was way out in the Swedish boonies and I envisaged having to drive another couple of hours before finding a hotel.
As with software, pick two.
AirBnB wont play down that expectation because again they profit more from it, but from the website and concept it is clear that you are dealing with random unprofessional strangers with a minimum of guarantees. Its kinda like the Uber contractor-vs-employee categorization for drivers.
AirBnB should definitely do a better job, but I maintain the risks are inherent in the business model, and you and the other users want the benefits of the risk (lower prices), without accepting the consequences of the risk.
I'd stay with a hotel (and sometimes do) if they would offer me as many bedrooms and a kitchen to work with.
We were exhausted and didn't have the energy to really do anything after our 6 hour plane flight. The hosts came in and tried to resolve things first by removing all the appliances and then by offering us a bribe. I had documented all of this on the AirBnB website via private messages, taken pictures of the cockroaches, and found a can of bug spray(the hosts knew they had an ongoing problem and still rented to us!) to spray the roaches with. They were falling out of every crevice that I sprayed in the kitchen.
We ended up spending a very restless night there, and in the morning I found a single roach in the bathroom. We were going to move out the next day, but ended up scrambling to find a hotel room in Maui that afternoon after driving the road to Hana.
When I called AirBnB to report the cockroaches the representative basically said he couldn't guarantee me any kind of refund, and moreover that I should be used to staying in "less than clean conditions" as a bachelor who has traveled for business. I was flabbergasted.
They eventually got us a refund but I have never had such a terrible customer service experience from any company, period. I will never stay in AirBnB again. Evidently they don't enforce any standards of cleanliness and they take all hosts at their words as to the fitness of the property. The CSR that initially handled my case was a huge asshole and made me feel like he didn't care about me at all. The later CSRs were better. Staying in an AirBnB was the most stressful vacation experience I have ever had and I will never trust them again.
As an aside, you should make it a point to call their support line during the hours of business in the EST or CST timezones. Their day shift CSRs actually seemed to care about the problem. But their night shift appears to be an overseas call center, and they treated me like shit.
I was not happy but at some point reality has to set in. Cockroaches are somewhat normal in tropical zones. I Googled around and found several tourists advising others that cockroaches are a reality in these locations. Even proper hotels had quite a few reviews involving cockroaches.
This was my experience as well. Called in the evening about the listing not being described. The CSR was pretty useless. Called the next morning and got someone from California who was far more helpful.
This is true: Mosquitos home in on CO2, and fans scramble that quite a bit.
Whether that is sufficient or not is your own personal choice.
Would not be surprised if it did. I remember one rental in the Netherlands where the english text said free parking, but the dutch text said parking available. The problem was AirBnBs translation and they refunded my parking expenses.
I've never had a problem with this, but I also don't bother staying anywhere that doesn't have a 4-star or better average. If you just set your filter at >= 4 stars, then these problems go away, and we also comb through the reviews of our top picks to make sure there's nothing unexpected. Consequently, we've had nothing but good experiences.
>Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future. Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review. Choose the latter option, and you could come across as too demanding by other prospective hosts, or, in extreme cases, even receive a retaliatory review.
What's going on here is that Airbnb has essentially made a pass/fail review system, where 5 stars is pass and anything less is fail. Thus, short of a visit being completely terrible and the host awful, I would feel bad giving anything less than a 5 star review, since it would adversely affect the listing and the host.
On one hand, this does encourage hosts (and guests I suppose) to do their best. On the other hand, this eliminates honest reviewing, making reviews either "Best stay ever!!!!!1 (5/5)" or "This place sucks! The host is terrible!(1/5)"
A review system should just be a series of factual questions that are aimed at determining whether a potential customer is likely to have problems, be satisfied, or enjoy their stay. And the scores should be subjective; e.g. if you're single then the questions that impact a family should be eliminated from calculating the score.
For example, down the hall, there's a dog with a persistent high-pitched bark. If I'm reviewing them, ideally, I just answer a simple question, "are there persistent noise disturbances from neighbors?" Yes.
I think the reason it's not done this way is because you'd have to put a lot of thought into maintaining the questions.
Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.
Hotels have it right up front: 2 Queens. Period.
The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.
Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.
And then they have the nerve to complain to AirBnB if you hold an all-night drug-fueled orgy.
Sadly that sounds like mort advertising of everything, so I can't say I'm surprised.
As does every single hotel ever in existence.
How do you corroborate the information on those properties? The clean, affordable, well-placed hotels I've stayed in had reams of reviews and news articles from various sources to confirm they were indeed clean, affordable, and well-placed. The cost of faking all those sources must be orders of magnitude greater than faking property images/reviews on AirBnB.
In every single AirBNB I have stayed in, after the initial transaction the rest of the communication was done over phone or text.
Another approach is to sent a question to the property manager. Invent some pretext to ask a question. I find that people trying to scam customers on the product also have poor customer service skills. So if I don't get a prompt, cogent and polite response, I move on..
I find it telling that you use the phrase "property manager" instead of "host".
Yeah, it's policy that you have to disclose any cameras inside the room in the listing. It's not clear what happens when you do find one though. You spend all day traveling and are in a strange city. On the one hand, you're entitled to get out of there with no penalty, but on the other, it might be hard to find alternate accommodations.
1) I'm a scammer. I stay in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room, and proceed to make a big deal out of "discovering" it. The room is refunded and the host is penalized or worse.
2) I'm a pervert. I spend the night in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room. I get off by watching the resulting footage, get paid by selling it, or both.
3) I'm a renter. I spend the night in an AirBnB. In the morning, I find the camera left by Pervert #2, possibly months earlier. I scream bloody murder. I get refunded, and the host is penalized or worse. Pervert #2 simply goes back to Ali Express and buys another camera.
There are probably numerous other variations I'm not devious enough to think of, all of which leave the host holding the proverbial bag.
Curious were the cameras in the bedroom pointing at the bed and attempting to be concealed? Huge fear of mine having some psychopath watching videos of my wife and I getting (un)dressed or intimate.
But the location was in walking distance of the major attractions in downtown and cost a half of what the local hotels were charging for "three" bedrooms (really two bedrooms and a closet with a bed crammed into it) vs. a single room with a pair of doubles at a hotel. It even had free parking, unlike the hotels that were charging $40-$50 per spot per day.
I mean yeah, it feels sketchy as hell, but the place is nicer and literally hundreds of dollars cheaper than a hotel.
Usually does when you are participating in fraud.
Ideally there would be an anonymous review system to let people disclose this sort of fuzzy evidence though because who wants to be party to a sketchy situation? Not only are there legit Airbnb’s, there are long-standing legit vacation rental markets (think summer cabins) where Airbnb is taking over from the old alternative sites. So it’s not like every Airbnb listing is circumventing the law.
I push back against this in my own building. I obviously refuse to let random people into the building, and I've left through the back exit to avoid obvious AirBnB "friends"¹. (Although having read the article, I now see people are much more reluctant to leave a bad review than I thought.)
Short-term sublets are against the contract in my building. Apartments in nice European city centres are for people to live in, not visitors on a weekend break.
I've just reported the current listings to the owner of the building. Last year their leases were terminated pretty quickly :-)
¹ Or whatever bullshit term AirBnB's marketing uses.
Its only a matter of time before authorities catch on and it isn't so cheap anymore
Letting toddlers run up and down the hallways is a good way to make you the most hated guest in the hotel.
We have a favorite AirBnB listing in one town we visit frequently (to see family that doesn't have space to host us) that has some fragile decorations. When we arrive, we do a quick sweep and put them all up high. We're also up-front with the host that we have small children, so they're free to reject our stay if they'd prefer. So far, it's never been an issue.
Please, PLEASE don't do this. You don't know what time people are trying to get some sleep in their rooms. Not everyone keeps your schedule.
For longer-term rentals, I find it's best to work through local property managers or maybe VRBO, where you're dealing with the person more directly. That said, the destination probably makes a HUGE difference in terms of how you are treated.
The fact that AirBnB's rating system is so gamed that you can't trust any reviews, and the fact that their policies for refunds skew towards the property owners and not guests means that my trust in the site is low. I'd probably only risk it again if there are hotels around as backups. That said, I'm also typically looking for cheaper places, so the scam-level density is probably higher.
It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund. It's totally within their power to say in so many words "be evil and we'll pull your funding and report you to the authorities". IMO AirBnB is complicit in these issues. There is no punishment for bad listings and often AirBnB doesn't even have the options in their system to list them correctly. They even removed my review that included pictures of proof.
But I have a hard time dumping bad policies on YC's plate, or demanding that YC "report you to the authorities" unless criminal activity/negligence is involved.
(Like, I don't think that Y Combinator owes me anything or gives a shit about what I think or whatever, I just think "they are a minority owner" is weak sauce)
I'm so glad now after years of never booking an airbnb I can say that with pride. I never gave this scummy company a single dollar. I knew who they were from the first experience.
Remember that AirBnB's first marketing campaign was hiring women (or men using female names online) to violate Craiglist ToS to spam people posting housing listings.
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
>...we asked [Sam] what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers.
That's what you meant?! I can't see which other part you might mean - it's only 750 words. Describing it as "an essay about how he and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams" seems as misleading as the worst of the deceptive AirBnB descriptions written about on this page. Maybe you meant to link to a different essay.
They do: https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/
YC founders are told to review these guidelines before we accept the investment.
From the ethics page:
> To maintain our community, if a founder behaves unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status.
I can think of several YC-funded companies pretty much raping our privacy and YC does nothing to fix that.
However, you can't go wrong with superhosts. I've never had a bad experience with them.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n...
There might be others, but this one has worked well for me. No affiliation, just a happy user.
This company has no moral compass. Why are you advertising for it? Distracting from the reality of the company described in the article?
You know it has illegally ruined communities in the name of profit, right?
If Airbnb would take fraud seriously and refund people who have been defrauded on their platform, it would be fine. The fact that they push the risks of fraud to the customer and refuse to pay for reparations is not acceptable.
It also used to be the case that AirBNB had some really nice places for pretty cheap. I think now that the business is more mature, it's not as easy to find really great discounts. Any more, it seems like the better value is on Booking.com, too!
AirBnB in Australia, Japan & the UK has never been a problem for me. The USA has a 50% scam rate so far.
I just spent 7 days (20h total) trying to make one booking. Tons of reading between the lines and analyzing involved, as well as bad or non-responsive potential hosts. To top it off, AirBnb Support the whole time was very poor.
Completely agree. If you don't want to put in the time or effort required to analyze for “assumed”, “missing” , and “bonus” amenities, scrutinize each listing’s description, photos, and guest reviews, and sniff out the nature of each Airbnb and the host’s motivations, I say stay away from Airbnb. More thoughts here - https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo...
The more negative comments I read here, the more I think that most people shouldn't use Airbnb. With that being said, I've been happy with Airbnb, warts and all.
Why is this not the number one post?
Another time our hotel room was smelling like a sewer and the hotel refused to fix the issue or move us to another room.
Just two examples there. Hotels are generally awful.
I guess you just really have to be careful when you use a service like this. It's like eBay in a way: you can get ripped off on there, but if you're careful and only buy from reputable sellers, you can get some great deals.
The listing had 5 stars because of a network of shill accounts leaving fake reviews. Additionally, there is no penalty for deleting a listing and recreating it when the fake 5-star status runs out.
I contacted Airbnb about the shill account network, and the scam, and they didn't do anything about it. Although I got a refund, I wasted 3 hours of my life trying to get into a locked apartment that had my things in it before a plane took off. The shill accounts still exist.
Haven't used Airbnb since. I might gamble for a chic destination listing for fun, but never again for casual/business use.
In this case, imagine if instead of trash furniture and minimal decor in the "switch" property of "bait and switch" they put in half decent stuff. Renters would probably all accept the story of a plumber and move on. Instead, they fill the property with crappy furniture and leave unhappy customers. They could have gotten away with it.
Not getting away with something in perpetuity is not the same as not getting away with it. Had they been more timid with their margins, maybe they would have been busted before making the money they did make.
Also of course airbnb is to blame for handling the support issue poorly, however my experience with airbnb has been nothing but amazing.
Same nonsense can happen at any 2-3 star hotels.
Never book airbnb without some research. If any issues come then file a complaint before your trip ends and ideally within first 24 hr.
Same thing happened in Florence to friends the following year. Luckily that time I had already bailed on Airbnb and got a hotel. But after I helped them look into it I found several instances of the photos/description from their well reviewed host used on other accounts.