I want corporate personhood rescinded just to be able to take freedom of association away from these faceless titans, so that unfairly banning people could finally have serious legal repercussions.
Corporations don't have freedom of association now. For example, that is the entire point of the "public accommodation" designation. Instead, there's a lot of legal investigation into which reasons for banning people are good and which are evil.
Literally the only “freedoms of association” that corporations can’t exercise in a public accommodation in the US are the ones banned by Civil Rights Act and the ADA.
At the very least companies should be required to make it clear which provision of their T&C's you violated, and with which actions. And if they want to use the freedom of association argument, they should be required to make it extremely clear (like, big red modal dialog on the signup and login pages) that they may unilaterally rescind your access. Instead of those cookie warning banners, I want 'We can fuck you anytime we like' banners on sites.
Note that corporations are not people, they are governments. the larger government licenses out a sub government that allows the smaller group to preform actions only allowed by governments. In our modern age this is usually to engage in commercial pursuit as a governing body, it is also common to see it used to form the governing body for a town or city.
Invoke the GDPR. Ask them for all internal communications and service agent notes that they hold about you. That should at least get you confirmation of why you got banned.
And no, you don't have to be in the EU or UK to invoke GDPR. See for instance the successful experience of the US academic with respect to Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections
Have you actually had any success with this? Because from my expreience you are never going to get to internal communications about you with just a GDPR request.
I’m also banned for life: I can’t login without my old phone number, and I can’t update my old phone number without logging in. Guess that makes me more of a hotel person now.
I'm also at least temporarily banned, because they try to verify my credit card with transactions that my card company say do not exist. I'm not going to change cards only for them, there are good enough alternatives.
A friend had managed to register using the wrong email address and had set up as an Airbnb host and let out her property for 2 months or so. Them she needed to log in on a new device and couldn't.
At the time I didn't realise she had used the wrong email address, and frankly it didn't occur to me because usually sites need you to click a link in the email to verify.
She also couldn't remember her password so we were in a catch 22 situation. I couldn't reset the password because all password resets went to the wrong email and I couldn't change her email without knowing the password.
Incredibly Airbnb could not (not would not - it was impossible for them to) fix it.
After 3/4 days of panic (a guest was due to stay at her house and she couldn't communicate with the guest or even set up bank details) I managed to find a password she'd previously used and was able to login and change the associated email address.
I'm still amazed that Airbnb allows for user error and is unable to fix it at their end once they have established identity etc.
Yes, that's what happened here, except her phone number was tied to another account, so when we logged in with her phone number it logged in to the OTHER account.
They weren't unable, they were unwilling. They started out as a Rails shop, right? Probably have a very simple email field on their users table, any junior dev could easily change it. Probably any sufficiently privileged support user as well, since clearly they allow users to change their email themselves.
Usually hotels have no kitchen you can cook something at, no desk I can work at, no sofa I can comfortably sit in, and often I can't even open the bloody window or control the temperature.
I think this is an important reason AirBnB took off: hotels are just horrible to stay at.
Almost every hotel I've ever stayed in has a desk, a sofa, and free reign over the thermostat. Are you in the US?
Granted, most don't have a kitchen outside of extended stays. But I'll take a bar, restaurant, freshening up, towels, bed changing, vacuuming, breakfast, restocking, etc all for free in exchange for losing the ability to cook, personally.
I've only stayed at an AirBnB once, staying with a friend. For the life of me, I couldn't and still can't understand why someone would prefer it over a similarly priced hotel.
Same. Been burned too many times by airbnb. Hawaii, DC, Philadelphia. People always say “that’s why you book with a superhost” or “if you don’t book in advance you pay for what you get”. I once stayed at a place in San Antonio, tx. Superhost but new property, and I literally couldn’t take a good breath in. I think it was some kind of mold, almost felt like I was in a cave. To their credit they only took one night. Next day at a motel was much better.
Desks are typically very shallow in depth, not adjustable in height, and have a crappy chair. They're basically useless for getting any serious work done unless you're maybe 160cm; they mostly seem decoration rather than an actual desk. I have never seen a proper sofa in a hotel; only a (usually not very nice) single-seater fauteuil (or whatever you call that in English).
I really like the ability to provide for my own food if needed because it just gives you the freedom to eat and do whatever, no matter the time of day.
I've never been in a hotel that I liked throughout Europe; it's okay for a night, but for a week it just gets claustrophobic.
I've almost only traveled for leisure (or digital nomadism) and as such I like to sleep in, and hotel breakfasts end at like 9:30 AM, then they want to get into your room to do cleaning etc. I'd prefer to roll out of bed at 11 AM and just have some toast in my room in my pajamas.
A lot of hotels only have extremely small desks - granted, the highest hotel level I ever had was four stars, but still, it's clear why: a desk and actually comfortable chair take up valuable space, meaning the hotel can't fit as many rooms as it could by providing only enough space to set down a phone charger on the desk.
In any case, most of the customers don't have the need for a desk to work on either. Business travelers work at the job site, tourists are out on the day and "digital nomads" work at the nearest Starbucks.
Indeed. I tried to give airbnb a chance on multiple occasions, but it's always more expensive and worse than hotels. In airbnb you depend on someone to be a good person and to arrive on time, you need to arrange meeting them (which might not be easy in a foreign country), you never know how honest they are, etc. It's inter-personal communication when you don't want any, you just want to pay money and get a room. I literally see no upsides. In a hotel, you book it on any of the number of hotel websites, you walk up to the reception, you give them your ID and bank card, they give you your key and show you into your room. It's always a very predictable experience.
Airbnb's pricing structure is deceptive, too — you always see "per night" prices when searching, but when you open a page for any particular property, there's suddenly like 5 extra fees tucked on and it's sometimes double the price you expected.
It seems he got banned for leaving a review of his Airbnb host on another platform, but of course he can’t be sure of that because of their weaselly “we don’t have to say why”. Aside from the unbelievable shiftiness of the place he booked, that sounds like a pretty bullshit cause for a ban.
I got banned from localbitcoins when I left a negative review on a seller that wanted a photo of my drivers license / password citing the risk of identity theft (localbitcoins already has my ID verified).
They removed my review and I got banned, interesting how they're behind ID theft...
Well, Airbnb customers are deliberately choosing to use a service that flaunts and evades every kind of regulation.
If you use a hotel or a taxi, there's plenty of legal recourse should anything bad happens, because they don't operate in a gray area, there are specific regulations and oversight for them.
Perhaps this is a problem of becoming a large intermediary?
I.e. a lot of properties are exclusively available on AirBnb. A random incident with one of them may mean that you now have no way to reach the rest, even though the rest may be unrelated to the incident and might want to offer you their services.
In my corner of the world, it seems to be a split: few rural properties are on airbnb, and few urban properties are anywhere besides airbnb. If you don't have an airbnb account good luck finding decent accommodation in the capital.
> Only a fraction of properties are exclusively on airbnb
I don't know where you live, but the "cross-listing" I see here is on Facebook, and that's next to useless compared to Airbnb’s ease of use. In places with few Airbnb listings, that means spending hours on Facebook Marketplaces and Groups combing through crap posts.
Is whether they resemble a traditional utility the right question to ask? Wouldn't a better question be how disruptive it is for a banned individual to replace the company in question with a competitor?
Well the article didn't say anything about utilities.
I would like a threshold for companies to have a better and appealable banning process that is much smaller than that. Let's say 10 million active users as a rough example.
Unfortunately these "your property as a service" startups have been permitted to grow for long enough that there are both buyers and sellers for whom it's an entire lifestyle.
(It's totally a cultural bubble, but a pretty thick one and one that overlaps a lot with HN.)
That's pretty much the bullet point version of Kafka's The Trial, although Airbnb was kind enough to merely banish their protagonist instead of executing them.
Often Kafakaesque is used as hyperbole, but this description is pretty apt:
"What's Kafkaesque ... is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world." [1]
This is basically what Reddit did to me. They suspended all of my accounts (and new ones) because I got too loud about how moderators are treated. It's interesting how much "corporate justice" and autocracies have in common.
Reddit has been circling the drain for a while content-wise. It wasn't until I tried to create my own subreddit (for my city) that one of the admins came reigning in on its purpose and tried to narrow down what I'm allowed to discuss. It was really eye opening as someone who jumped from digg to reddit in 2011 when media viewed reddit as the "wild west". I'm still reeling from the new level of censorship huge platforms like these are undergoing. It's disturbing, and unprecedented in its lack of transparency, considering how much power these companies have over society and influence.
This sounds like a job for consumer protection. I still feel all companies should have by law the availability of human representation within a reasonable timeframe, and any government should give their consumer protection ways to intervene with one sided arbitration.
I think there's a strong case for regulating automated decisions. But when there's a human in the loop, as there seems to have been here, I think you start to run up against the limits of what any reasonable regulation could do. Maybe you could write some kind of disclosure requirement, but we can't build a government Bureau of Were Your Tweets Really Bad Enough To Deserve A Ban.
This is more about general service, compliance with contract and reasonable assumption and assessment of arbitration. This should be a process any individual can start when the case warrants it (like when a company basically goes “because we say so”)
This should be illegal. It’s not a complicated or splitting hairs type of situation we should just make it illegal.
This is what consumer protection laws are for, there’s literally no reason to throw up our hands. We mandate the precise font and location of the amount of sodium on a bag of Doritos and we can mandate the disclosure of this kind of information too.
These tech platforms aren’t underdogs any more fighting against extinction against a wave of bad actors on the internet, terrified to speak lest the scammers gain the tiniest foothold into exploiting their system.
They’re multi-billion dollar international concerns and part of the establishment and they should be required to abide by basic concepts of fairness and due process that we insist upon in all of societies major institutions.
> Or is this all part of an ongoing trend, toward something like the Chinese Social Credit Score system, where the consequences of not maintaining a high rating are socially crippling?
Something like this.
See captcha for example, it is more and more required to use some websites. See PayPal, see Mastercard and Visa, see Apple, see Google, see Microsoft. They are all in control of your digital life and you have no power whatsoever.
Could you explain why captcha is controlling our digital lives? I mean sure they can force me to find a boat on every picture but other than that they don't really control me as far as I know.
The point of captcha isn't that you find boats on pictures. It's that you score high enough on some opaque metric.
That's why captchas come in different forms: math challenges, sound recognition, snooping on clicks, as well as captchas that will keep serving you challenges forever without ever accepting your answer.
If you can't hit the score, you won't be allowed in.
If the CAPTCHA provider deems you unworthy to proceed, the fadeout delay after each action will get excessively long, and the number of CAPTCHAs you have to complete will just keep increasing without bound, until you give up.
I have experienced this. On VPN I have to select specific countries in order to get through CAPTCHAs. Some countries no issue, some countries it's CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA until I give up.
They add so much noise to the picture, too. It can take over a minute to solve a single captcha. The funny thing is that by doing this, they're punishing the poor offshore workers I hired to solve captchas for me in the first place.
Notice the difference between Firefox and Chromium?
Google's ReCaptcha is gracious with Chromium/Google Chrome. You can even make mistakes and it still valid. With Firefox (and maybe other) browsers on the other hand... why not increasing the difficulty/challenge for them? -.-
The Chinese system also applies to companies and government offices. One could imagine in a similar system that Airbnb would get penalized for too many unjustified bans. Maybe this would be a solution to the robo-ban problem that we have with many large SV companies? Make the cost of a mistake higher?
The article does mention use cases for fraud, however it also states that the consumer score can
...determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue; high scores get you elite treatment.
The article also mentions usage by social / dating applications such as OkCupid, which would indicate that a score can have an impact on your social life.
On one hand, I do understand the need for fraud mitigation. On the other hand, I've had to deal with the negative consequences of incorrect data provided by companies such as LexisNexis, how you can't fix it, and the impacts it has.
I learned back in 2008 that you never, ever attach a review to your real name.
Any review, negative or neutral, runs the risk of damaging AirBnB, too many negative reviews might have the effect where AirBnB has to address the allegations, when it's much easier to just keep making money off of the bad host and ignoring negative experiences.
I feel less likely to rent an AirBnB because of this article, simply by the fact that there is more than one negative review placed off-site.
They don't want to deal with it; you are just a number, always have been. DO NOT post negative reviews with your real name
It actually takes a fairly high bar for me to leave a negative review of a product or service. But some sellers/providers are just so awful to their customers, you're dang right I enjoy helping other people avoid suffering from a business deal that is certain to be terrible.
I get a positive feeling when others have honestly reviewed a product/service, whether that be positive or negative feedback.
I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review"
Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews?
It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.
It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense.
That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean?
Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent.
If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine.
Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
Meh, the 2 seconds of warm fuzzy feeling I get from helping others is nothing in comparison to the risks from making enemies with someone.
And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.
Writing a review to warn others is like "i scratch your back, you'll scratch mine". There is no imminent benefit for you instantly when leaving negative review, but you benefit when others warn you later.
Quite. This is how systems break down, and is realistically a bit selfish.
Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.
The reason we help other people is not because it gives us warm fuzzy feelings. It is because it make the world a better place to live in, not only for the people you help, but also for yourself.
Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.
Just copy paste a positive review from a bot. It's a win-win, the platform (Airbnb here) and service provider (owner) can't hate you because it's positive, won't harass you for not leaving a review and the other customers aren't fooled if they actually read it because it's obviously fake. Reviewing someone's work is not my job, I'm the customer here.
And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing).
Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?
Be passive-aggressive: Get on the most glowing reviews and just copy and paste. It will look absolutely shady and make people think twice before booking.
I rented an airbnb room where the host had forgot to update the pictures since there was now a wood workshop in the room behind a curtain. He was a nice guy, but it turned out to be a negative experience for my girlfriend. I mostly blame myself for not picking a more expensive place, but I still felt like other guests should know that they’re sharing the place with model ships and fishing equipment that aren’t in the pictures. Didn’t try to make enemies; gave five stars with a redeeming comment phrased positively. But clearly a flag for anyone who cares.
This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews.
The way I read reviews is now:
- look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable.
- search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.
Be mindful of confirmation bias when searching reviews. Finding 10 reviews mentioning noise might be because it's noisy, or it might be that they have thousands of reviews and a small percentage experienced noise
This is an excellent point!
I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews.
It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.
AirBnb seem to have a different policy now: they simply delete the bad reviews. In June I had my first bad experience. The owner was nice but the property was absolutely awful (yet it was a "superhost" with glowing reviews).
I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change".
This is sinister, but funny at the same time. If the property is dirty it can be cleaned. But if, for example, it has walls so thin you can hear the neighbors breathing, or the slope of the bathroom is in the wrong direction and water flows into the bedroom every time one takes a shower, you can't say that in a review! Because it "can't be changed".
I learned from that experience that AirBnb reviews can't be trusted, and "superhost" doesn't mean anything (except the power to kill bad reviews).
I haven't been to an AirBnb since; the best properties are very often on Booking.com as well, and those which aren't, are questionable.
It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything.
User reviews are such a wonderful thing -- until companies figured out it's more profitable to hide negative reviews and just sell people crappy products.
Booking.com is the worst in my experience, and it makes me sad to hear that Airbnb isjust as bad...
Since Airbnb couldn't verify my credit card due to technical reasons, I started using Booking a lot (with the same card - no problem whatsoever), and it was a pretty good experience. Why do you think this way about Booking?
Sounds like video game reviews. Anything lower than an 7/10 is considered bad.
As an example, Aliens Colonial Marines[1] was literally unplayable, filled with bugs, and generally got a 48/100. To me that should be a middling game not literal unplayable garbage.
You want to look for new reviews (fake reviewers are active in waves, only for as long as they are paid), even if they are bad, read them and see what people dislike.
The only way to warn others without risking your account is by posting a reasonably high rating and a seemingly positive review that obscures how horrible the place is.
"Convenient if you drive a car, otherwise you'll want to rely on cabs since walking one way might take 30+ minutes. Lovely staff, make sure to ask about reception hours since they may not always be as advertised. Perfect bed if you like a hard mattress and aren't too tall (say less than 6 ft). Got a bit itchy in the morning, probably my skin allergies. Some roach sightings but they are everywhere in this price range right?"
This will stand out among all the paid 5 star reviews with two words and three grammatical errors.
Yes! Does Booking give stars on a curve? Because there is some serious ratings inflation happening. I once stayed in a 6/10 “room” in Spain and it was just a walk-in closet with a cot. And calling it a walk-in closet is generous. It was really more like a walk-in closet sized shed or garage that had been tacked onto the side of the house. Picture the back door of a house that when you open the door that should lead outside you instead enter a generic Home Depot type shed that has had its doors removed and been nailed to the side of the house. It was only marginally better than sleeping in a cardboard box. No one in their right mind would ever rate this “room” more than 1/10 but somehow on booking.com it was a 6??
Realistically, this is how every rating system I've ever come across works. On a 10 point scale, you avoid anything under a 7.5. this applies to even unfiltered public ratings, so I assume it's an attribute of how human apply numeric opinion scoring.
7/10 on Zomato is pretty good though, whereas a 3.5/5 Google review suggests "stay away unless desperate".
But I agree there's no system where 5/10 means "average".
I suspect it does relate to our time in educational institutions where a 50% mark is really the worst possible score you ever want to consider.
I used to have access to a large set of hotel review data. The median score on Booking was 8.1 (if you filter for business travelers it's in the 7s, but I'm not sure if that's available in the UI). This is partly because the scale is actually from 2.5-10, not 1-10 or 0-10 as you might expect. The rest is probably just because people don't evenly distribute ratings and tend to favor the top and bottom of the scale.
I have at least one example of Airbnb ignoring a bad review. I had a pretty bad experience in Washington DC once and left a review to warn future guests. To my surprise such review never came online. I checked for several weeks after and saw new reviews popping up on the same property but my review was nowhere. I still use Airbnb but just lower my expectations by a huge amount because according to them everyone is having a fantastic experience. Just like Instagram... Thanks internet!
I had a situation with Booking a couple years ago where I booked a room that was double booked. It’s kind of the hosts fault, but Booking’s support was completely unhelpful in resolving the situation.
Like GP, had infinitely better experiences in Booking.com than in AirBnB. I'd just rather stay with professional hosts, except in few cases (eg, renting summer stays for larger groups)
Just being on booking.com doesn't guarantee a professional host, though. I booked a small B&B via booking.com and they cancelled an hour before arriving. Or rather, they told me that we couldn't come and instructed us to cancel ourselves. That felt weird and I said I wouldn't do that. What they then did, was to invalidate the creditcard payment.
Luckily I could book another hotel, even though it was holiday season.
Yup, called support and after our explanation, they asked whether the host offered us an alternative. I said no, and support would get back to us. Never heard from them again.
Reviews can have objective facts (the AC is broken), but there is a subjective quality to them that has to be calibrated to each person (shabby decor to one person is faded glory to another).
Maybe that’s a good use for AI. It could Calibrate itself to each persons “taste” and filter the world for them. Instead of making users rely on fake metrics like “stars” or hidden clues like the presence/absence of neon lights, or some quality in their logo to signal what type of establishment it is…this signalling/filtering could be done for them virtually.
“It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything.”
Slightly off-topic, but this statement reminds me that it’s not just “profit motives”. I deal with third-party customer services (my clients work with third-party b2c who markets to customers, and my client fulfills the orders) a lot. Each company has a slightly different culture and structure. All have front line customer service for merchants, but it can take months to get through to higher levels of support—if at all.
Front line say yes yes yes but nothing is fixed or remedied. The only obvious recourse is to leave the platform.
Profit, yes. But also structure and roles of employees you are allowed to speak with who have no power for remedy, or incentive to be rational actors.
What do AirBnb do if you just give a host low ratings without actually writing anything in text? Might be a good way around malicious hosts pushing AirBnb to remove all bad reviews due to some technicalities.
You'd think that it is somewhat within the owner's control because they could disclose whatever this apparently immutable fact of the property is and then people could reasonably factor this in when deciding whether to stay or not.
But presumably this is not something which is policy because it would lower the price of relevant properties which presumably affects airbnb's revenue as well.
This kind of behaviour should somehow be regulated in a similar way to advertising - if they're intentionally hiding negative information while posing as a place to reliably inform you about your stay based on the experiences of others (which is what "review" implies) then they're misleading you for profit. What they're actually running is a mislabelled testimonials section. It distorts the market by actively preventing people from accurately assessing the property's utility to them.
It is regulated - it’s called zoning. There is a reason many municipalities are banning short term rentals. But AirBnb is not doing anything to make sure the hosts are in compliance and are actively hiding where the places are until after you book.
Can you imagine not being able to find out the exact location of a hotel until you book?
True, but this can actually be circumvented easily. The pointer on the map is at the exact location, all one needs to do is zoom in, and compare with a map that has street names.
Sure, I’ve done it many times. Sites like priceline.com offer huge discounts if you’re willing to commit to a small area on a map and a general description of the property without knowing the particular hotel until you pay.
As a pretty frequent traveler (business and personal) and even more soon, I’m very particular about the hotel I stay in, the loyalty points and status benefits (neither of which you can get when booking through a portal) add up.
What I was talking about is not really a specific zoning concern, it could potentially be applied to e.g. ecom websites with review sections as well if they're hiding negative reviews for whatever reason.
Looks like the property count is not infinite, so many of them will accrue negative reviews with time.
So rental companies demonstrate to us they only care about their own livelihood and not about the quality of the product they provide.
Expedia/Hotels.com prevented me from publishing a negative review and made it impossible even to edit it (to supposedly meet their "review guidelines").
I also had terrible experience with Airbnb due to fake host review.
So yeah - just use Booking.com. Most apartments are there anyway.
I could be wrong about this but I think they only post guest reviews of the property once the host has also reviewed the guest. So if the guest leaves a review the host doesn't like then they simply won't post a review for the guest.
The only times I have not received a guest review from a host on AirBnB is when I have left a 4 star review (instead of 5.)
The net result of this is that more properties have more 5 star reviews and so do more guests.
>I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change".
I've been shouting that from the rooftops for a couple of years. I discovered that same thing happened to me, but without the support comment above. Then I discovered in the Airbnb subreddit, hosts telling each other that to remove a bad review it's easy, just show something in the review you can't change. Bingo.
You know what, F Airbnb. Anyway the cleaning and service fee add ons make it more expensive than a hotel, and with 0 flexibility to cancel or reschedule.
Yeah it makes sense that hosts would exploit this; but it doesn't make a lot of sense that "things that can't be changed" are the things that can't be talked about in reviews?
As a traveler, it's those things I want to know about. Not whether they did or didn't swipe the floor six months ago...
Noise, location are prime things that are 'outside of host control' and thus need to be censored. Speaking from experience. How about a ground floor apartment with several restaurants' courtyards and back areas adjacent to the windows?
As a customer you're reviewing the overall experience, not the host. Whether or not something can readily be changed by the host (and actually, there's very little a host genuinely can't change - if the location is terrible, they could sell that property and buy another one in a more suitable location!) is irrelevant to potential customers deciding whether a property is suitable for their accommodation.
Do AirBnB also remove positive reviews that praise things the hosts can't change?
You're preaching to the choir. We're hammering home how corrupt and unethical the process is with regards to reviews. The logic Airbnb gives is weak, but then logic of profit is stronger: of course they will side with hosts, the moneymaker, and shit on us, the expendable piece of the equation.
I had a host write me a bad review. I challenged it with airbnb team with screenshots and proof, they agreed that review was incorrect but said couldn't do anything because it a policy to not change/delete reviews.
Had a similar experience. Stayed at a 4.9 star superhost place, and the place was terrible. Very cheap and uncomfortable furniture (I had to buy my own pillows in order to sleep), and the place smelled of sewage most of the day for some reason (not due to bad cleaning).
I left a bad review. They just deleted it saying it was against their TOS.
I wonder if they allow positive reviews mentioning things the host can't change. Say the location is great, isn't that unfair to all of their hosts that are in less ideal places?
I wonder if their review system is just biased towards the user with more activity. When I first signed up for airbnb 2 years ago as a host, I didn't know what I was doing and accidentally allowed the default option of instant bookings, which means you just automatically accept what ever booking comes your way. So of course the next day someone booked the place at 3am in the morning, which wasn't going to work because we still had tenants there for another week. I had to cancel. And the person I cancelled on left a wonderfully concise review.
"Cancelled day-of booking"
I thought this was true, but disingenuous because I had also cancelled the day it was booked, but airbnb refused to intervene. I ended up creating a new account.
Question: If you get banned for Life from Airbnb - can you still use Airbnb through a 3rd party?
What i mean is: can a friend/significant other book an Airbnb stay - then add you as their +1...so you can roll in as the +1 as opposed as the person who manages the reservation?
Last time I used Airbnb, there was no adding people as a "+1" or anything. I booked a house with 5 beds and that was it. Airbnb would never know if it was just me or 15 of my closest friends. Has that changed?
You can add the names and emails of the friends you're traveling with, both so they can receive a copy of the itinerary and so the host can see it. It's not required, though, and in my history with Airbnb the host never cared.
When you book an Airbnb you can choose the number of guests that will be staying. The maximum Airbnb allows is 16 guests, but it’s up to the guest to set a limit. The most common I’ve seen have been 5-6 guests maximum.
Also, most airbnbs I’ve used have had a ring doorbell, and in one case a security camera pointed at the front door. The ring doorbell will alert them whenever there is motion at the front door, and they’ll be able to see who is coming into the property. There’s also usually clauses in their “terms and conditions” that state if you have more people than was booked well charge you extra blah blah.
Bottom line: if you run an Airbnb you’re going to make massive amounts of money and can essentially do whatever you want with it.
Cunningham’s July 2018 Medium post about his experience went viral — and soon afterward, Airbnb responded to apologize and reinstate his account. “You were removed after we received a report alleging inappropriate behavior in an Airbnb listing. Upon further review, we determined that removal was not required based on this report. We hope you give us another try and again, we apologize for any inconvenience,” a representative said in an email seen by MarketWatch.
Which shows why bans with no reason given (as is popular with many tech companies, citing that they don't want to tell abusers how they got caught) are so problematic for both sides: It will lead to the banned person speculating, usually incorrectly, and often publicly because a shitstorm on social media is the only remaining form of appeal.
citing that they don't want to tell abusers how they got caught
Oh they cite it, but it's all about cost savings. Customer service costs. By refusing to interact, a platform like airbnb saves into 7, likely 8 figures easily.
Abusers/scammers always, always know why they are banned. It doesn't help a bit to not-disclose. A google search will turn up the why of it too.
The real gain here is fiscal.
I'm beginning to think that the only response here is legislative. Make it illegal to cancel accounts without a full rendition as to why, and evidence to validate the same. Essentially, statements of "you broke the ToS" turn into "here's how you broke our ToS".
And most importantly, the ability to challenge the evidence.
To make it easy on small corps, maybe there should be a corp-size requirement. Lots of stuff (fiscal duties, for example) change over a certain size.
According to the same article, the guy never went back. Good for him, and I hope he stands firmly by his principle.
"
But Cunningham, who believes the company only acted “because the story got so much attention,” says he hasn’t used his account since its reactivation. He believes the company sees its customers as “data points” rather than individuals. “If somebody is showing in their policies that they really don’t care about the individual, I think it’s just a really dangerous thing,” he said.
“He was removed by mistake,” the Airbnb spokesman told MarketWatch when asked about Cunningham’s case. “We reinstated his account and apologized to him for the inconvenience.”
"
A heartfelt apology with some conciliatory gesture would be the absolute minimum after such injust horror story. But no. All rbnb did judging from this, is damage control of the viral story, and they even failed at that.
When it makes the news that a corporate titan unjustly banned someone, it really stinks the the response is almost always just a one-off fix for the person in question, and never properly fixing the banning system to protect all of the people who aren't lucky enough to go viral when they're unjustly banned.
Alright. 2 can play this game. Why are Airbnb hosts allowed to operate, effectively hotels/resort style properties without the appropriate licenses required for one?
I know, they need to register in some jurisdictions but should be much more widespread.
You can operate like "Oh it's just someone's home, we're all just being civil to each other" in which case, have a conversation; permanent irrevocable ban is not it, or "Here's our 100 page T&Cs. We have all the control and can dump you whenever we see fit for whatever reason and we don't have to tell you" in which case, go through the legal process of getting each and every property properly registered and licensed and operate like a real business. Can't have it both ways.
Now I'm sure it's easy to see the above comment somewhat conflates the Airbnb hosts with the Airbnb corporation. And that's intentional.
I imagine these days one could send a Subject Access Request to ask for whatever data AirBnB hold on you. Assuming there's some digital record of an internal conversation, or mark/comment on your record, you'd be able to obtain it.
I doubt they would provide you with any internal communications they have on you. After all, they can just claim they no longer hold any info except what they already told you (that you are banned) and you have pretty much no recourse.
This sucks, but it makes me happy that I’ve never used AirBNB or any of the other app-based real life services that people have come to rely on (never ridden in an Uber or Lyft, gotten stuff from Doordash etc)
412 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 447 ms ] threadBut they could still simply say “no”.
That's scary to even think about, you might just get SLAPP'd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
At the time I didn't realise she had used the wrong email address, and frankly it didn't occur to me because usually sites need you to click a link in the email to verify.
She also couldn't remember her password so we were in a catch 22 situation. I couldn't reset the password because all password resets went to the wrong email and I couldn't change her email without knowing the password.
Incredibly Airbnb could not (not would not - it was impossible for them to) fix it.
After 3/4 days of panic (a guest was due to stay at her house and she couldn't communicate with the guest or even set up bank details) I managed to find a password she'd previously used and was able to login and change the associated email address.
I'm still amazed that Airbnb allows for user error and is unable to fix it at their end once they have established identity etc.
How is that possible, since they send an email to your address before confirming your account?
It wasn't always like that. They used to verify only your phone number.
Just staggering.
I think this is an important reason AirBnB took off: hotels are just horrible to stay at.
Granted, most don't have a kitchen outside of extended stays. But I'll take a bar, restaurant, freshening up, towels, bed changing, vacuuming, breakfast, restocking, etc all for free in exchange for losing the ability to cook, personally.
I've only stayed at an AirBnB once, staying with a friend. For the life of me, I couldn't and still can't understand why someone would prefer it over a similarly priced hotel.
I just take out the $200 cleaning fee and 15% AirBnb fees to the local restraunts and grab a bite to eat.
Desks are typically very shallow in depth, not adjustable in height, and have a crappy chair. They're basically useless for getting any serious work done unless you're maybe 160cm; they mostly seem decoration rather than an actual desk. I have never seen a proper sofa in a hotel; only a (usually not very nice) single-seater fauteuil (or whatever you call that in English).
I really like the ability to provide for my own food if needed because it just gives you the freedom to eat and do whatever, no matter the time of day.
I've never been in a hotel that I liked throughout Europe; it's okay for a night, but for a week it just gets claustrophobic.
Hotels are just too "uptight" for me.
In any case, most of the customers don't have the need for a desk to work on either. Business travelers work at the job site, tourists are out on the day and "digital nomads" work at the nearest Starbucks.
Airbnb's pricing structure is deceptive, too — you always see "per night" prices when searching, but when you open a page for any particular property, there's suddenly like 5 extra fees tucked on and it's sometimes double the price you expected.
They removed my review and I got banned, interesting how they're behind ID theft...
Perhaps they should be regulated?
There’s perfectly good set of regulation regarding hotels. It just needs to be enforced.
And do.
And arguably should from time to time.
Laws are, infact, not the word of god.
Hotels have elaborate procedures to protect themselves; you never see it unless you're really acting up.
If you use a hotel or a taxi, there's plenty of legal recourse should anything bad happens, because they don't operate in a gray area, there are specific regulations and oversight for them.
I can see someone making the "they're effectively a utility" argument for GMail (or other mail providers), maybe Facebook in a stretch, but AirBnb?
I.e. a lot of properties are exclusively available on AirBnb. A random incident with one of them may mean that you now have no way to reach the rest, even though the rest may be unrelated to the incident and might want to offer you their services.
Source?
Also, even if that was the case, when the scale is that big, the problem might not be gone. E.g.:
- Some cities might have more of the exclusive listings than others.
- Exclusive listings might share some common traits; some people might be interested in booking these places only.
- etc
I don't know where you live, but the "cross-listing" I see here is on Facebook, and that's next to useless compared to Airbnb’s ease of use. In places with few Airbnb listings, that means spending hours on Facebook Marketplaces and Groups combing through crap posts.
I would like a threshold for companies to have a better and appealable banning process that is much smaller than that. Let's say 10 million active users as a rough example.
(It's totally a cultural bubble, but a pretty thick one and one that overlaps a lot with HN.)
- We are jailing you
- The jail term is forever
- There's no defense
- There's no appeal
- We won't tell you what we think you did
"What's Kafkaesque ... is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world." [1]
The Trial is an awesome book.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/29/nyregion/the-essence-of-k...
They use a combination of browser fingerprinting and IP address for identification, but you can still create a new account and access it via VPN.
It's just not really worth it except in a few rare cases when you want to ask a specific sub a narrow question.
The main subs have lost all meaningful quality.... Even the larger tech subs like sysadmin are garbage now
This is what consumer protection laws are for, there’s literally no reason to throw up our hands. We mandate the precise font and location of the amount of sodium on a bag of Doritos and we can mandate the disclosure of this kind of information too.
These tech platforms aren’t underdogs any more fighting against extinction against a wave of bad actors on the internet, terrified to speak lest the scammers gain the tiniest foothold into exploiting their system.
They’re multi-billion dollar international concerns and part of the establishment and they should be required to abide by basic concepts of fairness and due process that we insist upon in all of societies major institutions.
Something like this. See captcha for example, it is more and more required to use some websites. See PayPal, see Mastercard and Visa, see Apple, see Google, see Microsoft. They are all in control of your digital life and you have no power whatsoever.
That's why captchas come in different forms: math challenges, sound recognition, snooping on clicks, as well as captchas that will keep serving you challenges forever without ever accepting your answer.
If you can't hit the score, you won't be allowed in.
1. Install Firefox
2. Open Firefox and solve a ReCaptcha
3. Install Chromium
4. Open Chromium and solve a ReCaptcha
Notice the difference between Firefox and Chromium?
Google's ReCaptcha is gracious with Chromium/Google Chrome. You can even make mistakes and it still valid. With Firefox (and maybe other) browsers on the other hand... why not increasing the difficulty/challenge for them? -.-
- It's completely arbitrary and opaque. - It's irreversible.
With the CSSSS at least you get a notification of what you did, and you can revert it by "behaving".
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
Non paywall: https://archive.ph/FKQ6d
The article does mention use cases for fraud, however it also states that the consumer score can
...determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue; high scores get you elite treatment.
The article also mentions usage by social / dating applications such as OkCupid, which would indicate that a score can have an impact on your social life.
On one hand, I do understand the need for fraud mitigation. On the other hand, I've had to deal with the negative consequences of incorrect data provided by companies such as LexisNexis, how you can't fix it, and the impacts it has.
Any review, negative or neutral, runs the risk of damaging AirBnB, too many negative reviews might have the effect where AirBnB has to address the allegations, when it's much easier to just keep making money off of the bad host and ignoring negative experiences.
I feel less likely to rent an AirBnB because of this article, simply by the fact that there is more than one negative review placed off-site.
They don't want to deal with it; you are just a number, always have been. DO NOT post negative reviews with your real name
How about warning other customers?
Just don't use your real name.
I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review"
Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
Did anyone say that? I know I didn't.
The parent I was replying to (and simply to offer clarification on what they might have meant) said:
>This is wise.
In reply to the suggestion of using a fake name to leave a negative review.
>Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?
I'm not sure how this follows from what I commented? I don't have a reply.
It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.
That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean?
Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine.
Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
Just to be abundantly clear, I offered no advice. I simply offered a clarification to the comment I replied to, with my assumption of what they meant.
And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.
Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.
Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.
And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing).
Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?
I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change".
This is sinister, but funny at the same time. If the property is dirty it can be cleaned. But if, for example, it has walls so thin you can hear the neighbors breathing, or the slope of the bathroom is in the wrong direction and water flows into the bedroom every time one takes a shower, you can't say that in a review! Because it "can't be changed".
I learned from that experience that AirBnb reviews can't be trusted, and "superhost" doesn't mean anything (except the power to kill bad reviews).
I haven't been to an AirBnb since; the best properties are very often on Booking.com as well, and those which aren't, are questionable.
User reviews are such a wonderful thing -- until companies figured out it's more profitable to hide negative reviews and just sell people crappy products.
Booking.com is the worst in my experience, and it makes me sad to hear that Airbnb isjust as bad...
As an example, Aliens Colonial Marines[1] was literally unplayable, filled with bugs, and generally got a 48/100. To me that should be a middling game not literal unplayable garbage.
1. https://www.pcgamer.com/aliens-colonial-marines-review/
You want to look for new reviews (fake reviewers are active in waves, only for as long as they are paid), even if they are bad, read them and see what people dislike.
The only way to warn others without risking your account is by posting a reasonably high rating and a seemingly positive review that obscures how horrible the place is.
"Convenient if you drive a car, otherwise you'll want to rely on cabs since walking one way might take 30+ minutes. Lovely staff, make sure to ask about reception hours since they may not always be as advertised. Perfect bed if you like a hard mattress and aren't too tall (say less than 6 ft). Got a bit itchy in the morning, probably my skin allergies. Some roach sightings but they are everywhere in this price range right?"
This will stand out among all the paid 5 star reviews with two words and three grammatical errors.
The good thing about booking.com reviews is that you must have to have stayed at a property to leave a review.
Sure, that can also be gamed, but the risk is significantly lower that a review is outright dodgy.
Luckily I could book another hotel, even though it was holiday season.
I'd guess that they would be very unhappy about such behavior and eventually drop the property.
For what it's worth: I booked 100s of stays on booking.com (virtually always hotel rooms) and never ran into an issue.
Maybe that’s a good use for AI. It could Calibrate itself to each persons “taste” and filter the world for them. Instead of making users rely on fake metrics like “stars” or hidden clues like the presence/absence of neon lights, or some quality in their logo to signal what type of establishment it is…this signalling/filtering could be done for them virtually.
Slightly off-topic, but this statement reminds me that it’s not just “profit motives”. I deal with third-party customer services (my clients work with third-party b2c who markets to customers, and my client fulfills the orders) a lot. Each company has a slightly different culture and structure. All have front line customer service for merchants, but it can take months to get through to higher levels of support—if at all.
Front line say yes yes yes but nothing is fixed or remedied. The only obvious recourse is to leave the platform.
Profit, yes. But also structure and roles of employees you are allowed to speak with who have no power for remedy, or incentive to be rational actors.
At this point I have had enough of this. Trustpilot does this also and tries to conceal it with me not providing enough information.
But presumably this is not something which is policy because it would lower the price of relevant properties which presumably affects airbnb's revenue as well.
This kind of behaviour should somehow be regulated in a similar way to advertising - if they're intentionally hiding negative information while posing as a place to reliably inform you about your stay based on the experiences of others (which is what "review" implies) then they're misleading you for profit. What they're actually running is a mislabelled testimonials section. It distorts the market by actively preventing people from accurately assessing the property's utility to them.
Can you imagine not being able to find out the exact location of a hotel until you book?
It could probably be automated too.
AirBNB will agree and remove the review.
Looks like the property count is not infinite, so many of them will accrue negative reviews with time.
So rental companies demonstrate to us they only care about their own livelihood and not about the quality of the product they provide.
Expedia/Hotels.com prevented me from publishing a negative review and made it impossible even to edit it (to supposedly meet their "review guidelines").
I also had terrible experience with Airbnb due to fake host review.
So yeah - just use Booking.com. Most apartments are there anyway.
The only times I have not received a guest review from a host on AirBnB is when I have left a 4 star review (instead of 5.)
The net result of this is that more properties have more 5 star reviews and so do more guests.
I've been shouting that from the rooftops for a couple of years. I discovered that same thing happened to me, but without the support comment above. Then I discovered in the Airbnb subreddit, hosts telling each other that to remove a bad review it's easy, just show something in the review you can't change. Bingo.
You know what, F Airbnb. Anyway the cleaning and service fee add ons make it more expensive than a hotel, and with 0 flexibility to cancel or reschedule.
As a traveler, it's those things I want to know about. Not whether they did or didn't swipe the floor six months ago...
I left a bad review. They just deleted it saying it was against their TOS.
"Cancelled day-of booking"
I thought this was true, but disingenuous because I had also cancelled the day it was booked, but airbnb refused to intervene. I ended up creating a new account.
It'd have to be properly moderated, and vetted for having actually stayed there (automate with Google/Apple timeline?), but it could be very valuable.
I am not banned from Airbnb but I am curious...
Also, most airbnbs I’ve used have had a ring doorbell, and in one case a security camera pointed at the front door. The ring doorbell will alert them whenever there is motion at the front door, and they’ll be able to see who is coming into the property. There’s also usually clauses in their “terms and conditions” that state if you have more people than was booked well charge you extra blah blah.
Bottom line: if you run an Airbnb you’re going to make massive amounts of money and can essentially do whatever you want with it.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/party-houses-will-get-you-...
Oh they cite it, but it's all about cost savings. Customer service costs. By refusing to interact, a platform like airbnb saves into 7, likely 8 figures easily.
Abusers/scammers always, always know why they are banned. It doesn't help a bit to not-disclose. A google search will turn up the why of it too.
The real gain here is fiscal.
I'm beginning to think that the only response here is legislative. Make it illegal to cancel accounts without a full rendition as to why, and evidence to validate the same. Essentially, statements of "you broke the ToS" turn into "here's how you broke our ToS".
And most importantly, the ability to challenge the evidence.
To make it easy on small corps, maybe there should be a corp-size requirement. Lots of stuff (fiscal duties, for example) change over a certain size.
Very good course of action, assuming you can go viral.
What is the purpose of half-heartedly censoring the word "fuckwits", when it is immediately obvious to everyone what you are saying?
- HN doesn't ban users, or stop comments from being posted if they contain the word fuck.
- If you have moral objections to saying/writing fuck, then why even use it in the first place? Why not say something else?
- You are not sparing anyone else from the word, because we are all filling in the blanks automatically even if we don't want to.
So please tell me why you did it. I cannot think of a reason.
" But Cunningham, who believes the company only acted “because the story got so much attention,” says he hasn’t used his account since its reactivation. He believes the company sees its customers as “data points” rather than individuals. “If somebody is showing in their policies that they really don’t care about the individual, I think it’s just a really dangerous thing,” he said.
“He was removed by mistake,” the Airbnb spokesman told MarketWatch when asked about Cunningham’s case. “We reinstated his account and apologized to him for the inconvenience.” "
A heartfelt apology with some conciliatory gesture would be the absolute minimum after such injust horror story. But no. All rbnb did judging from this, is damage control of the viral story, and they even failed at that.
I'd rather stay at a best western than an airbnb 99% of the time, and policies like the above are part of it.
I know, they need to register in some jurisdictions but should be much more widespread.
You can operate like "Oh it's just someone's home, we're all just being civil to each other" in which case, have a conversation; permanent irrevocable ban is not it, or "Here's our 100 page T&Cs. We have all the control and can dump you whenever we see fit for whatever reason and we don't have to tell you" in which case, go through the legal process of getting each and every property properly registered and licensed and operate like a real business. Can't have it both ways.
Now I'm sure it's easy to see the above comment somewhat conflates the Airbnb hosts with the Airbnb corporation. And that's intentional.
It does make me think twice about ever using them again. They do have competition.