Perhaps a dumb question but who was handling the insurance before this? Homeowners does not cover rentals, correct? So you needed rental insurance? I’ve always seen airbnb to be too risky to do with your primary residence, which seems to greatly diminish from the efficiency of the service (and of home ownership)
AirBnB is interesting in that it's like the gig economy, but actors that have unlimited capital can participate. If you have a few million bucks, you can park it in real estate in a touristy place and rent it out for $150 a night (compared to <$100 a night you'd get renting to a full-time renter). These "superhosts" know exactly what they're getting into.
This is different than the gig economy where workers are just pouring hours of their lives into a dead-end job. You never get more efficient at being an Uber driver or a Doordash delivery person. You put in the hours, you get paid, and nothing changes for the rest of your life. (This is certainly true of some non-gig jobs, but at least you get a guaranteed 40 hours of paid work a week, don't have to buy your own supplies, get some paid holidays, and get health insurance.)
Uber drivers get progressively more economically inefficient the more they drive as the maintenance costs or driving a vehicle increase the more you drive it, up until it needs replacing either due to wear and tear or regulatory / contractual requirements.
But, a car that is being used for Uber/Taxi service loses way more value over time, as a normal private car (in Europe for example) will make 10k to 15k kilometers per year, while Uber/Taxi cars will make double of that easily.
Yes. The use of a car in Uber service is extracting value from the car. My point was that the rate of that extraction goes down over time and distance, partially (perhaps more than) offsetting the increase in repair costs over time and distance.
I just want to point out that the "Superhost" status is related to your reviews and star ratings, not the amount of properties you run. I rent out half of my house on AirBnB and I am a "Superhost"
AirBnB did. I forget the exact terms, but a while back someone's house got trashed and it hit the news. AirBnB announced they'd cover the damage to her house and started an insurance policy.
Except, of course, when it blew up either on social media or in the press.
Then suddenly "they made it right" and some spokesdrone trumpeted some bullshit like "In this exceptional case we didn't live up to our members / hosts high expectations".
With rare exceptions I also don't see any more advantage compared to staying in a hotel. But to each his own, I suppose.
I used to feel this way and have since flipped. Unless I'm traveling with a large group for an extended period of time, I really prefer hotels. Bed made & bathroom cleaned every day, breakfast served, ample obvious parking, investment in paid support staff instead of an asshole or at-best disinterested "host", etc. Plus hotels are almost always cheaper for parties <= 2.
In Hawaii at least the home insurance companies have products for long term and short term rentals based on the homeownership. As a host I also have additional a liability and umbrella insurance. There is also some coverage from my property managers.
I'm in the U.S. I don't find the policy any more expensive than it would be for a long term rental property. This is a ski town condo and most of the risk to the insurer is fire I think, not Airbnb renters.
In the UK, "homeowners insurance" definitely wouldn't cover you for Airbnb style scenarios, and most "landlords insurance" wouldn't either, e.g. because you needed formal tenancy agreements (e.g. Assured Shorthold Tenancy), no potential for long void periods etc. However, some specialist insurance companies would insure you for Airbnb style scenarios via "holiday let insurance". You'd still need that cover because AirCover only provides insurance for the period while guests are there, i.e. you would still need insurance for break-ins, water leaks, cleaners injuring themselves, etc. in-between guests.
So this supplements rather than replaces your existing insurance. Not sure why this is so prominent on the HN home page because it isn't really something "that good hackers would find interesting" or something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
I rent an Airbnb in Miami but fly back to uk after a hangover style party. Good luck sueing me, even if you did most people don't have a 10,000usd never mind a 1m, then enforcement and collection.how does that open and shut?
You'd have a hard time re-entering the usa after automatically losing the case by not showing up at the courthouse and not paying the bill. But in any case the scenario of leaving the country is not unique to airbnb and exists for rental cars, other loans, and basically any activity involving borrowing something
Actually intentionally trashing place at 1M level is criminal offense (vandalism/destruction of property) in pretty much every state, local police will most definitely open criminal case and it may even rise to the level of extradition (and UK has extradition treaty with US).
If you intentionally trash the place at a few thousand dollars level then year - nobody will probably bother other than banning you from AirBnB for life. One time we sort of trashed AirBnB (my 2 year old got hold of pen and draw on the wall and couch while we were not looking) and the only consequence was paying 400 or so in fine (max liability on listing) and stern letter from AirBnB that they may ban us if it happens again.
Not even true, at best a civil case after months and you must provide service to the defendant or defendant attorney - depending on who booked and who stayed can be different and will not proceed normally.
tl;dr mostly nothing if they don't value their airbnb account.
"A person is guilty of criminal mischief in the second degree when with
intent to damage property of another person, and having no right to do
so nor any reasonable ground to believe that he has such right, he
damages property of another person in an amount exceeding one thousand
five hundred dollars.
Criminal mischief in the second degree is a class D felony."
Class D non-violent felonies are worth up to seven years in prison, likely varying widely depending on the circumstances.
I guess most states probably have similar statutes on the books. Whether you could get a prosecutor to charge it probably depends on the exact circumstances. I reckon you could find cases of people being charged on much less than $1M in intentional damage, though.
No one in the comment chain above me stipulated that the proposed violator was a foreigner. Most Airbnbs in the US are rented by domestic renters. And anyway, I'm only responding to the notion that civil action is the worst case scenario. That is plainly false.
Also, yea, you can commit minor crimes that don't rise to the level of extradition then skip town. That's always been the case. So? Who is going to go to the U.S., trash an AirBNB, risk getting charged with a crime and potentially banned for life from coming back? The people who trash AirBNBs are not the same people who can travel internationally, by and large.
Luckily you can steal more than twice that at your local Best Buy in California and it's a misdemeanor. So take good care of your AirBnB but feel free to go to town at a Walgreen's. If you can find one.
> These Host Damage Protection Terms contain an arbitration clause and class action waiver
So this insurance policy isn't even worth the pixels it's rendered on. It's not a good sign when a company purporting to be entering into contract is already trying to wriggle out of it, and this goes doubly for insurance.
It’s not just Airbnb - every insurance policy written today is loaded with exceptions you could fit a Mack truck through. The textbook business model of insurance is to collect premiums and try as hard as possible not to pay claims.
To be fair, fraud is a serious issue. If there were no checks at all then every innkeeper would be burning their tavern down right after getting an inn-sewer-ants polly-sea.
To be fair, policy opacity with tiny letters clauses is a serious issue. If there were a few hundred execeptions less insurances would still turn a massive profit.
Wow, the astroturfing in this thread already is happening.
0. This is nothing new, airbnb always had a free "guarantee" they just rebranded it basically from what I see to a trademarkable name.
1. Umbrella policy is better than airbnb. Umbrella policy will go after all parties including airbnb on your behalf.
2. Airbnb has a history of ignoring or mitigating damages unless you get famous on social media - this includes sexual assault/rape and murder of animals.
While these are just two incidents, there are countless more that can be searched, or you can probably filter through other incidents, and yes, while airbnb did "compensate" they did so only after intense media pressure.
3. If you are a tourist in most countries and "fly" back home, you are judgement proof. There only liability is the guests airbnb account, which, is worthless. You can create new accounts, and in most places you can use alternative government identification to bypass previous bans.
You can read the link I posted earlier about the death of a dog, the PII that airbnb released was not enough to start a civil court case. And even if you have a name, you have no guarantee that the nae of the airbnb account is the ACTUAL guest that stayed.
There was a weird ad-post for You.com earlier, which I mistakenly thought was organic... And now this. HN needs a bit more transparency or it’s going to lose a few of us.
HN has already lost a lot of quality posters over the last 10 years. It’s a drop in the bucket as more and more new registrations happen anyway.
For the savvy reader: the best kind of astroturfing on a tech site involves nerdsniping. Make a small obvious error and you’ll get people trampling over each other to correct you. Never underestimate how smug stooges can pay off. Keep an eye out for these kinds of posts (see Twitter blue thread).
That thread was moderated. You can tell because the founder’s opening introduction was pinned above dang pinning his own comment about a related thread. Those are conscious moderator actions which are about as transparent as it gets and illuminate the thinking on the other side (hint: you’re not aligned, but it sounds like you already expected that)
He replied to you explaining his reasons for detaching your completely shit comment. I found that explanation in ten seconds just by clicking on your name. I also found you replying to his reply, so it’s amusing to see you claim what went down wasn’t transparent. You were there, friendo. Way to go all debate club on dang with a clearly hurt essay after a pointless observation about the name being used as a verb didn’t score as you’d like.
Don’t dilute this thread about (legitimately interesting) turfing with your simmering annoyance from being moderated for good reason. We all see what happened, it’s fairly transparent
This is HN, where how startups market and position themselves is discussed just as much as their tech stack is. In the context of a Show HN, pointing out a terrible name is just as relevant as pointing out bad code or a bug.
A comment being negative =/= it being "completely shit".
Also dang did that to the other big Show HN story yesterday: "Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer" so it seems to be a new thing he does independently of if the post is by a YC company or not.
Please don't jump to grandiose conclusions from a couple of data points from the stochastic stream. Given enough randomness (which we certainly have here), you can literally jump to any conclusion that way. This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The moderation practices haven't changed here for many years. We don't publish a moderation log for a bunch of reasons*, but I'm always happy to answer any questions and usually spend hours a day doing it.
I stayed in an Airbnb in Bangkok and in the middle of the night we found a guy under the bed. Airbnb was kind enough to refund us the replacement fee of the key we took with us as we ran for our life. Awful company.
> If you are a tourist in most countries and "fly" back home, you are judgement proof. There only liability is the guests airbnb account, which, is worthless. You can create new accounts, and in most places you can use alternative government identification to bypass previous bans.
This isn't necessarily true. If you fly the coop, you might be out of the reach of a host or local law enforcement, but in some places action could still be taken against you in your absence. While for all practical purposes, you might never have to face the consequences if you never plan to return unless you were accused of doing something really terrible (like murdering or seriously injuring someone), it's best not to get yourself into legal entanglements in foreign countries, whether criminal or civil. Especially if you do think you might want to visit again in the future.
Also, AirBnB has taken legal action against guests itself[1], so that's potentially a risk in some cases too.
One of the best ways to avoid finding yourself in precarious situations while traveling abroad is to stay in legal accommodations, be they licensed hotels, hostels, homestays, etc. It's also one of the best things you can do to respect the places you visit. AirBnB is a horrible company that has single-handedly ruined buildings and neighborhoods and even, arguably, significantly harmed many popular tourist destinations, with its inventory of frequently illegal short-term rentals.
> Wow, the astroturfing in this thread already is happening.
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like that without evidence. Why? Because internet users routinely make these accusations up based on nothing more than seeing a few things (or just one thing) they happen not to like. There's nearly never anything more to it than that, therefore (a) it's off-topic here unless there's something objective to go on; and (b) if there is something objective to go on, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can specifically look into it.
"While AirCover protects you while you’re hosting an Airbnb stay or Experience, it is not a substitute for personal insurance"
This is a key point. As a host here in NZ, its basically useless as I still have to have commercial insurance. Aircover only covers you for the period of time that you have someone staying in your property. As soon as they have gone, you have no insurance. So if you have a house listed on Airbnb and someone breaks in and burns it down between bookings, you're not covered.
I mean the risk you mention seems unrelated to your business relationship with AirBnB. Personally I wouldn't expect their insurance to e.g. cover natural disasters either.
Those are two different things. Normal insurances for your house cover fire damage or burglary, but not the damage done by your guests. The Airbnb insurance does exactly that.
Why should AirBnb be responsible for covering issues that arise between stays? I mean, it would be nice if I could just sign up as a host for my condo, set it as unavailable for most of the year and get free insurance.
The point isn’t that airbnb should cover that situation, it’s that hosts need insurance anyway and that insurance should cover everything this covers plus more.
I think some home insurance providers might balk if they find the damages were caused by commercial renters. If this covers all issues related to commercial activity, then you would be fine with just residential homeowner's insurance.
It'd be useful if Airbnb offered a full coverage for a premium. That would make it easier for hosts since getting another insurance yourself is more complicated as you will need to pay much more for insurance that covers Airbnb style rentals, even though that part you already have coverage for and just need regular insurance when the property is not rented.
If someone breaks in and burns down my house, insurance will be irrelevant as they explicitly do not cover arson. I wonder if other countries have the same policy. I live in Brazil.
Theoretical insurance doesn't help you when Airbnb will simply ignore you or close your claim without explanation. They have become completely predatory and incompetent towards hosts in the past few years. As soon as something goes wrong they will find a reason to deny your claim. Their support that handles these cases is clearly incentivized to close cases without payouts. The only way anyone sees any coverage from them is if they get social media famous and then they quietly sweep it under the rug and make them sign a non-disclosure agreement to get their payout.
> They have become completely predatory and incompetent towards hosts in the past few years.
I'm discovering that, having just become an Airbnb host in the last year for my beach pad.
My new worst experience is Airbnb doing nothing and saying "too bad" when a guest with a new profile stayed for 3 days, then wrote a scathing review warning people off and demanding a refund.
The guest posted in her review that the place is full of broken furniture, rock hard beds worse than in communist countries, black mould, animal smells, urine smells, and is a health hazard. She used a lot of capital letters and accused me of punishing her for "sins not yet committed."
And yet she didn't contact me or Airbnb to complain until after the end of her stay of 3 nights.
My property averaged 4.8 stars (out of max 5) prior to that with zero negative reviews. I thought Airbnb might consider she is trying to scam a refund. But they say she hasn't done anything against their policies so too bad. The review stays. When I tried to complain the support ambassador warned me that if I insist on an investigation it could result in penalties for me as a host.
I asked Airbnb to send someone out to check my property so they can see the guest is being unreasonable, but of course, Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company. It's just a listed entity on the stock exchange that made a few people $100 billion renting properties owned by... people like me.
Sorry for your experience. I do use Airbnb occasionally as a guest but would never consider hosting. It's just too dangerous, insurance or not, and not worth it IMHO.
> Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company
This part is especially infuriating. Google, Amazon, Airbnb, etc. they're all the same. They play a numbers game. At one point they may run out of people to trample though.
I think you're making too big of a deal out of this. You can reply to her comment telling your story. One bad review shouldn't impact you in the long term. I understand why Airbnb is not willing to help you here. They have millions of hosts and need to prioritize their time and efforts towards major issues.
>They have millions of hosts and need to prioritize their time and efforts towards major issues.
This is the same lame justification for any big corporation, they have millions hosts but also millions of money coming from them.
Any business should be able to support properly their customers, particularly in the case of middle-men, such as AirBnb and similar, part of their business consists in having BOTH hosts and guests "at least moderately" happy.
> You can reply to her comment telling your story.
It becomes a debate, or a he said she said. Pages worth. What better way to scare off a guest looking for a relaxing holiday?
This is how Airbnb plays hosts off against each other. Any host that tries to stand up for themselves loses out to a more compliant host.
> One bad review shouldn't impact you in the long term.
The last review (1/5 stars) goes to the top of the list. It's the first thing new guests see. It dragged the average down half a star, which was enough to lose my super host status, which requires 4.8 average.
I have to get 10 new guests to rate 5 stars just to restore the average to what it was.
How do I get 1 new guest when the first review says HORRIFIC. HEALTH HAZARD. BLACK MOULD. STAY AWAY.
It would be fairer if Airbnb, which is an accomodation company, had the resources to independently rate properties. They wouldn't even have to do it all the time - just to resolve disputes. But they don't have the resources to do it ever. Nor the will. That's because they make more money by not actually managing their core business, and simply playing hosts and guests off against each other.
Does it cover the costs of you guests illegally downloading stuff? I've ran into that one myself (in Germany the host can have it dismissed when you can prove it wasn't you).
Wouldn't that be more a legal thing? A bit like you can't take out insurance against speeding tickets. I guess they could offer some sort of insurance for covering your legal fees to deal with such things, though.
Someone I know who owns a hotel in germany said it happens so rarely that it's cheaper to pay the fines than maintain router configurations or spend time to dismiss them.
Add the cost of a router that supports e.g. Mullvad and the monthly subscription to the rental cost, then advertise "uncensored Internet" as a feature.
I put way too much faith in Airbnb's "million dollar coverage" when I was a host.
I had an Airbnb guest steal all the electronics from my apartment -- Sonos speakers, wifi router, everything. They also left behind a large stack of obviously stolen credit cards, social security cards, and driver licenses.
When I called up Airbnb support to tell them what happened they responded by saying "We've found that most disputes between hosts are just misunderstandings. Have you tried talking to them about it?"
Then when I tried to claim they needed original receipts (which I obviously didn't have for everything) and ultimately only paid out a small fraction of the original cost (because the items were no longer new).
But a real insurer also isn't facilitating bringing the people who made the damages into your house.
Airbnb has the means to properly screen guests, but does not adequately do so.
I've always personally thought both sides of the AirBNB transaction were crazy. When I was a teenager, long before AirBNB was a thing, we used to rent houses to party in and it was always a disaster.
I've never found that getting a hotel was significantly more expensive. Getting my price might be less convenient distance wise but the experience is consistent. To me, AirBNB seems like all of the risks of unprotected sex without any of the upside.
No, home insurers wouldn't normally require receipts unless the value of some of your items were in dispute. They usually just ask for an itemized list with estimated replacement values.
Traditional insurance policies are written on a "replacement cost" basis. Which means.....the carrier will initially pay what they consider to be a depreciated value for the item, then when you purchase the identical or similar item, you show them the receipt, and the carrier then forwards a secondary check for the difference of the depreciated value (payment 1 to you) and the current retail price.
Ah... I had a motorcycle stolen in NYC. Smoothest insurance claim process ever. Granted the cops had the thief on the bike going over Brooklyn bridge at 3am.
Progressive paid for full value of bike (which at the time, pandemic just started was higher than what I paid for it). Plus any add-ons they reimbursed full price. I had pictures and receipts for it all. But all in, from moment of noticing my bike was gone cash was in my bank account 4 weeks later.
Yeah same here. Had our hardwood floors damaged by guests to the tune of thousands in repairs. Airbnb paid out about $80 after months of hassling them. Their "talk directly to the guests to get them to pay damages" is obviously a non-started as hosts have zero leverage.
I've experienced similar as a guest. Had a severe misrepresentation about the property I was renting for a month. AirBNB support initially just said "talk to the host about resolving it", which wasn't going to actually change anything since they simply said "sorry, we're keeping the money". It didn't get fixed until I got in touch with the CEO, which isn't a viable path for everyone - and once I did it was resolved in a few hours.
I had another incident at the beginning of covid, where I had to fight hard to get a refund. The international borders were closed to the UK, and the initial response was "talk to the host" who didn't want to refund it. Eventually got solved, but AirBNB was happy to not-help.
Generally their support just seems to give few fucks, no matter what side you're on.
Stayed at a property while visiting my parents. Bed was broken, but, worse, ants crawled out of the sink when I went to brush my teeth in the morning. I hadn't eaten anything at the apartment.
I left one day into a seven day stay. Literally left the next morning. I only got refunded for five of the nights. The host refused to refund me for the sixth night.
I wish I knew that going to the CEO was a support path, as I strongly felt that ants coming out of the bathroom sink is unacceptable and I should have gotten my six night refunded. But based on what I saw in /r/airbnb, it seems like I did better than many other guests did.
I'm still going to use Airbnb, as most of my stays have been really good. Just won't use them in the tri-state area, I suppose.
Does this do anything to address the rapes and sexual assaults that occur inside of an Airbnb? I remember those being swept under the rug with NDAs to receive compensation.
Am I missing something? I fail to see how an assault within a rented AirBnB would be a claim against the owner, unless they had been negligent in some way allowing the attacker to gain entry.
when I bought a vacation home for myself I was initially hesitant because the HOA doesn't permit short term rentals or Airbnb's. But I'm actually glad.
The hassle of worrying about your personal belongings is just not worth it IMO. I want to buy nice nice furniture for my place and not worry about strangers ruining it.
Although I do want friends & family to be able to enjoy it. Maybe a site like Path was to Facebook?
Good luck on finding anyone there to make a claim to. They've had 'million dollar' coverage from the start. They just don't pay claims. Yo AirBnB: when's the last time you paid out a million dollars to anyone?
128 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadThis is different than the gig economy where workers are just pouring hours of their lives into a dead-end job. You never get more efficient at being an Uber driver or a Doordash delivery person. You put in the hours, you get paid, and nothing changes for the rest of your life. (This is certainly true of some non-gig jobs, but at least you get a guaranteed 40 hours of paid work a week, don't have to buy your own supplies, get some paid holidays, and get health insurance.)
Then suddenly "they made it right" and some spokesdrone trumpeted some bullshit like "In this exceptional case we didn't live up to our members / hosts high expectations".
With rare exceptions I also don't see any more advantage compared to staying in a hotel. But to each his own, I suppose.
We rent them for work offsites, family trips, and individual travel. 98% of the time everything goes smoothly.
Therefore most of the time a hotel room is not the right thing for us.
In the UK, "homeowners insurance" definitely wouldn't cover you for Airbnb style scenarios, and most "landlords insurance" wouldn't either, e.g. because you needed formal tenancy agreements (e.g. Assured Shorthold Tenancy), no potential for long void periods etc. However, some specialist insurance companies would insure you for Airbnb style scenarios via "holiday let insurance". You'd still need that cover because AirCover only provides insurance for the period while guests are there, i.e. you would still need insurance for break-ins, water leaks, cleaners injuring themselves, etc. in-between guests.
So this supplements rather than replaces your existing insurance. Not sure why this is so prominent on the HN home page because it isn't really something "that good hackers would find interesting" or something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
It is not criminal yet to not show up in a civil case.
You can send a fee request, but mostly you do that to show airbnb you tried and they'll maybe compensate you if they agree.
If you intentionally trash the place at a few thousand dollars level then year - nobody will probably bother other than banning you from AirBnB for life. One time we sort of trashed AirBnB (my 2 year old got hold of pen and draw on the wall and couch while we were not looking) and the only consequence was paying 400 or so in fine (max liability on listing) and stern letter from AirBnB that they may ban us if it happens again.
tl;dr mostly nothing if they don't value their airbnb account.
"A person is guilty of criminal mischief in the second degree when with intent to damage property of another person, and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that he has such right, he damages property of another person in an amount exceeding one thousand five hundred dollars.
Criminal mischief in the second degree is a class D felony."
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/145.10
Class D non-violent felonies are worth up to seven years in prison, likely varying widely depending on the circumstances.
I guess most states probably have similar statutes on the books. Whether you could get a prosecutor to charge it probably depends on the exact circumstances. I reckon you could find cases of people being charged on much less than $1M in intentional damage, though.
Also, yea, you can commit minor crimes that don't rise to the level of extradition then skip town. That's always been the case. So? Who is going to go to the U.S., trash an AirBNB, risk getting charged with a crime and potentially banned for life from coming back? The people who trash AirBNBs are not the same people who can travel internationally, by and large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
So this insurance policy isn't even worth the pixels it's rendered on. It's not a good sign when a company purporting to be entering into contract is already trying to wriggle out of it, and this goes doubly for insurance.
0. This is nothing new, airbnb always had a free "guarantee" they just rebranded it basically from what I see to a trademarkable name.
1. Umbrella policy is better than airbnb. Umbrella policy will go after all parties including airbnb on your behalf.
2. Airbnb has a history of ignoring or mitigating damages unless you get famous on social media - this includes sexual assault/rape and murder of animals.
https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Guest-caused-the-de...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/16/airbnb-ne...
While these are just two incidents, there are countless more that can be searched, or you can probably filter through other incidents, and yes, while airbnb did "compensate" they did so only after intense media pressure.
3. If you are a tourist in most countries and "fly" back home, you are judgement proof. There only liability is the guests airbnb account, which, is worthless. You can create new accounts, and in most places you can use alternative government identification to bypass previous bans.
You can read the link I posted earlier about the death of a dog, the PII that airbnb released was not enough to start a civil court case. And even if you have a name, you have no guarantee that the nae of the airbnb account is the ACTUAL guest that stayed.
For the savvy reader: the best kind of astroturfing on a tech site involves nerdsniping. Make a small obvious error and you’ll get people trampling over each other to correct you. Never underestimate how smug stooges can pay off. Keep an eye out for these kinds of posts (see Twitter blue thread).
Don’t dilute this thread about (legitimately interesting) turfing with your simmering annoyance from being moderated for good reason. We all see what happened, it’s fairly transparent
A comment being negative =/= it being "completely shit".
The moderation practices haven't changed here for many years. We don't publish a moderation log for a bunch of reasons*, but I'm always happy to answer any questions and usually spend hours a day doing it.
* Past explanations if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This isn't necessarily true. If you fly the coop, you might be out of the reach of a host or local law enforcement, but in some places action could still be taken against you in your absence. While for all practical purposes, you might never have to face the consequences if you never plan to return unless you were accused of doing something really terrible (like murdering or seriously injuring someone), it's best not to get yourself into legal entanglements in foreign countries, whether criminal or civil. Especially if you do think you might want to visit again in the future.
Also, AirBnB has taken legal action against guests itself[1], so that's potentially a risk in some cases too.
One of the best ways to avoid finding yourself in precarious situations while traveling abroad is to stay in legal accommodations, be they licensed hotels, hostels, homestays, etc. It's also one of the best things you can do to respect the places you visit. AirBnB is a horrible company that has single-handedly ruined buildings and neighborhoods and even, arguably, significantly harmed many popular tourist destinations, with its inventory of frequently illegal short-term rentals.
[1] https://sfist.com/2021/08/17/airbnb-is-suing-guest-who-threw...
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like that without evidence. Why? Because internet users routinely make these accusations up based on nothing more than seeing a few things (or just one thing) they happen not to like. There's nearly never anything more to it than that, therefore (a) it's off-topic here unless there's something objective to go on; and (b) if there is something objective to go on, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can specifically look into it.
Please review the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's years worth of explanation about this at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants more.
This is a key point. As a host here in NZ, its basically useless as I still have to have commercial insurance. Aircover only covers you for the period of time that you have someone staying in your property. As soon as they have gone, you have no insurance. So if you have a house listed on Airbnb and someone breaks in and burns it down between bookings, you're not covered.
I'm discovering that, having just become an Airbnb host in the last year for my beach pad.
My new worst experience is Airbnb doing nothing and saying "too bad" when a guest with a new profile stayed for 3 days, then wrote a scathing review warning people off and demanding a refund.
The guest posted in her review that the place is full of broken furniture, rock hard beds worse than in communist countries, black mould, animal smells, urine smells, and is a health hazard. She used a lot of capital letters and accused me of punishing her for "sins not yet committed."
And yet she didn't contact me or Airbnb to complain until after the end of her stay of 3 nights.
My property averaged 4.8 stars (out of max 5) prior to that with zero negative reviews. I thought Airbnb might consider she is trying to scam a refund. But they say she hasn't done anything against their policies so too bad. The review stays. When I tried to complain the support ambassador warned me that if I insist on an investigation it could result in penalties for me as a host.
I asked Airbnb to send someone out to check my property so they can see the guest is being unreasonable, but of course, Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company. It's just a listed entity on the stock exchange that made a few people $100 billion renting properties owned by... people like me.
> Airbnb doesn't have anyone who can come out because it isn't a real company
This part is especially infuriating. Google, Amazon, Airbnb, etc. they're all the same. They play a numbers game. At one point they may run out of people to trample though.
This is the same lame justification for any big corporation, they have millions hosts but also millions of money coming from them.
Any business should be able to support properly their customers, particularly in the case of middle-men, such as AirBnb and similar, part of their business consists in having BOTH hosts and guests "at least moderately" happy.
It becomes a debate, or a he said she said. Pages worth. What better way to scare off a guest looking for a relaxing holiday?
This is how Airbnb plays hosts off against each other. Any host that tries to stand up for themselves loses out to a more compliant host.
> One bad review shouldn't impact you in the long term.
The last review (1/5 stars) goes to the top of the list. It's the first thing new guests see. It dragged the average down half a star, which was enough to lose my super host status, which requires 4.8 average.
I have to get 10 new guests to rate 5 stars just to restore the average to what it was.
How do I get 1 new guest when the first review says HORRIFIC. HEALTH HAZARD. BLACK MOULD. STAY AWAY.
It would be fairer if Airbnb, which is an accomodation company, had the resources to independently rate properties. They wouldn't even have to do it all the time - just to resolve disputes. But they don't have the resources to do it ever. Nor the will. That's because they make more money by not actually managing their core business, and simply playing hosts and guests off against each other.
> protection from aircraft for land-based or naval operations in war situations.
AirBnB needs better branding people.
I had an Airbnb guest steal all the electronics from my apartment -- Sonos speakers, wifi router, everything. They also left behind a large stack of obviously stolen credit cards, social security cards, and driver licenses.
When I called up Airbnb support to tell them what happened they responded by saying "We've found that most disputes between hosts are just misunderstandings. Have you tried talking to them about it?"
Then when I tried to claim they needed original receipts (which I obviously didn't have for everything) and ultimately only paid out a small fraction of the original cost (because the items were no longer new).
Would a more typical insurer have done the same thing in asking for receipts and such? Maybe?
(I've never had to make such an insurance claim so I have no idea...)
Airbnb has the means to properly screen guests, but does not adequately do so.
I've always personally thought both sides of the AirBNB transaction were crazy. When I was a teenager, long before AirBNB was a thing, we used to rent houses to party in and it was always a disaster.
I've never found that getting a hotel was significantly more expensive. Getting my price might be less convenient distance wise but the experience is consistent. To me, AirBNB seems like all of the risks of unprotected sex without any of the upside.
Normally just printing out an invoice from even 10 years ago from a site like Newegg (and i have had to for a claim) is accepted just fine.
Progressive paid for full value of bike (which at the time, pandemic just started was higher than what I paid for it). Plus any add-ons they reimbursed full price. I had pictures and receipts for it all. But all in, from moment of noticing my bike was gone cash was in my bank account 4 weeks later.
I had another incident at the beginning of covid, where I had to fight hard to get a refund. The international borders were closed to the UK, and the initial response was "talk to the host" who didn't want to refund it. Eventually got solved, but AirBNB was happy to not-help.
Generally their support just seems to give few fucks, no matter what side you're on.
Stayed at a property while visiting my parents. Bed was broken, but, worse, ants crawled out of the sink when I went to brush my teeth in the morning. I hadn't eaten anything at the apartment.
I left one day into a seven day stay. Literally left the next morning. I only got refunded for five of the nights. The host refused to refund me for the sixth night.
I wish I knew that going to the CEO was a support path, as I strongly felt that ants coming out of the bathroom sink is unacceptable and I should have gotten my six night refunded. But based on what I saw in /r/airbnb, it seems like I did better than many other guests did.
I'm still going to use Airbnb, as most of my stays have been really good. Just won't use them in the tri-state area, I suppose.
The hassle of worrying about your personal belongings is just not worth it IMO. I want to buy nice nice furniture for my place and not worry about strangers ruining it.
Although I do want friends & family to be able to enjoy it. Maybe a site like Path was to Facebook?
It feels like their customer service was offshored to the cheapest contractor many years ago.