I've lived in Airbnbs full-time for about 18 months while traveling, and Airbnb has lost my trust repeatedly in terms of reliability, safety, and user-friendliness.
- Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay.
- Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their phone number, then force you to go through a ticketing system for urgent issues. Then, they start assigning you a new "case manager" every few hours as their shifts change, which means the rep never is caught up on the issue. Sometimes, they forget to transfer you to a new rep before ending their shift, which could result in zero responses for days until the rep works again.
- When there is a problem, Airbnb supports the host and makes little to no effort to relocate users. For example, when our unit flooded, among other problems, the feedback was basically "well we can book you into another available unit". The problem was that it was peak Summer in Barcelona, we were there for a long period of time, and the only available units were minimum 5x the price.
- We had an Airbnb burglarized. Again, we waited hours for a response, as a police forensics unit was dusting the unit for fingerprints. We suspect that the host was complicit after realizing that previous tenants were also burglarized. Airbnb's insurance policy covered none of our losses ($10K+ in electronics, jewelry, watches, clothing, etc). We ended up feeling unsafe and canceling the reservation with 3 weeks remaining. As a "courtesy", Airbnb support credited our account for less than the cost of one night at a local replacement unit. Because we accepted the credit, they considered the matter "resolved" and did nothing else.
I've spent $30K+ on Airbnb. It started as a great alternative to hotels. Now, I can no longer recommend it, and I prefer a hotel.
It's almost as if AirBnB's hosts and guests are bearing the externalities that should be priced into the transaction on both sides...
For hosts, property damage, etc. is a matter of when, not if, and for those things you get insurance. But as far as I know that's not a standard thing for hosts. Pricing in hidden hosting costs would make hosting look less profitable up front, then AirBnB's market would shrink.
For guests, inconvenient cancellations, bad hosts, bad rentals, etc. AirBnB doesn't give you any real recourse like paying for you to stay elsewhere the way a hotel often does. That would be expensive and you'd have to either pass the cost onto the customers (raise fees/prices), or reduce your margins.
That's not counting societal externalities like permanent AirBnB setups in neighborhoods that are affecting community cohesion.
These days, I use AirBnB to save money by taking on some level of discomfort/risk. If I'm looking for a worry-free night with decent amenities where I want to minimize mental overhead, I just book a hotel.
I feel like what you described is the main reason for the profitability of most "sharing economy" services. Uber is also advertised as a little side gig you can do when your car is not being used while the real goal is to have a taxi service that isn't subject to the same legislation and unloads more cost on the driver.
Personally what I've come to realize over the years is that 'Use a startup while its young, get rid of it and get on the next startup once it grows beyond just being a simple pre-seed, 1st round startup'.
My reasoning comes from the amount of cash investors pour money into startups, and startups having insane amount of deals at the very start in order to attract costumers like uber had and airbnb to an extend. After the 1st or 2nd round is where a strong cfo either joins or the VC's involved want to capitalize on what they got so they are trying to squeeze things in and butcher the level of service something provided so they can either IPO or sell for big $.
What am saying is not always the rule but it does apply to a lot of things.
- New currency exchange card coming out amazing rates etc, 3 years down drops down to whatever your bank was going to give you
- uber is a cheap taxi alternative you can use by abusing its own staff and investor money, cool 5 years down the line it becomes the same as any other taxi out there and still manages to abuse their staff
- airbnb has some nice quality for money accomodation cause they are taking care of the product? fine again few years down the line when it gets streamlined and is getting squeezed for its maximum value they drop their customer support standards etc.
So yes thats it for me, am not going to remain a loyal customer anymore, am going to use your startup and its initial investing deal you are giving me, and am going to jump ship to the 1st startup that is coming out to beat you. Sounds very egoistic, its not though, am just tired of getting treated like a sheep.
P.S not a startup but a company that I very much liked Blizzard is changing face and its getting squeezed out for money from Activision, I feel betrayed so am a bit biased on my views but as my father once said: 'I bought a miele washing machine 25 years ago and it still works like a charm. I bought a brand new Samsung washing machine as a 2nd and broke within 3 years and good luck with warranty, if companies are going to treat me like this from now on, then am going to treat them like that'.
You don't think that your behaviour (i.e. consciously not just enabling but promoting new & continued "abuse[s of] their staff" etc.) is in any way decent, right?
Of course I bought jewelry from the Nazis - it was cheap while it lasted!
Lets be clear about that, using uber is not the same as buying jewelry from war criminals. (hit a vein cause my grandpa was executed by them).
Everyone used uber and keeps using uber no matter what comes into light. Certainty not many of us knew beforehand what uber was doing, and once it was out I think uber tried to cover it quickly by increasing benefits and whatnot for the drivers. So no its not the same and am not enabling any dodgy business or anything, don't misjudge my comment, uber is a multi-billion $ company of course its dodgy as any multi-billion $ company out there.
Uber is built on squeezing safety and security from the drivers of cars for hire and somewhat from the customers. By using Uber you are complicit in this.
So essentially you can fuck with the lifehood of a driver with one lousy * feedback; nice!
Frankly, and probably to the detriment of a few ultra libertarians in here; I prefer a government regulator with established processes, a mandate and enforcement for drivers to observe rest times and drive sober and a requirement by law to be properly insured and health - (let alone background-) checked if you drive people around on a commercial basis to a completely arbitrary review system, which is a joke to begin with.
I can't judge Uber, since I never used and never will use it. But just about any other review system is rather unreliable. That 4 1/2* restaurant on trip advisor, which is mediocre at best? All those 5* AirBnb reviews for places where you have to tip-toe around strangers and find a constantly occupied bathroom? This would get a 3 * rating - if you feel generous - if that would be a hotel room.
I drove for Uber 20-30 hours/week for 3 years. It was super super rare for someone to try and fuck with me by threatening a low rating. At first, when they did, I told them to go ahead and just give me the 1 star. It really didn't matter. A few 1 star ratings barely puts a dent into thousands of 5 star ratings. Eventually I developed the customer service skills to prevent this from happening while still saying no. If you're a good driver you have nothing to worry about.
In my city, I remember when the news came out that drivers also rate passengers. The quality of passenger behavior skyrocketed.
I think most of the bad views of Uber come from disgruntled drivers and passengers with poor people skills. I know many many drivers and passengers who are happy with the product.
Also, ever since Travis Kalanick left the quality of driver support has tanked badly. It's very difficult to get issues fixed. The level of crippling bureaucracy within Uber is clearly growing. Not sure if that's a coincidence or indicative of his leadership.
You can fuck with the livelihood of any service industry employee with feedback. "Let me speak to your manager."
That's not to defend Uber's predatory practices, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the service industry hasn't been at the mercy of those they serve. Also there are regulations, including background checks, for drivers? At least for Lyft.
I leave your comment 2 stars, would prefer not to read again.
If there are multiple drivers within your radius, Uber applies an algorithm to decide which driver gets you as a passenger. Their rating affects this, so if they have a had rating they'll have less passengers in high traffic areas.
As a short-term tenant who isn't eligible for property insurance, there is no way for me insure against losses. I spent considerable time trying to get a policy after our burglary, and it wasn't possible. In my opinion, providing this insurance should be handled by the marketplace.
The problem is that Airbnb stays are similar to airline flight delays - the cost of a problem can result in many times more costs than just the cost of the flight.
The EU has very strict laws - if you booked a flight in good faith, then the airline is responsible for getting you to your destination, paying for your needs (food/housing) until that happens, and pay cash compensation of up to 600 euros.
In my opinion, the government should provide the same type of legislation for short-term stays. If you make a booking, the platform should at least be responsible for housing you for the duration of your stay.
Depending on your policy, your homeowners insurance or renters insurance (at your long-term home) may cover you for theft from hotels, Airbnbs, etc. If yours doesn't, you could shop around for one that does.
As a digital nomad, I have no long-term home. I literally live in Airbnbs. I tried finding a policy to cover me, but none exists. Policies also vary a lot with burglaries - eg some require signs of forced entry.
Have you considered starting this up as a business? Surely there's a market for it, and the claims data alone would make you a valuable acquisition target.
> It's almost as if AirBnB's hosts and guests are bearing the externalities
If the parties to the transaction are bearing the cost, it's not an externality. It may be a hidden cost, but it's only an externality if it is born by someone outside the voluntary participants in the transaction.
> It's almost as if AirBnB's hosts and guests are bearing the externalities that should be priced into the transaction on both sides...
Often enough, the neighbors also bear externalities: noise from guests dragging their heavy roller coffers up and down the stairs and smashing all doorbell buttons in the hope someone opens the door as they locked themselves out, rents rising because it's far more profitable to rent 100€/night/AirBnB than 1000€/month on the open market, ...
I wonder if the Airbnb team has ever thought about their profit and its relationship to the externalities you describe. As a customer, I've felt like I pay for something and then bear lots of risk if it goes wrong, but the discount often isn't sufficient to cover that risk.
At the end of the day, it may still be a good thing for the temporary housing marketplace if people who want certainty (in general or just for the trip) stay in a hotel, and people who are willing to trade certainty for some savings stay in Airbnbs. This would lower demand for hotels, and therefore cost. But this is only an efficient outcome if Airbnb guests understand how the company will leave them high and dry if something goes wrong.
I'm convinced the majority of "unicorns" ignore (or actively dodge) externalities in favor of lucrative profits.
I think most companies develop convenient ethical blind spots where profit motive conflicts with the ethical problem from generating externalities.
AirBnB takes a strong moral stand on "inclusion" as a principle but has a clear blind spot when it comes to consumer, property, and residential externalities. Facebook takes a strong moral stand on free speech, but it has a clear blind spot for privacy and public discourse.
Other companies don't necessarily take moral stands, but they still develop convenient blind spots. Youtube (Google) and ideological polarization in its recommendations, Equifax and its lack of cybersecurity measures, and so on.
> Facebook takes a strong moral stand on free speech, but it has a clear blind spot for privacy and public discourse.
I think Facebook expressly does not take a stand for free speech, they've been pretty clear about banning offensive/hateful/sexual content from their platform (to the point of being prudish, e.g. with female nipples).
I know successful companies (and the VCs that back them) look for large market inefficiencies, which create profit opportunity. I wonder if anyone has ever broken down their profit opportunity in terms of: (1) we're taking advantage of this existing inefficiency and (2) we're creating these externalities that we don't bear the cost of.
Some investors would not be dissuaded by (2), if they are purely looking for financial returns. In fact, if you could make a compelling argument that you're externalizing some of your costs, it could be attractive to financial investors because it would help prove that your business model can be profitable.
Considering it was born out of the couch surfing movement you hit the nail on the head. All the worst potential things shared by hosts and guests with a cool risk free cut going to airbnb
I'll add to this as well. I've had two incidents over the past year.
1. I rented a place and was told that I could check-in whenever. When I got there, the key wasn't available and I wasn't able to contact the host. I was essentially just standing around for three hours waiting for Airbnb to respond. Apparently, you can contact them, but it's extremely difficult to call them if you're international unless you want to pay for roaming, which I doubt they would compensate you for, so I had to wait for case managers to reply to my email.
After fiddling around with my phone for a while, I managed to install Skype, sign up for some credits, and call them. It was resolved within an hour after that, but the non-savvy tech user would probably have a lot more trouble.
2. The second incident was when I went to an Airbnb and the electricity wasn't working, the roads were closed off for 3 blocks to the apartment due to construction. I paid for a week's stay, but I immediately left since this wasn't disclosed in the listing.
By the evening, I was fed up with the problems, so I left to another Airbnb. I contacted Airbnb, again through email support, since that was all they offer and they told me I could not get a refund since I was past their 24-hour cancellation policy. After going through numerous emails and case managers, I never received my money back based off of a technicality. Their response was that I should have contacted them immediately... but they don't make it easy to contact them.
>I rented a place and was told that I could check-in whenever. When I got there, the key wasn't available and I wasn't able to contact the host.
This. This happened to me one time and from there on, I will not bother with it again. My time and my travel logistics plus standing around with luggage or whatever else, is worth paying for a proper hotel to never have to deal with that ever again.
AirBNB and anything the sharing economy produces is never good for humans. These companies are just proprietary algorithms extracting money on the back of the poor. They should be burned with fire.
Our family of four (2 small kids) needs to travel across the US three times a year. I'm fairly sure we're all humans, although the jury is still out on our youngest. :)
For these trips we stay exclusively in AirBnBs. They are much cheaper, much more comfortable, they have room for our kids to play, and we get access to a kitchen so we can have relatively cheap home cooked meals rather than eating out 3x a day.
That's not to say we haven't had bad experiences. Once we had a combination of thin walls/floors, a downstairs neighbor who was very sensitive to noise, and a one year old who didn't yet know how to tiptoe (we did our best and didn't get any more complaints after the first, but it was a fairly uncomfortable thing to have to worry about). We've stayed in not-great neighborhoods. One kitchen looked fine in pictures but didn't have knives or cutting boards or a single unbroken pot, which made the "cooking at home" options less appealing. The variance of quality in AirBNBs is much higher than that of hotels.
But even with these negative experiences, we're still staying in AirBNBs because it's still much, much better than the alternatives. Declaring that no value is produced by AirBNB or similar companies might be emotionally satisfying, but it's not true.
I like them. I use them for business trips, and at $150/ni for a good room near the San Jose HQ that I need to visit vs $450/ni for an acceptable hotel room, the value is immensely clear.
Of course, when the hotel rate is within $50-$100 of the AirBNB room, I'll happily pay the additional upcharge for the convenience and consistency of a hotel. And if I'm traveling in particularly unfamiliar terrain, I'll pay even more just so I can talk to the concierge and enjoy the security that the hotel offers.
AirBNB and competitors like Vacasa are a good thing. AirBNB's practice of making it impossible to ask an open-ended question, however, is braindead, and unless they fix those kinds of issues, the business will be deservedly overtaken by better followers.
The place you booked did not have electricity and you did not get a refund for the prepaid week? I almost find that hard to believe. There must be something I don't understand here.
Sorry, the electricity was out when I arrived. The host told us it was just temporarily due to the construction outside and the neighbors confirmed it was happening a lot throughout the last few weeks. We were never told about this problem. I didn't want to deal with no electricity on and off so I left.
Unfortunately this doesn't work in my experience. The credit card company will absolutely back you if you've been sold bad goods or services, but they seem to need to see evidence that you've already done your due diligence in trying to recover the money yourself. The evidence needs to show that the seller isn't willing to reimburse you. I find email works best for this.
The last time I encountered this was with Air Transat. I had to submit my twitter and email correspondence to my Visa provider. I was never issued tickets but I spent nearly $3k on my card, then had to do it AGAIN so I'd get tickets in time for my trip. So I went on my trip missing pretty much all of my spending money, and Transat and Visa were both just playing a waiting game for the entire two weeks. Thankfully my accommodations were paid for in advance and food in Puerto Vallarta is delicious and cheap. I didn't get my money until about 3 months after they took it from me.
I've heard Mastercard will do chargebacks with no questions asked, but I've never actually done it.
> If the guest cancels less than 7 days in advance or decides to leave early after check-in, the nights not spent are not refunded.
^ I basically got hit with that rule.
----
Edit: Wanted to add that I'm pretty sure AMEX has a partnership with Airbnb since I always notice the promotional deals pop up. Spend $200, get $50 back.
Interesting, I'm disappointed by AMEX... What about this part?
> this wasn't disclosed in the listing
Isn't that basically "false advertising" or "bought something and got a different item"? I thought credit cards/AMEX would cover that... anyhow, very disappointing.
This summarizes why we can't have nice things. As Airbnb scales, the problems scale too. Unless they started seeing serious financial implications putting the investor dollars at risk, Airbnb basically has no choice but to scale to 'sustain the machine' and stay competitive (monopolistic) in the shared-lodging marketplace.
Airbnb sounds good in theory - like when the founders described how they came up with the idea after they started making side money letting travelers crash at their pad and jovially cooking breakfast with their guests. There's other people out there that could share their homes with nice strangers and enjoy these fun bonding experiences with guests too, right?
However, this theory goes out the window once the platform is opened up to the world for all kinds of good, bad, and in-between actors to use.
Now we have guests/hosts stealing from each other, scamming each other, pulling nefarious acts, and destroying the housing markets of various communities. And Airbnb throws up their hands from the sidelines and apathetically wonders "What could we do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Once could argue that this sort of thing happens because people are very quick to try and turn any value-making proposition into a money-making proposition, as though the relationship between the two were simple and obvious, or often, equivalent.
Some things are no longer valuable when you intend to extract that value as money. That's why the poor king doesn't hire cheap mercenaries to protect his kingdom. Sentiment has nontransferable value.
I've had nearly identical experiences, the worst being an apartment infested with bedbugs. Despite having video proof [0] of our mattress literally crawling with bedbugs, Airbnb support took the landlord's side and bounced us between case managers until it was finally resolved almost 24 hours later. At least at a hotel they have to acknowledge and fix the issue on the spot.
Yeah, we had a similar issue with mice at an Airbnb listing in London. Airbnb asked us to send photos to prove it. They ended up settling for pictures of feces in the kitchen. It took a couple of weeks to resolve, and the host seemed mad that we asked them to come to clean up the excrement in the kitchen. In this case, they wouldn't even let us cancel the reservation - we would have needed the host's permission to end the reservation early without fees.
Same, bedbugs in India, had to go to a proper hotel costing me more than $1000 between room and cleaning all my belongings, I take bedbugs seriously and didn’t want to bring any bug back home. I had pictures of the bugs and the hotel and cleaning invoices. They asked for a medical (!!!) report. Airbnb refunded me 1 of the 2 nights out of 7 I didn’t spend there. So Airbnb costed me more money than going directly to a hotel. Not to mention how distressful and time consuming all this was. I didn’t ever use Airnb before and I’m not going to miss them at all...
correction: did the conversion wrongly, total was around $717, more than the half of it was laundry, they were expecting me in the lobby already. I was arriving with a new set of clothes and a new backpack with my laptop and chargers and gave them everything else including my actual backpack and the suitcase, they had to steam clean or wash more than 57 pieces in my luggage, charged me half price.
Also good to clarify that I paid premium money for a serviced apartment offered in Airbnb, was sold as luxury etc etc. And having no previous experience with Airbnb could not see any potential problem in the add, once there the place was filthy, weird red stains on the walls... Disgusting
You tried to airbnb in India ? It’s probably barely passable in LA. Hotels in India would be quite cheap with the American dollar. Hmmmmmmm :thinking face:
> You tried to airbnb in India ? It’s probably barely passable in LA
yeah, rookie mistake, my first Airbnb, but probably the last too :)
> Hotels in India would be quite cheap with the American dollar
A good hotel (or BnB) in India is not particularly cheaper than in any other country, they tend to have more staff than needed and the service is crazily good when it's good. I've had to bounce back from supposedly good quality hotels, and expensive in relation to the average, to a hotel that would be considered expensive in London a couple of times before this incident. Obviously all depends on your hygiene and quality standards. But if you think that flashing some dollar will make a red carpet appear in front of you... probably is a good idea that you try for yourself to have the exposure that you might be lacking
It is true that you can find very cheap hotels, but let me assure you that you don't want to sleep in those.
Hotels in India are very expensive in the big cities, and for lower-level and 2nd-tier cities, you have to be very careful what and where you end up with. Its either pay a lot, or end up with arrangements and sanitation that would be acceptable to a local would be considered OSHA/CDC-worthy in the US.
had the same issue with bedbugs. was staying at a place for 3 months and they refused to relocate me.
they stopped paying the host so he was up in my shit about not being paid, (he said he couldnt afford to get the place treated) and I was already out of all my money paid out to airbnb. it was a very awkward situation
I consider Airbnb to be a menace to society. The hotel industry exists for a reason.
I've been lucky and never had a truly bad experience with Airbnb, but I've had some lousy ones and never a top notch or even good one. Conversely hotels usually provide at least decent service and usually are great in my experience.
What I really dislike about Airbnb is the feeling of being an invader in a neighborhood. Doing something I shouldn't be doing, because, well I am. No one wants the house next door to them to become an Airbnb, so why do we support its practice by using them?
> No one wants the house next door to them to become an Airbnb, so why do we support its practice by using them?
Well, my next door neighbor in my building rents his apartment on Airbnb about 8 months a year (he travels a lot for business so is not often there). Honestly, I don't really mind. There's been a few noisy guests but those are few and far between and apart from that I've talked to and met some nice guests of his.
That said, his apartment is a great apartment since he actually lives there part of the year. It's totally different from apartments that were built for airbnb and tend to be really bad with crappy furniture. And, since the guests are happy, they are more likely to be respectful I think.
> Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay.
This is basically the Etsy playbook. Have a good model that doesn't scale. Back yourself into a corner by taking VC money and end up having to do the opposite of what made your service good in the first place to keep growing your platform.
Just like there are only so many people making actual handmade goods, there are only so many homeowners looking to host guests.
Fortunately, there is a never ending stream of Chinese-made trinkets and garbage just as there is a never ending stream of slumlords (oops, property investors) looking to make a quick buck.
I had a similar experience to your last one. I was in a small house fire in a shared Airbnb. I left immediately. Airbnb wouldn’t compensate me because I didn’t take photos and the host claimed nothing had happened. (I was honestly too shaken to even think I would need evidence.) They gave me a $200 voucher which didn’t cover the time left in my stay.
It is partially my fault for not getting evidence, but you’d think they would do more for somebody who, like you, has spent an awful lot of money on Airbnb.
Unfortunately they often have the best apartments available in a city. I do still use them, but I’ll search alternate sites first.
The trouble is that, if you use any buyer protections available to you outside of the platform, you risk being banned for life. That to me seems unfair.
For your case where they wanted evidence - what would have happened if you had no evidence, and ended up issuing a chargeback for "Services not provided? You would have been in the right, but probably would have been banned for life from Airbnb's system. The lack of competition and monopolistic nature makes this seem hostile to consumers.
Specifically, if you charge back the stay on your credit card, which would get you a refund. I expect that if you do this, Airbnb will ban you from the platform.
If I’m at the point in a dispute with a company where I’m invoking a credit card chargeback, I’m NEVER wanting to do business with them again, for any reason. I’ve always assumed chargeback == bridge burned.
Why would you continue doing business with a company behaving badly?
When they're a big enough player that monopolizes the available inventory of holiday homes in a region or city you would be backing yourself into a corner by not having the option. Also, maybe tomorrow or next year they could be regulated or under new (better) management and you still wouldn't be able to use the platform.
I laughed out loud the other day when I saw an Airbnb receipt that broke down the total cost and showed their Airbnb fee. It attributed the $100 fee to paying for 24/7 customer support during the trip.
Having experienced their horrendous support in the past (bounced from agent to agent over a 72-hr period, as you describe), I can attest that this fee is worth nowhere near that. The support is a joke, and when dealing with something as critical as housing, this is not acceptable.
This is a great example of why we have regulations.
Regulations can be burdensome, they can entrench existing players, etc -- the disadvantages are frequently discussed. But also they can be too light. AirBnB was how inns basically used to work, and then iteratively an infrastructure built up.
I've had similar Airbnb experiences as you, and I'm convinced that Airbnb has the worst customer service of any company I've ever dealt with. I've never felt more defeated, humiliated, and powerless as I've felt when dealing with them. I used to think, "those people who have problems are just exaggerating, or they're problem customers." Nope, Airbnb will screw over everyone, and make them gag on cloying "community" marketing in the process.
I like the idea of Airbnb and many of the apartments can be great, but boy do I wish Airbnb would die a cold, harsh death.
I may be naive, but I never got the buzz around Airbnb. I had been a user of vrbo (vacation rentals by owner) for a long time, well before Airbnb. I continue to use vrbo, as I rarely see a better deal with Airbnb. Infact even the booking UIs look very similar.
I’ve booked cottages for years, my parents did it for us in the 90s, when the catalog was posted out.
My understanding was Airbnb started as renting out sofas or spare rooms, but is now basically the same as cottages.com, but with more hype, and apparently far worse property owners.
> The problem was that it was peak Summer in Barcelona, we were there for a long period of time, and the only available units were minimum 5x the price.
I've never got this at all. Why should you pay 5x price for AirBnb's risk?
Exactly. They take a huge cut, hold cash for months ahead of time (earning considerable float), preach the need to use their in-app messaging and platform for "safety", then just abandon ship when things go wrong.
If I showed up to a hotel and they didn't have a room available, they would rebook me at a different hotel. Airbnb just seems to say, "well, that's not our problem".
It makes me wish that there was a tenant bill of rights similar to EU Regulation 261/2004 about canceled flights.
"If I showed up to a hotel and they didn't have a room available, they would rebook me at a different hotel. "
Don't be so sure about that. I had a Marriott reservation but apparently they overbooked a whole bunch of us and tried to rebook us at Motel 8 without refunding any of our money. Luckily I had booked through Priceline.com and called their support and they rebooked us at the nearest hotel that's comparable to or better than Marriott, which ended up being a five start boutique hotel. I've been pretty loyal to Priceline every since.
Marriott is shit. Stayed three weeks in Cancun at a four and five start Marriott. No air conditioning. In the middle of the fucking summer. The lowest it'd go was 73. The first week, they were doing construction so there was a jackhammer literally outside our door every morning until we complained enough for them to move us to one of many empty rooms. Unfortunately, it was already booked so I couldn't get a refund or chargeback despite proof of all this. Marriott is just utter garbage and should be avoided at all costs.
It's not exactly fair to say "No air conditioning. In the middle of the fucking summer." When they had AC that goes down to a very chilly 73. I keep my AC at 77, and my wife is still cold half the time.
The construction issue was pretty valid and shitty of them.
Ah yes I should have said it had a shitty fucking broken air conditioner that they refused to fix. Their lies and refusal to fix it were even worse than the shitty fucking broken air conditioner and even worse than not having any air conditioning whatsoever. So you're right, it's not fair. I let them off too easy. The actual situation was much worse. Thanks for pointing that out.
I have had similar experiences with Airbnb, and problems as a host and a guest.
Why they have gotten away with these behaviours for so long is likely due to forced arbitration.
Their business plan is likely to show as much profit as possible, IPO/get on stock market, exit early investors and founders, and leave the mess and risk associated with their unconscionable protocols to the public markets - offloading it to society as what will inevitably be a loss, as they're not going to realize these nuances.
The forced arbitration is going to stop sooner or later, and cities are going to start to crack down heavily - going through the counter appeals of landlords and commercial hosts with many properties.
> If I showed up to a hotel and they didn't have a room available, they would rebook me at a different hotel. Airbnb just seems to say, "well, that's not our problem".
I believe this is rolled up in hotel pricing, and why Airbnb's are still overall cheaper.
Why should AirBnb have to not only waive their free but pay several times what they would have earned off the transaction to another party? It is wholly unreasonable for them to put you up in a place that costs 5x(+) as much.
They aren't a hotel chain, they are a booking agent. They don't own the properties, the connect a party that has a space and a party that wants a space. It's not like when you're at a hotel and a pipe bursts and they just put you in another unit that they already own. If the rental was 500 unitofcurrency and the only thing available in their system is 2500 unitofcurrency, they're now hemorrhaging money where a hotel would have virtually no extra expense moving you to another room.
If they made a practice of putting people in considerably more expensive places than they have agreed to pay for it would be absurdly easy to abuse the system from both ends. You could relatively easy manufacture a situation in which what you were renting was unusable getting you a free upgrade or property owners could potentially game the system during high peak times by listing a cheap space, having someone in on it get it, manufacture unusable conditions and then dump one or more properties into the system just under the price of the next cheapest unit and now they have 2 empty locations and are getting paid for the expensive one and can then dump both on vrbo/booking.com/flipkey etc.
At best they should refund your entire stay (unless you've already been there a considerable amount of time then prorate accordingly) and help you find a hotel.
I disagree - they're not a booking agent, they're a marketplace. They don't charge a flat fee for a booking - they take a substantial ongoing cut for the full term of a reservation, even if it's multiple payments over multiple months. They take on more risk than a booking agent and increase their cut proportionally.
Same here. I've had bad experiences, and AirBnB has not responded to complaints in any way. In one case, the host was so hostile that we left after staying one night. I've yet to hear back from AirBnB about it, and my review was not published either.
I wonder how many reviews go unpublished. I had a host try to shake me down for nearly $200 saying that "you spilled something on the bed, I had to have a professional cleaner come out." I had spilled nothing at all! His "evidence" was some unclear photos of a mattress, and that's it. I refused, noting exactly that - it felt like a shakedown, and he had even admitted that another guest had already stayed. I don't know how or if it'll affect my reputation, but I was pretty turned off on Airbnb after that and i'm not too sure i'll use it again.
I've spent a similar amount as you on Airbnb as a hotel replacement over the years. I have the same exact feedback. What started as a great community vibe is now being exploited by slum lords. It's really a shame, the site is a victim of its own success.
I have to believe that with better curation it would have been possible to maintain quality. For example, Lyft still has a great UX with awesome drivers like they did at the beginning, even after they have scaled up to MegaCorp status. It seems Airbnb has made a conscious decision to pursue growth at all costs, including what made them great in the beginning. Time will tell if that was a smart play.
just throwing in one more +1 to how absolutely terrible their customer service was to deal with. We had an AirBnb scheduled for 2 weeks once, and I emailed the host saying we didn't need the first week and we'd be there starting the 2nd week and go ahead and keep our money for the first week.
Well the day we were getting ready to go check-in, he cancels saying we were a "no show" with no refund despite multiple written records of his confirmation that we'd be there the second week.
I asked AirBnb to refund us for half, and over and over they'd transfer between agents who had no f*cking clue about the case and just kept regurgitating some cancellation policy and ignoring my obvious evidence.
Finally I took to the social airwaves and kept calling over the course of a week and they eventually relented and refunded something.. and the best part, they never apologized once, in fact they made some absurd 6-year old passive aggressive comment about still being right but they'd refund me anyways -- and the refund was less than half.
I get that two-sided markets are tough, but even having the slightest decency and empathy during the matter would have made a world of difference to me.
I tend to agree. I've grown tired of the poor-quality, soulless flips that are falling apart and barely cleaned that have completely taken over Airbnb. For business I find myself not wanting to deal with the uncertainty of Airbnb and just get a hotel.
> The problem was that it was peak Summer in Barcelona, we were there for a long period of time, and the only available units were minimum 5x the price.
What can they do then? Build new apartments for you?
> We had an Airbnb burglarized
Once again, what can they do?
They are not a hotel. You accept that when you book somewhere. It is not magic, there are going to be horrible places, there are going to be shitty owners who rob you.
You want all the benefits but none of the compromises. Too bad.
> What can they do then? Build new apartments for you?
Do the same thing an airline does. If a flight is cancelled, they don't just refund the original price you paid for the ticket. They have to get you to the destination. If the only available option is a first class seat, it's their problem, not yours. They don't ask you to either pay $1000 for the price difference and get on the next flight or get your $100 back and try to get to the destination on your own.
So in this case, the alternative was not building apartments. It was to eat the price difference and house OP in another listing or even a hotel.
Not sure about recently, but I’ve had the opposite experience living in Airbnb’s three months at a time when I was in between my startup and current job.
My two hosts were very friendly, and I got on great with them.
My first host would throw weekly dinner parties, cooking fresh organic food with vegetables she grew in her garden. When I was sick she would bring me breakfast in bed. Indeed, this woman was a wonderful human being.
My second host I would hang out with on an almost daily basis, we became really good friends. Hockey games, getting smashed on the weekdays, and other such fun times. I’ve kept in touch with both.
The problem is that the whole model changed a lot.
Chances are much bigger that you wind up in some cooky cutter appartment of dubious quality and design managed by some management company that manages dozens, if not hundreds of such appartments and gives exactly zero fucks about your well being.
Experiences as you describe them certainly exist. My girlfriend had a great experience in San Francisco, but that was in 2014.
My expreiences are very mixed and the reviews are rather useless in my opinion. Since I had a couple of youngster neighbors turning their temporary (and illegal) sub lease into an illegal hotel I will not use AirBnb again. It's just too damn painful for the people actually living in a multi party dwelling.
Or human relationships. As one of my old friend/coworker once said, your reputation is like a whiteboard. Once there is a tiny black dot upon it, you’re screwed.
I have nothing to back this up, but it feels like hotels have been lowering prices and raising their quality as a result of Airbnb. Lots of "boutique" hotels offering great rooms for less. I was an early adapter to Airbnb and sung their praises for years, but for all the above reasons I too prefer hotels now.
Yeah, it started as a great alternative to hotels, both on price and the sort of hospitality offered. I think the comparison is now much closer, Airbnb has lost a lot of that edge.
At the same price point I would take a hotel, they have employees whose job is to help you and instead of the "hey we're sharing a space and growing together and learning about each other" horseshit Airbnb is trying to peddle.
I find that the only scenario that Airbnb still comes in handy for is when you want to book a large place for a group of 8 people or more to stay together.
I used to use AirBnB all the time. Lately I've switched back to using hotels almost exclusively. The camera/privacy thing is a big part of it. I empathize with the hosts to a degree - you don't want people doing outrageous things in your home. But the hosts want their cake and to eat it too. Don't rent out your home if you don't want the risk of people damaging it!
(As a minor aside, I've also noticed the quality of the places I've found on AirBnB has gone down. The homes I stayed at before I quit using it were not very clean (despite the fee!), things were broken, key retrieval was a pain etc. Hotels used to be much more expensive, but price/quality of experience is starting to get more competitive)
It's funny to me, because AirBnB runs in to all the same problems we had with hotels a hundred years ago. We have dozens of taxes, rules, regulations, building codes etc now for hotels. I imagine at some point it will be the same for AirBnBs. What's old is new.
Same here. A few years ago all our AirBnB experiences were good, but over time they have progressively got worse.
For example, one host housed us in what felt like a derelict hotel/doshouse with all sorts of weird people staying and no working locks or fire alarm. On another occasion we booked a cottage, but it had a blocked chimney and was spewing fumes and smoke in to the living area. And for our tenth wedding anniversary we booked another cottage where the host insisted on staying with us despite the listing saying we would have the property to ourselves. He also insisted on singing to us against our will, this was actually quite creepy.
We did of course raise concerns with AirBnB about the first two and left a negative review for the third. AirBnB did not care and crucially it did not seem to have an effect on the ratings of these properties. That just does not seem right.
I no longer trust AirBnB. I don't trust the listings, I don't trust the reviews and I certainly don't trust AirBnB itself to filter out bad hosts.
This could be because AirBnB has grown so fast and it has struggled to cope, or it could be a conscious business decision. Either way, we don't use them anymore.
It's hard to trust reviews when it's engineered the way it is. You're almost forced to leave a good review or else you'll get a bad review in return. People also don't like feeling guilty and transactions have been made personal. People do the same damn thing with ridesharing, really bad drivers somehow get 5 star ratings.
The way it is actually engineered is that it is impossible to view a review, before leaving your own (or waiting until the review shows up, after which you can not leave a retaliatory review).
For the ridesharing, it depends. Maybe the driver has a route they know well, or has friendly connect. Maybe traffic for you was very bad and chaotic and there was no click.
For ridesharing I played tit-for-tat for a while, until I realized that I don't want to play this game (if my rating drops below a point where less drivers will pick me up, I will switch to Taxi's). For AirBnB: I never leave bad or lukewarm reviews, only good reviews. Getting a host that is actually there for check-in, really acts a host, is getting increasingly rare, so my good reviews are too.
As mentioned by the other responses, you are mistaken. Reviews can't be seen until both parties have submit their reviews or the review period expires.
However, as a host I've encountered situations where I probably should have given a lower rating but opted to not submit a review because the guest seemed nice other than some minor poor behavior (had to ask them to be quiet during quiet hours, ignored our house rules, left more mess than usual, etc). I didn't want to affect the guests' ratings because they weren't awful and had otherwise positive reviews, so maybe it was a one-off... I am sure there is some inflation on the guest reviews as well.
I like Uber's give compliments feature. There could be a variety of reasons why they were great. Professional and just let me be. Had an awesome conversation with them and learned something. Got some good tips in a new city.
I don't feel obligated to leave a lengthy review, just either the default options and potentially a nice note.
Every time I've used Airbnb, the review process would prevent one party from seeing the other party's review until either the review period ended OR all parties would have posted a review.
In other words, you can't retaliate because of the other party's review: you don't get to see it until you post your own review.
I would have called Airbnb as soon as I found there was an issue and made them book me in somewhere else. You are paying a service fee to them for a reason.
The problem is that's when you arrive to your rented property late on a Friday night with two tired and cranky children, you just want to make the best of a bad situation.
I know AirBnB have an emergency number, but they themselves state on their website that all they will do in a situation like the above is to try and book you in to another AirBnB property or offer you a refund.
I think a lot of AirBnB customers have lower expectations of the service compared to what they would expect when booking into a hotel and AirBnB benefits greatly from this.
After all the AirB part of their name stands for air bed, the whole business was founded on the concept of customers accepting lower standards for a lower price. Now that AirBnB has grown into a quality property rental service it really needs to up it's game in terms of vetting it's hosts and dealing with questionable situations.
They should have called the fire marshal. Airbnb support is probably one step up from Google's in terms of reaching a satisfactory solution for customers.
The fire marshal won't get you your money back, but they'll ruin a host's day if they're renting out a space without smoke detectors.
> I would have called Airbnb as soon as I found there was an issue and made them book me in somewhere else. You are paying a service fee to them for a reason.
DoubleGlazing said:
> > We did of course raise concerns with AirBnB about the first two and left a negative review for the third. AirBnB did not care and crucially it did not seem to have an effect on the ratings of these properties. That just does not seem right.
Of course you can say that DoubleGlazing should have insisted, but, from my own experience, I agree that, if AirBnb doesn't feel like doing anything, then they won't do anything; and that any remedies to force them into action will, at best, take effect only too late (e.g., it's no good getting a response in a week if the residence is uninhabitable today).
I second this. It's not easy to call Airbnb if you're international. Even if you end up finding the number and reaching them, you're placed on hold waiting for a representative.
I have switched back to hotels too, due to my recent experience.
My friends and I were staying over at a 4-subroom Airbnb during the summer. The apartment looked great, and we really could not complain about the price either.
However, we started noticing that none of the furniture match; there we no more than two of the same chairs, the beds were all different, the cutlery was bent and visibly used, etc.
When two of my friends sat on the edge of a double-bed at once, the whole frame collapsed. Puzzled, we inspected further only to find custom fitted planks, badly mounted by too small screws, legs made of cheap wood, and so on.
Contacting the host, we were told that we had to reimburse him for a completely new bed, as well as the transport and installation costs. Meanwhile, we could just "sleep on the floor".
It became all to clear that the host picked up furniture from some kind of recycling station, and expected the guests to pay for it when it inevitably breaks. This way, he could continuously replace the furniture for new one, and having the guests pay for it!
Luckily, we could prove to Airbnb that the furniture was not original, and that it was modified multiple times, badly. After the whole vacation spent worrying about the communication between the host and the Airbnb, we managed to avoid having to pay.
It scares me that the host was willing and able to ignore the safety of his guests, and he got away with it without any repercussions from Airbnb.
PS: While my bad review of the host did not even put a nudge in his almost perfect 4.5/5 score, mine fell so drastically that most decent hosts might now reconsider housing me.
Luckily, we could prove to Airbnb that the furniture was not original, and that it was modified multiple times, badly. After the whole vacation spent worrying about the communication between the host and the Airbnb, we managed to avoid having to pay.
A similar experience is what put me off to AirBnb. What was supposed to be a carefree weekend at the beach turned into managing the property manager. One thing after another. Starting with no key because the lockbox code was incorrect. Some other doozies include: twin not a full bed, patio door did not lock, no hand soap in bathroom, and the Internet didn’t work.
Hosting is difficult and Airbnb is still learning. Once day they may have it figured out, but I’d be surprised if when that day comes they don’t look a lot like the incucmbent players. In the mean time we are all paying for their training.
I was in Spain and got an airbnb which did not have sheets for the beds or towels. The host, who was in another country on holiday, had me walk down the street and meet her mother, who didn't speak english. Her mother gave me a musty top-sheet that seemed to have been in a closet for over a decade, and asked me to pay her 5 euros in cash for it. This whole process took about 2 hours.
Still didn't get a towel.. should have listened to douglas adams.
I also stayed at the cheapest airbnb in miami beach, which was an unwalkable room full of children's-sized bunkbeds, and populated by fully grown humans with the consideration of children. There was so much chaos i couldn't sleep, and since i was there to compete in a tournament the next day, I literally walked around the streets of miami at 3am until i found a patch of grass where I could sleep. I couldn't bring myself to pay $200 for 3 hours of a hotel.
Something doggy people have been doing is signing year long leases for properties, listing it on AirBnB, and milking it for as much as possible until the owner and/or HOA get wind and evict them (sometimes the HOA will find out and fine the owner continually while the eviction is in process, which is always unfortunate). I always recommend to owners and property managers when this happens to stick to the eviction and follow through to prevent future landlords from encountering the same issue (most landlords will not rent to someone with an eviction on their record).
This: "I've also noticed the quality of the places I've found on AirBnB has gone down."
Is the direct result of people listening to your own own advice: "Don't rent out your home if you don't want the risk of people damaging it!"
I rented my home a handful of times when I knew I would be out of town on the weekend. The first renters were great, the next 2 caused a combined $1,200 in damage that Airbnb refused to cover. Refunding me the cost of dry cleaning my comforter that was left with blood stains(!) instead of the cost to replace it was bullshit but that was all they'd offer. There was also no real recourse for one of the guests having at least a dozen people over for a midnight afterparty. I was still finding cigarette butts and trash out of my backyard landscaping for months after that final rental. There's just not enough money in Airbnb rentals for people who only have their own property to rent and don't desparately need that extra income, this the noticeable decline in quality. You're not the only person I've heard say that Airbnbs are becoming more like cheap motels than nice hotels.
In my mid-to-late-twenties, I remember thinking "Damn, why are hotels so expensive? I'll just stay in this Airbnb, which is so much bigger anyway. This is the new way and it's disrupting hotels."
Now at the outset of my thirties and a more settled phase of life, I will gladly pay a premium to stay in a hotel.
In the same way, it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.
There's a reason why some business models and establishment types 'just work' throughout history and it's not entirely because of well-funded lobbying and conservative lawmaking, as we were maybe led to believe in the early Airbnb/Uber days when anything disruptive was shiny.
I wouldn't say they 'just work', but rather that what we see is the steady state they've arrived at, warts and all. The startup industry has this obsessive focus on looking at the steady state and thinking they can fix all the warts, without really looking into why they formed in the first place.
>it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.
Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get, the points of interest for example, if you spend that much time just trying to get licensed you're probably going to be more professional than random soccer mom trying to make money while the kids are at school. That's not the case with taxis in the US or many other countries though.
>Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get
Indeed, the dedication required to acquire The Knowledge [1] is incredible, at least to me considering how the job of taxi driver is considered a fairly low-end, unskilled one here in the States.
"The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the "Knowledge of London" is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.
It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve "appearances" (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process usually averaging 34 months, to pass."
I made the switch as well and now only get an AirBnB when traveling with a large group of friends to remote destinations.
For my own travel, I got so sick of the problems with key access. It's just too hard to coordinate with most hosts when you are in a foreign country and don't have cell service or wi-fi.
It's also super annoying when any number of other issues show up: spotty wi-fi, no cable TV, no soap or shampoo, poor quality mattress, etc.
And then hosts often expect you to wash your dishes and put laundry in the washer. Why do I need to do this when I am paying >$100 for a "cleaning fee"???
>For my own travel, I got so sick of the problems with key access. It's just too hard to coordinate with most hosts when you are in a foreign country and don't have cell service or wi-fi.
Yeah, in Spring two years ago a friend an I did a Europe trip, with 4 Airbnbs bookings in total. On three of them we had issues getting in, where we had to contact the host, who was hard to reach or unavailable. And none would give us separate keys.
>And then hosts often expect you to wash your dishes and put laundry in the washer. Why do I need to do this when I am paying >$100 for a "cleaning fee"???
In fairness, cleaning involves a lot more than that step. But there does seem to be an arms race in how much of the cost they can cram into a hidden "cleaning" fee.
I did AirBnB with a group. The place didn't had the beds advertised (I don't count defective inflatable mattress as bed) only 4 forks and 3 knives, the swimming pool was closed for 3 a months planned maintenance. The place had good ratings but from what I understood, the guy operating it had left and the new one was lost.
To be fair, AirBnB gave me a $30 coupon. Thanks but I'm not using that one.
> It's funny to me, because AirBnB runs in to all the same problems we had with hotels a hundred years ago. We have dozens of taxes, rules, regulations, building codes etc now for hotels. I imagine at some point it will be the same for AirBnBs. What's old is new.
An industry can only be disruptive for so long. Eventually, it will either fail, or be successful and become the new status quo.
> Eventually, it will either fail, or be successful and become the new status quo.
The book "Animal Farm" is so prescient, it's scary. I know it was written about governments but it applies to a lot of different organizations and industries:
"The creatures outside looked from <new> to <old>, and from <old> to <new>, and from <new> to <old> again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Just swap out <new> and <old> with:
Uber/taxis
online streaming/cable
AirBnb/hotels
Not saying all of these will come to pass, but generally as the disruptive <new> are encumbered with ever increasing regulation over time they eventually become <old> again
I disagree with the streaming video example. Netflix, Disney etc aren't facing any regulatory issues that's causing them to circle their wagons and create their own content pipelines and streaming services. They're doing it to maximize profit and be less dependent on third parties.
On the other hand, hotels are innovating on improving the customer experience too.
The Hilton App is easier to use than their actual website. I am able to check-in and check-out without talking to anyone. I can use a digital key on my phone. They send me receipts automagically.
And thanks to consistent corporate standards, I know what to expect in a Hampton Inn vs. Homewood Suites vs. Conrad.
Getting a hotel has become less of a hassle, has less friction, and is more convenient. Oh, and the technology helps the chain as well.
If you disrupt an industry, you better hope your moat is big enough to ward off the entrenched business. Ridesharing might indeed kill the taxi, but there's no way AirBnb is going to defeat the hotel industry.
Uber at their worst still beats the heck out of taxis at their best. (Yes, that's an exaggeration, but only a mild one.) There is a reason why the taxi industry died almost overnight. Legalities aside, that simply doesn't happen to industries whose customers are happy.
However, I've never quite grokked AirBnB. I'm not a big fan of traveling in general, and when I do travel I prefer (and don't mind paying for) predictability and good customer service. Crashing in some random person's house doesn't seem very predictable, as threads like this tend to suggest, and responsive customer service is obviously out of the question.
I think another thing people tend to forget: regulations are often there for a real reason. Especially in the US there's a vocal majority who thinks that regulations are the problem. It's true sometimes. The reasons for the regulation were either bad in the first place, or have "aged out." But a lot of times: the regulation in the way of some business is there to protect consumers.
I fully disagree. I view regulation like opioid painkillers. Sometimes they're necessary to solve a problem. Sometimes the problem is temporary. If a society gives them out at the drop of a hat there will be negative consequences far and wide. Regulation is dangerous and is very easy to abuse but it performs a necessary function in society. We need to be careful not to over-prescribe it though because every regulation is at its core a limitation on individual liberty and when we trade away individual liberty the utmost scrutiny should be applied to ensure we are getting a good deal.
Do you have any examples of such negative consequences, regulations for problems that went away (that became inconvenient after the fact), or dangerous and abusive regulations? Your objection sounds dogmatic, but if it's founded I'd love to hear on what.
It sounds like more people should be interested in regulatory reform. I'm a huge fan of refactoring regulations once the problems they've been made to fix have been solved.
The problem is most "bodies of laws" are so complex and have so many competing stakeholders that it's a lot like a method that everyone's afraid to touch so they just comment "#DO NOT TOUCH!!"
The other problem is the "policy people" who create regulations are rarely the subject matter experts. They are good at managing the process to the successful conclusion: a new published regulation. They are not good at deciding what a good regulation is.
a) pretty much every case where a "may issue" permit is required to engage in business (these mostly happen on the state and local level and incentivize corruption).
b) Regulatory capture (e.g. the current FCC).
c) The war on drugs (I can come up with other examples of unnecessarily criminalizing things if needed).
And on the other side, the movies/music/video games/tv rating system sure isn't perfect but it's a great example of an industry coming up with a solution that doesn't involve regulation. Various other professional organizations (ones that are not given special protection via legislation, i.e. not doctors and lawyers) are also good examples. The AWS comes to mind as a pretty good one.
Legislation is hard to get right and harder to change and I'd rather only use it when other options have been exhausted (e.g. I support making ISPs utilities and a public option for healthcare).
Personally I find the knee jerk reaction to legislate whenever anything bad happens quite dogmatic.
"Regulating whenever something bad happens" is problematic, but it's a bit of a straw man. You should be regulating wherever people are incentivized to do bad things, which happens quite often when you don't offer any oversight whatsoever. Especially when you are unwilling to even regulate the reporting of misbehavior.
And the last paragraph of the article mentions banning long vehicles, which itself is a knee jerk response to when a drunk t-boned a limo on Long Island awhile back.
I can only echo that! We did an around-the-world trip for an entire year from 2017 to 2018 and did not use AirBnb a single time. We looked up AirBnb places maybe a handful of times only to find out that the quality and location of AirBnb homes was worse for often a more expensive price than a good hotel. We ended up booking everything via booking.com and hostelworld.com.
Hotels were often cheaper, in better locations, had a better service (longer reception hours, etc.), often breakfast included, room service, other guests which we could connect with and most importantly, no creepy cameras!
Airbnb should be liable one way or another of those situations. They should at least inspect the places before accepting them in the network. They should inspect after a complaint.
I had a massive rat infestation in my Airbnb in Paris. I arrived at the place at night and I didn't see at first the forced temporary leave notice on the building door for all inhabitants. It took Airbnb 12h to respond to my emergency call. They didn't reimburse my first night, considering that I stayed and didn't allow me to review if I accepted the reimbursement of the rest of my booking. The wording was memorable "We contacted Thomas your host and he has agreed to ... ").
They should at least inspect the places before accepting them in the network. They should inspect after a complaint.
That requires people. Airbnb and its SV brethren aren't interested in using people to solve problems. They believe all problems can be solved with an algorithm.
Same. On a recent trip a close friend advised me to look at hotels as well as airbnb.
Turns out that a 5* hotel was renting a room at half price (I was looking for a room at the last minute), making it competitive with a mid range airbnb.
I am definitely going to do comparison shopping again, it was an awesome experience.
They did this in Japan. You're require to have an emergency sprinkler system for fires as just one example. If you don't have one, getting one installed is apparently around $20k so that prohibits lots of people from getting started renting out. Then as well they have to registered. If it's an apartment/condo building you have to get permission from the building management/home owners association. And I think it's max 90 days a year.
I think this one is pretty key. For the first couple years when AirBnB started, they were almost always cheaper than hotels, even for whole places. Of course, a lot of that was their fees were lower and they weren't paying taxes. I can almost find better deals at hotels now.
AirBnB's aren't that great, just another service that has already been refined. In hotels you might not be getting what you pay for, but at least there is a level of consistency for major chains. In AirBnB's you're left to the wims of the household that sets you up for the night or week. If the place doesn't have something, most of the time you're not going to call the home owners, but a hotel you have no problem calling the main lobby if there is an issue at 2 am.
Downsides aside, one thing that AirBnB as a service provides over hotels is heterogeneity of location. Especially remote, suburban, or certain urban neighborhood locations will always be underserved by hotels, while still being desirable to potential guests.
That is a big benefit, and I will be honest they have saved me from an expensive hotel at times, especially around packed conference areas. I just have had more bad experiences especially at those times, and would have in hindsight payed the higher rates at the hotels. Maybe this is just my rant, but the inconsistency and lack of some peoples awareness when it comes to hosting really puts me off.
>It's funny to me, because AirBnB runs in to all the same problems we had with hotels a hundred years ago.
To a point. I find it a bit silly to regulate a single person renting out their house occasionally for short stretches (read: most users of AirBnB) to a corporation with multiple purpose built, million dollar facilities on expensive commercial property with their own staff and so forth.
I've been looking at AirBNBs recently for a vacation. The small guy is an outlier anymore. Most of the listings are obviously professional, ie they do it for a living and have multiple properties and property managers. The network is hard to unravel since the companies behind the "hosts" create many profiles, but it is easy to see that its not just Carla or Emily or Cody offering up their apartment while they go on holiday. I've been on AirBNB for more than 6 years and have hosted as well, but the rules as well as the standards have tilted heavily to favor the big players.
The last few AirBnBs I've stayed at have all been filled with "stock" goods. The cheapest handsoap, the cheapest paper towels, etc. Basically it looks like they went to the dollar store and filled their house with what's in it, which makes me believe that people don't actually live in there.
Unless AirBNB solicits more fine-grained reviews to elicit feedback on such things, or enacts a policy around consumables, this is the direction many hosts will go. As long as it doesn't reflect in the photos, corners will be cut.
An alternative here would be a meet in the middle type system where venues could opt into a private regulatory body that entailed obeying a system of rules and regulations, and accepting adjudications of the body in case of conflicts. In return, entities could advertise membership as a selling point, and the regulatory body itself could provide lists of participating entities to anybody who'd like to find, for instance, a higher quality BnB stay at. The system would be funded by entities paying a fee for participation, and perhaps also allowing membership for regular customers as which would entail various promotions and prioritization.
This generally would not work for areas where there is monopolization or where the benefits would be less visible to the consumer in the normal case. what I mean by 'the normal case' is that even a shoddy building won't usually fall down, so abiding and non-abiding entities would seem more or less identical until the 0.01% scenario hits with resultant catastrophe. But things like BnBs are perfect for this model since there is major competition for consumers and transgressions against obviously desirable rules (like no cameras in the house) are not particularly uncommon.
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As an aside, the reason I mention this as a desirable option is obviously not because I think there should be any hotels that have e.g. cameras in rooms. But rather because these things never just end at a handful of very critical points. Take food safety as an example. Obviously there are a good number of basic ideas everybody would agree on such as ensuring your hands are cleaned/gloved, that food is reasonably fresh, and so on. But as regularly organizations feel obligated to continue to expand, you start ending up with ever more esoteric rules. For instance in California if your dish cleaning sink for a food stall is 9 inches deep, you're in violation of regulations. They arbitrarily require that a dish cleaning sink must be at least 10 inches deep.
This gradual creep of rules poses an issue to people who are just starting a business. So obviously we all want hotels without cameras and food stalls where servers wash their hands, but on the other hand being forced to read literally hundreds of pages of legalese with countless 'gotchas' that can catch even perfectly safe and desirable products is something that can really hamper entrepreneurship, while simultaneously artificially entrenching older entities. Neither of which I think many people would think is a good thing.
Or, how about one rule: No cameras in living spaces. If you want to make money using AirBnB, you understand that you can't use cameras inside living spaces. I don't think we need to invent a new bureaucracy to deal with this.
The system I described was much more akin to something like the Better Business Bureau than a new bureaucracy. It tends to be a way to get things done in a way where both consumers and businesses want to obey them (as is rather the definition of opt-in systems). For instance I just checked the BBB entry for AirBnB [1]. It turns out that even though they aren't affiliated with the BBB, they are rapidly responding to complaints and seem to be resolving most issues. Many of the complaints/resolutions are publicly displayed. Feels rather voyeurish reading them, but it's all quite interesting!
You tend to get much better results with using a third party company (such as the BBB) since the company's action towards the company stands to have much more weight than a single consumer's. It's similar to governmental regulation, except it tends to scale more appropriately with size. E.g. 'Ma and Pop BnB' are generally not going to end up facing BBB complaints since they can resolve things 'locally.' Whereas with governmental regulatory systems 'Ma and Pop BnB' is treated in many ways the same as multibillion dollar multinational "BnB" and inadvertent noncompliance can be devastating, even when such inadvertent noncompliance in no way negatively affected anybody as you invariably end up with some rules that make sense for multinationals, but not necessarily e.g. a couple of retirees renting out a spare room.
Is there anyone that still takes the BBB seriously? They operate as a pay-to-play scheme, charging money in exchange for their approval in an outright quid pro quo sales operation.
Beyond that, the advent of modern communication has taken a huge bite out of whatever relevancy they might've had. Why complain to the BBB when you can complain via Yelp/Google Reviews/Facebook, etc. and have a bigger impact.
I've yet to run into a company that didn't actively engage with the BBB. AirBnB quite certainly seems to respond extremely actively to them. I've been fortunate enough to only have a couple of complaints with businesses I was unable to resolve directly, and in both cases I was able to work out a fair settlement through the BBB alone. If somebody would prefer to go the social review route, then that's great - it's obviously a very good thing that we have so many dispute resolution options available for consumers now a days.
What you describe already exists with things like franchises, trade groups, and consumer organizations. For example, if I told you that I stayed in a Hilton last night, with no further information, you probably have a good idea of what the place was like and what kind of rules it had, despite having no idea where it is or who owns it. If I tell you that I stayed at a AAA approved hotel, you’ll know it met certain standards.
What you say also describes governments pretty well. They just tend to base membership on physical location. For your example of sink depth, if a business doesn’t like California’s rules, they can resign their membership and join a different government by moving there.
I'm renting houses/apartments on AirBNB and place cameras outside the homes (to watch who's in front of the entrance door, activity). Placing them inside the home is a real privacy concern - a zone that I would never even consider.
The reason for the cameras outside is to watch closely how many people enter as we're constantly fighting prostitution which leads to a pain with neighbors and other stuff.
We have two properties listed on Airbnb and have been a "superhost" for half a year.
Our listing has extra fees if there are more than 2 people booking and there have been a number of instances where guests would sneak in extra people.
We got a security camera for one of our listings recently. It's an attached suite with a private entrance. The camera is installed outside and it's disclosed with a check box toggled in Airbnb's listing settings.
Being a private person myself, I would not put a camera inside spaces meant private for guests. In these times, I'm even a bit wary on adding a CO alarm because guests might think it's a spy camera.
Obviously, not everyone has the same standards. The host described in the post is quite rude. I wouldn't communicate that way with a guest. Hopefully, Airbnb will reopen the case given the attention it has received.
I don't think most people think it through that well. I once had a guest stay in our attached guest house where we live and try to sneak in a dog (explicitly not allowed).
Outside, sure, fine. I'm of the opinion that they should still be disclosed, but I think a camera outside (and not looking in so that it can see any interior spaces) is fair.
Bullshit reason given by the AirBnB. How is someone renting a room qualified to determine from a photo what kind of a device is there in the corner, or even notice. It can be anything, perhaps just a motion detection sensor or air quality monitoring or whatever. Also I do not scrutinize every single photo for details, but I read the description in its entirety.
These things have to be stated in writing and they should have it as a part of listed attributes for the room/house.
There are also accessibility concerns/questions here. What if someone with poor (or no) eyesight is trying to book accommodation? Is there a screen-reader friendly description that says "Living room with security camera in the upper corner"?
Great point. I'd be interested to see what their response to that argument would be if it came from him pretending to have the disability. (or not even pretending)
We were in Hawaii. We checked into the AirBnB, and the first thing my wife noticed was that there were crumbs of food all along the walls of the kitchen. She murmured something about this not being good and attracting bugs.
We turn off the lights, and a few minutes later she jumped up, claiming there was something on her. We turned on the lights, and saw nothing. I brushed it off. A few minutes later it happened again. Same deal. Then a few minutes later it happened to me. I turned on the lights, and happened to look at the roof, and there were 2 large cockroaches on the roof, right above us! Yikes! Then I stepped out, and on the kitchen floor I saw a few of them scurrying about.
So I called up AirBnB at 2AM. They asked me for photos, video, etc. After a couple of hours of back and forth, they agreed to let us leave. They let us book another place. But then they proceeded to cancel our original reservation, so I could not leave feedback! The host contacted me, and when I told her why we left, pretended as if nothing was wrong about 3-inch long cockroaches running around all over the place. AirBnB never reprimanded her.
> pretended as if nothing was wrong about 3-inch long cockroaches running around all over the place.
To be fair it actually is pretty common to see 3 inch cockroaches running around in Hawaii and other tropical places, even in reasonably nice/clean houses. Especially in older houses that might not be insulated or sealed very well (given the weather there's not much need to insulate for heat purposes).
Granted, keeping things clean and making an effort to get rid of bugs when you do see them will obviously make things better, and it sounds like this host was probably more neglectful than they should have been.
This is honestly a really interesting example though - a lot of people's stated reason for liking AirBnB is being in a more authentic, local environment. But then when you have different expectations about the conditions than a local person living in that house might have, it becomes a bad experience that AirBnB should solve. Where should the line be? If you want them to standardize things and make sure all listings are comfortable for the widest range of people possible, doesn't that just end up looking exactly like a hotel?
Cockroaches in a residence in Hawaii is not uncommon, you are after-all, in a tropical rainforest. I have come to expect them in the rainforest/jungle housing. It is inevitable. The houses in these areas are often not well sealed due to local construction quality and/or the need to vent humidity. That said, the crumbs of food can/will exacerbate the problem and probably should have been kept to a higher standard of cleanliness.
I think that's what bothers a lot of guests who have an experience so bad they have to leave. Is there any penalty for lying in a description or putting guests at the risk of their own safety?
When I interviewed at Airbnb, they asked me about one thing I learned in the past that could be useful for Airbnb.
I suggested that people who are developing the product should once in a while spend a few hours handling user tickets themselves (perhaps shadowing an actual customer representative), so that developers get to sense (at the gut level) the pain points.
The interviewer did not seemed pleased with that suggestion.
dunno if they still do it, but this was normal practice at Etsy when I was an engineer there (2013-2015). Every so often (once a quarter maybe?) I had to spend a day answering support tickets. We discovered (and fixed) a lot of bugs that way.
As a lead developer on some projects, I've explicitly asked to jump into the weeds and handle support.
You can learn SO MUCH about your application just by handling a bit of support. You learn UX issues, you learn what tooling the support people are missing that would allow them to do their job (a simple "send a screenshot to support" button in our app saved our support reps HOURS spending time trying to get customers to describe the problem or teaching them how to take a screenshot on their device).
Not only that, but often the easiest wins are those where you make a happy customer even happier. I saw one customer one time that did this like 10 step process to get some information from the app. They would switch to one user, go to a specific page, open it in a new tab and leave it there, then logout and login to another account, go to their overview page, and then bring the 2 tabs side-by-side to compare numbers.
We already had support for "manager" style accounts that could view info on multiple people, but it didn't have the information they were looking for. A few hours later I had a POC up on our staging system with the information they needed right there, and that person I was talking to became almost an evangelist for our software at their company. Just knowing that they had a problem in the first place was key, and the fix took me a few hours, but it saved them probably that much per week.
I can't imagine a company not mining the info from support for exactly these kind of improvements as a standard operating procedure; it's a gold mine of information, anyone ignoring it doesn't really care about the quality of their product.
Support (even "in-house" support at global companies) is often outsourced to the lowest bidder. They are paid by support ticket and thus have zero interest in actually resolving the issue once and for all.
It's more profitable to open 20 tickets on the same issue than to actually resolve it.
Also, from the perspective of the call center you're a lousy support person if you actually want to help customers. Your most important metric is calls per time unit. It's in your interest as the support agent to get the customer off the call as quick as possible.
To add some background to the discussion: As a host, you are asked to check a box entitled "Surveillance or recording devices on property". If you check it, it asks you to "Describe any device that records or sends video, audio, or still images. Specify each device’s location and whether it will be on or off."
As this is a text box, it is up to the host to accurately describe things like location of device, viewable area, on/off/recording status, and if there is a microphone. There is also no structured way to specify if the recording device is posted outside (ie a driveway, facing away from the property for security) vs inside the rented space.
I never understood appeal of AirBnB. We used to travel a lot and thought AirBnB would be cheaper to equivalent hotels but it usually is about same or more expensive but with less amenities.
For example:
* There is no room service. You can order delivery but room service has certain charms especially at 2AM.
* In hotels, you come back to a clean room at the day's end.
* There is cleaning fee for many AirBnB. With hotels, you just leave a tip but no need to leave the place in perfect condition to avoid cleaning fee.
* If you have any issues with your room, hotel will relocate you to new room quickly.
* Concierge services, shuttle services, pools, etc are really nice to haves even if we don't use them.
* You are with other travellers in hotel. Very easy to meet new people and share some experience or tips.
Some of my friends get AirBnB in suburbs to save money but then they are renting cars or taking Uber everywhere which probably adds up to same price. Also when traveling I don't want to feel like I am back in 'burbs.
The appeal of AirBnB is that there is a much lower barrier to entry. I rarely spend more than $50-100/night on airbnb. (With the $100 being in expensive areas and usually a whole apartment)
I can rarely, if ever, find hotels that are below $80/night (short of them being extremely sketchy or in the middle of nowhere). Meanwhile those hotels don't always have kitchens, sizable refrigerators, etc.
It's allowed me to travel to places much more and for longer than I would otherwise. One could argue for hostels but private rooms in hostels usually are not any cheaper than AirBNB and they are insanely more noisy/disruptive.
Most hotel we stayed at, cost about $120-150 a night. And these were in Manhattan, SF, Austin, Vegas etc. I would def. stay in AirBnB to save $80-100 a night.
Not sure how I missed such options, perhaps we have bias towards hotels that made us ignore these.
Trying out our first AirBnB with a few friends in Austin next month. It will cost each couple $175 per night for one room in 4Bed/4Bath house . In the same general area, we could have gotten hotel for $150 but thought house would be more fun.
Yep, I recently rented a cabin for a group of 5 couples. That was a lot of fun. Having common areas (kitchen, living room) is something you don't get with hotels, and nice if you want to hang around and play board games or something. (Of course home rental has been around before AirBnB)
That makes no sense to me. Airbnb has changed travelling for these reasons:
* It is cheaper for the location
* It has a kitchen
* It feels like a home
I don't understand these kind of comments. Can you remember any of the hotel room you've been in the previous years? I can't. Can you remember any of the airbnb you've stayed at? I remember every one of them. There is a true home feeling to them.
A lot of my friends who stay in AirBnB list same reasons for using it. Also they say that they like to live like locals when traveling.
I can respect it but I really don't want to feel like at home on vacation. Hotels give me that feeling of adventure and travel. I have couch surfed and enjoyed it. But that was probably because I was visiting a friend in burbs without any agenda of "travel".
Kitchen is cool but then again I am on vacation, I don't want to cook.
I have never stayed in any AirBnB but always compared AirBnBs and hotels before vacation. At least, in the US, hotels and AirBnB of comparable quality and location cost about same. Even if it is any cheaper, it is not by much.
And now you asked, yes some of my favorite hotels are Eden Roc in Miami, and Marriott in Maui. Yeah they are a little bit more luxurious compared our normal hotels but highly recommended for special occasions.
I think hotels are fine, if you just like to chill out. For me, hotels never gave much excitement, adventure or novelty. I hate the blandness of all the hotels, how all the decoration and furniture and even the people seem fake. There are good hotels here and there, but usually they are either old or small. Not chains filled with families of screaming kids. After fews days, I also want to eat some home cooked meals. In any part of the world, you get tired of the local staple and just want something familiar for a change.
I'd have never been able stay in such unique places the world with hotels. From a house overlooking volcanoes of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, hillside a-frame in New Zealand, to design desert villa in Joshua Tree, a urban loft filled records in Berlin, a modern lakehouse in Finland to simple cottage near Denali, Alaska and many others.
I hate the blandness of all the hotels, how all the decoration and furniture and even the people seem fake
I often hear that argument and actually think it's the other way round.
Sure, some hotels offer very generic rooms. However, I stayed in memorable, extremely well designed hotel rooms. Awesome beds, which can compare to my own (rather good) bed at home. Let alone the extremely well and thought thru design of the lightning and the blinds. If you want just one example look at the Bangkok LeMeridien.
On the other hand I never experienced a rented appartment, be it via AirBnb or other purveyors, which wasn't completely generic. With the same cheap Ikea furniture of shoddy quality and decorated worse than the worst examples of "hotel art".
I think where you are coming from is the ideal where AirBnb started, but which is no more the case for years. Most offers, by a wide margin, are by professional landlords, hording dozens if not hundreds of appartments managed by some faceless management company.
The only hotel I've actually enjoyed staying at was the Marina Bay in Singapore. Other than that hotel rooms always feel meh. Very generic experience.
If you're comparing cost, you probably go for expensive airbnb experiences. I have never encountered a place where airbnbs were not cheaper than hotels (and I've airbnb'ed everywhere in the world).
The kitchen always ends up being less useful than I imagine it will be because it's so unpredictable what basic ingredients will be there. Many are pretty bare-bones, and by the time I buy cooking spray or oil, salt & pepper, basic condiments, etc. I have spent more than I would have by going out to eat. They're great for longer stays, but for a long weekend trip I almost never do anything more complicated than breakfast cereal or a freezer pizza.
We usually stay in one place for 1+ week, and we usually eat out for lunch but eat breakfast and cook and eat dinner at home, except a few nights out. So the kitchen is essential for us!
The solution is to carry the basic spices with you in small containers. I even pack pre-measured spiceblends for meals that require common ingredients which can be brought in every part of the world. I also bring my own coffee and Aeropress.
The oil or butter is annoying, so you might need to buy it if you're unlucky and the place has no olive oil.
You hesitate at close friends staying at your place? They probably are not that close of friends. I'd toss the keys to plenty of relatively close friends with a "hey make sure the cat doesn't sneak out, he's a bastard like that. Have a good weekend, feel free to raid the fridge"
We probably just have different views of personal space. I don't like people in my private spaces; it is hard enough when I am there, and even worse when I am not.
It isn't about closeness to the person; I wouldn't be super comfortable with my best friend, my family, doesn't matter.
After a host made a suspicious/creepy comment about our stay, I started logging into host routers (creds usually printed on the device) and look at what other devices are connected. The camera may not be on that network, or not networked at all, but it’s a little peace of mind.
There is an app called Fing on iPhones and maybe Android. It will scan the WiFi you are on and give you a bunch of information. There’s also a few more network functions you can do. It recognizes phones, my plex server, and a brother printer at my house to name a few.
> There is an app called Fing on iPhones and maybe Android.
This seemed like a really useful tool; I looked it up on the app store and - uh oh - it's free. Screenshots don't seem to show any ads and there's no IAP, so how do they make their money? Taking a look at their privacy policy[1], they collect:
> Information on MAC addresses and Wi-Fi networks you collect through the App or the Box. Please note that this Privacy Policy does not exempt you from any obligations you may incur should you collect other individuals’ personal data.
So basically, Fing will help you find devices on your network, and then store what it finds forever for other uses. And if you accidentally reveal some PII to Fing while scanning someone's network that's your problem.
This is the state of "apps". Collect everything, store everything, disavow any responsibility for anything. One of the first phone apps I used was a G-meter that just read the accelerometer and showed you a graph of your acceleration. It was a neat little toy. Today that app would send all accelerometer data back to some server farm in case there's anything that can be mined from that data.
So, download it while in the AirBnB. If it shares data permanently about the AirBnB location, fine. Delete the app immediately after using it. At your next AirBnB stay, do it all over again.
I don't actually use AirBnB very often. But I do end up doing network maintenance for friends, family and at the startup I work at. Fing seems like it would be useful for that purpose - but not with this kind of privacy policy.
Also, just like it's not ok for hosts to put cameras in the properties they're renting out, I don't think it would be ok for me, as a guest, to knowingly upload data that I would consider sensitive to a third party. Treat others how you would want to be treated, right?
And using Fing (works better on Android b/c on iOS it can't access raw MAC addresses) is perfectly legal. The fact that a default password is used or the password is posted on the router is not in any way legal permission to access it as a short-term guest. Look at Aaron Swartz's case if you don't know how readily prosecutors will (ab)use the CFAA.
Honestly who cares if it is illegal? What are they going to do? Literally nothing would ever happen. Using default creds on a home router really isn't going to get a prosecutors interest. They would probably laugh at you after you filed a complaint.
At the risk of sounding condescending, what you did was a crime and potentially makes you liable under the CFAA. Probably, no one in law enforcement would care, but I would not advise doing this in the future.
Ok, people suck. Not much we can do about that. For all you know, the host is archiving footage and could use it for whatever nefarious purposes later on.
What really isn't okay here is Airbnb's response. Indoor cameras should be explicitly against their policies and finding one in an apartment should immediately terminate all the listings by that host.
This is where some regulation actually makes sense, and it might not be a bad idea for Airbnbs to be treated as hotels -- especially all the properties that are exclusively used for this purpose. There's tons of those in bigger cities and they're pretty obvious since the "host" will have dozens of apartments available.
I will never use Airbnb again until they implement this policy, and I encourage everyone here to vocalize the same.
They'd end up having to remove like most of the listings in Orlando then. It's pretty difficult to find a nice house that doesn't have cameras. I've opted to just stay in apartment hotel suites instead - ends up being way cheaper anyways.
Here is my unpleasant story from 2 weeks ago when I was in Bali.
I had booked an apartment but the host was not replying to any of my messages/sms/calls. Fearing something was fishy I opened an Airbnb support ticket 3 days before my the checkin date. In those 3 days Airbnb support did not reply to me at all. It was a shitty feeling, I wanted to book another place but I had already paid for this one.
1 day before checkin, the host replied with a short message that I could checkin next day, he didn't address any of my questions nor any of my follow-up messages. Next day I go to the specified address of the villa and call the host, the host picks up this time but tells me that the address on Airbnb is wrong and sends me to another location. I go to the second location, the building does not look anything like the one in the photos, there is nobody there and I cannot get inside, the neighbour shouts that the building is empty because the lease contract has expired a month ago. it starts raining and I am standing there on the street with all my baggage and it starts to rain. I call the host, now really angry and he starts apologising that he is not even the landlord but just a guy from another country (India) and he does not know much about the booked property then he stops responding.
At this point I submit to the reality that this listing is some sort of scam and start looking for ways to contact Airbnb over phone to get urgent help since I have nowhere to go.
The Airbnb website is useless, cannot find any phone numbers to call. Finally I google and read on some forum, that there is no phone number for Airbnb in Indonesia and that I need to make a call to a US number. I make the call and they are very helpful. They tell me they will try to contact the host in the next 30 minutes and that I should look for other suitable listings. After 30 minutes they contact me again and they agree to cancel my previous booking so that I can book something else. I end up booking something which was is in the same price range but much lower standard (not much choice when doing same-day booking).
I talked to Airbnb support for 7 minutes in total and that cost me 28 EUR. Airbnb later agreed to refund me the 28 EUR for the phone calls.
After this experiece I am more keen on using booking.com again, have not had any such bad experience with them yet.
This is a pretty big oversimplification of the law. If you're not hiding the presence of cameras, they're not capturing private areas or those entrances directly, and you're not doing anything with that footage after the fact, it's unlikely to ever be an issue.
There was an /r/legaladvice thread a few weeks ago where someone's security camera recorded a cleaning lady's 16 year old daughter changing, which certainly has the potential to be more lascivious than a 2 year old post-bath time, and the consensus was pretty unanimously that the homeowner had nothing to worry about provided they weren't archiving or keeping that footage.
I agree with your conclusion regarding CP laws, but regarding possible invasion of privacy or similar claims, I think there is a notable difference between those cases. In the reddit case, the daughter was an unauthorized trespasser who LAOP did not permit or know would be on the property, and certainly no reason to believe would be changing in his bedroom. Here, renting a home to families, the host may have reason to believe otherwise.
To be fair, I did qualify my statement with a “could”. IANAL.
This likely depends on where it happens as well, and how aggressive the legal system is there. I know that I’ve heard of cases where a high school official was attempting to handle a situation where a student was distributing nude pictures of another student via their phone, and because the teacher forwarded the message to themselves so that they could show law enforcement, the teacher ended up being charged with possession of child porn.
I guess all I’m saying is that I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I could inadvertently capture something like that. Maybe 90% of the time you’re fine as long as you handle it properly, but we’ve all seen situations where someone ends up in a bad situation despite having no ill intentions.
Absolutely, the most common refrain on LA when anything related to this is involved on someone's device is always some version of "don't delete it, don't open it, don't touch the device, get a lawyer yesterday and have them talk to law enforcement."
My wife and I have done a lot of traveling over the last 5 years and usually stayed at an AirBnB. We used to have nothing but good experiences but the quality has become so inconsistent that we switched back to hotels. AirBnb is now no longer cheaper than a mid-budget hotel, and if anything goes wrong at a hotel, you can dial the front desk and get the problem resolved immediately. Plus check-in is easy and comfortable and you can often get other perks like breakfast or a gym.
The last straw was a bug infested cottage in Key West. The owner wasn't responsive for hours, and finally "dealt" with the issue by giving us a vacuum and telling us that's what he uses to get rid of them.
Reading this made me pissed off for you. AirBnb should have clear prohibitions on cameras in living quarters, regardless of disclosure. This host behavior is wayyy out of line.
I had been having great experiences until I got this place in NYC that when I just got in, the host started sending me messages on I could and couldn't do.
He told me to get rid of the shoes because I was hurting the floor, that I shouldn't leave heavy stuff on the sofa because it was brand new (my bag was on it). For a moment I thought that maybe he told this to everyone and then I found the camera. It was a 1 bedroom so the camera gave him a full view of the whole apartment. I covered the camera and decided not to communicate Airbnb because it was only for a week and I would be barely in the apartment during the day (it's NYC!). He gave me a great review but I decided to go back to hotels ever since.
Given that the entire Airbnb model involves the host, guest, and the company splitting the profit that comes from pushing externalities onto everyone else it’s hard to have sympathy for any of them. No honor among thieves and all that.
The profit doesn't come solely from pushing away externalities. It also profits by tapping into more transient supply of accommodation by home-owners. That is, people who happen to own a home but aren't living there at the moment, or who are willing to share the space.
This doesn't apply to people who buy houses with the intent to airbnb them, they are purely about avoiding hotel regulations.
Regardless of the AirB&B fine print, I think this would likely run afoul to local and state laws against unauthorized wiretapping. I would be interested in seeing it play out in court, because that's a pretty serious crime in some states. I doubt the owner of this unit is fully aware of their liability.
I've used Airbnbs in the past and some were great but now I'd only use one if no hotel is available. Recently I traveled to Thailand in the peak season and no hotel had the full block of dates available that I was looking at. Stayed at an Airbnb served by some Russian dude. We reach there and he wants a 3000 Baht "deposit", says it is standard. Couldn't argue with it, he agreed to take a USD100 bill instead. Instead of a receipt he took a photo of me standing with the USD100 bill and sent it to me :). Returned it back without a fuss but it was an odd experience.
The fact that AirBnB even allows recording inside of the rented appartments is utterly mind-boggling to me. I always assumed they'd ban recording or guests outright. Your home (even a temporarily rented one) is pretty much the primary place where you should expect complete privacy at all times.
Agreed. Even if I choose to have recording devices in my home, and then rent out on a temporary basis, it would be trivial for me to take them down before renting it out. Plus, I have the financial incentive to do so.
Allowing hosts to have cameras inside the rented space, regardless of recording state, seems like a bad policy indeed.
The only "legitimate" reason a host would want active cameras in the home is for protection against bad guests. This belies AirBnB's supposed "host guarantee" which should prevent this concern in the first place.
I actually prefer the hotels to Airbnbs. If price difference is not drastic - hotel. If employer pays - most definitely the hotel! I prefer to have maybe cookie-cutter but more or less reliable set of things and services available and not figure out what to find where, what to do, what not to do, read the goddamn house rules, look for the key under the rug, text some random people where are they with the key, do you have parking, do you not, etc.
It looks like Airbnb has a requirement that hosts "disclose all surveillance devices in their listings": https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/887/what-are-airbnb-s-ru...
How could they possibly say that the vague appearance of a camera in a photo satisfies the language of this policy?
I think the cracks in "break the rules" startups such as Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, etc. are starting to show. However, I think these companies have surfaced some interesting product ideas with accompanying demand. More established players might be able to adjust the business model a bit and make things more sustainable.
Ultimately we may not be staying at Airbnbs and driving Teslas, but maybe we'll be staying at some sort of Marriott "Experiences" boutique and driving electric cars from GM.
That is kind of creepy indeed. In my country you are allowed to video tape inside your own home and I assume that right extends even if you rent it out temporarily.
I guess far from every host does this, I would even say it's probably very rare. But maybe there is a reason to stay in a hotel after all ;)
In general privacy law seem to work under the "expectation of privacy", which is why you see signs warning of security cameras or monitors showing what they see.
In a rented room scenario, you obviously have an expectation of privacy up until someone tells you explicitly that there are cameras in the space, at which point I guess you can decide whether or not you want to stay there.
So in this case (and depending on local laws, obviously) it seems like the renter would have to convince a judge that the photo of the room with a white blob in the corner was enough notice to circumvent that expectation of privacy.
I recently stayed in an AirBnB in Hamburg/Germany. Not only did he write that it's not a hostel everywhere. He used his smart home to keep the temperature below the legal limit and had all internals checked setup with cameras without any information. From the way he talked he also checked whether you exited the shower(not literally the shower, but the bathroom).
He also had Bottles of sausages and would check through the camera who used them without paying. He also charged 50 cents for those coffee pads and used the camera to check on it.
When I asked him to turn on the heater he lied to AirBnB on the phone(which they recorded) and then assaulted me and kicked me out.
His one listing was removed temporarily but his other listings are still there. So yeah, even a hostel would have been better.
Edit: the response from AirBnB was way better than the response from German authorities, but that may have been because they heard everything on the phone.
It's Germany, and I have dark hair. When I went to file a police report the tall blonde police officer, he and his colleagues were mocking me in the back.
I ended up telling them off and will report it to the tax office. Which, while nasty seems to be only thing that will get that guy into trouble, Police at least doesn't care even though he violates a dozen laws including standard German privacy practice.
There is very little chance that German police in Hamburg would not consider those alligations serious. Lots of Germans have black hair. Few Germans are tall and blonde. German police will file your case in any case.
I guess you don't have a lot of experience with the police here.
This is actually very common. Whether you have dark hair or not, the former just makes it more likely. What I learned is that by law they're supposed to do that job. However, the general recommendation is not to go to the police, but rather to write the complaint to the DAs office[1]. Not only is a complaint to the DA office generally more fruitful they also immediately give you a reference number, which is more valuable than what most police officers will give you when you file a complaint there.
I'm going to contact the DPO yes, but I don't have any expectations. I'm not a big fan of Casper actually, his last legal publication is about animal rights. The SH DPO is way better efficient and faster at decisions. The line up is two ladies leading it, one of them with a technical background(computer scientist) and the other one a lawyer[2]. I work in German government, and we even tried to pay SH to get feedback(something they won't do).
That's why I was surprised when the Hamburg DPO received praise at the 35C3, since that's not inline with what I've seen from them at all.
While an anecdote doesn't prove much, a distant relative of mine with a more Mediterranean appearance was detained by police in Munchen on allegations that the bicycle he was riding was stolen as he allegedly fit the description of a bike thief. After proving them wrong they mocked him saying something like 'how did someone like you managed to land such a high paying job? Do your colleagues like working with you? I mean you know.. considering... etc.. etc..'. I don't know what happened with his complaints post-factum but it's not the first time I hear about racist/xenophobe behavior by law enforcement in Germany.
I've lived in Germany and there are still clear race issues left in certain areas but I can't speak for police personally. It's all very hush hush as well which is one of the reason I dislike Germany and would not live there again. I live in the U.S. now and for comparison, there are some tensions here too but it's on the surface and in general much better.
Is that limit applicable domestically - like would children be able to enforce it against a carer/parent. Or does it only apply to commercial arrangements?
Do you get to demand 20degC at work?
20degC is a bit hot for my liking, 18 degC as a minimum, perhaps - one should expect to wear a jumper in Winter.
Yes, if it's office work or other work without physical activity. Limits are lower for more active work. (and of course special rules exist for environments where working in cooler/cooled rooms is required)
Well in Sweden (which is where I live), at least one case I know of where I man video taped him having sex with women in his apartment didn't get any repercussions for it since it's perfectly legal to film someone in your own home without them knowing about it.
It is illegal however, to share that film without consent or video tape outside the apartment. You can video tape with your camera moving around in a public space without permission, but same here you cannot share it online or something like that.
I agree with these rulings and I think it should indeed be legal to video tape inside your own home. It's very illogical if that wasn't the case.
Your guests and family have an expectation of privacy IMO, unless you inform them otherwise. So, I wouldn't be surprised if your general right to video record activity at home was curtailed heavily.
The ECHR clause on right to private family life would certainly seem to curtail your rights (by giving rights to family/friends).
If you're in the EU it does not. You can record anything you want in the privacy of your home but if you record other people, they need to consent to it. The reasoning described in the article "but there's a camera in the picture of the room so you agreed to it" certainly wouldn't hold up under any interpretation of the GDPR.
Also even if it's your home, if you rent it out, that's a commercial activity even if it's your personal residence.
Also, if you have a clearly visible camera, I as a guest would cover it up the second I see it, and uncover it when I move out. I realize not everyone wants to adapt their home by tearing down theeir own cameras but they can power them down and have a post it note next to it saying "this is part of my alarm system but it's disconnected when AirBnB guests stay here, feel free to put this note note over the lens if you like /host".
If you have a hidden camera and someone found it, the reviews wouldn't be good for business.
I doubt the latter part is entirely true, especially post-GDPR. Privacy law always depends on the balance between legitimate interest and personal rights.
My biggest gripe is that the cleanliness has gone way down.
It used to be, a few years back, AirBnB would make sure everything was immaculate. I remember a host letting me in to her house and being embarrassed that there were garbage bins out front since it was garbage day. Everything was laundered, sheets were bleached and crisp, everything was on-par with a 5-star hotel.
For whatever reason, now when I stay in AirBnBs it's next to impossible to find a place that has that level of detail. Supply and demand, I guess. More people doing it, pressure to lower price, less money for cleaning, less money for quality linens. Sure... I get it. But it's turned me off AirBnB.
The last place I stayed in had dirty towels. Like they didn't even bother to put clean towels up, they were damp when we showed up and had someone's makeup on them. Was gross. I wrote in to complain, and used the dirty towel to wipe the floor and counter to show that those weren't clean either. The towels were sort of grey, and came off the floor just black.
And you know what I got? Billed for damaging a towel, they said that because I used their towel to wipe off their floor that it stained the towel. Likely wasn't good for the towel, but come on... the place was filthy. AirBnB needs a "white glove" service -- and I'd be willing to pay extra for this -- to ensure that everything is on-par with a nice hotel.
Never had a similar experience with Airbnb. But I switched back to Hotels and I found it way more comfortable and easier. Just good reviews and reasonable prices. Hotels are in good competition these days and you don't hear these scary stories about them.
I recently tried to book over AirBnB just for the convenience of it.
They requested government id and a new photo of me for verification. They also (indirectly and insidiously) asked for my permissions so sell all my personal data listed in the ID (biometrics, height, skin colour, ID number etc). Of course you'd have to read the privacy policy to know this, and many people don't. Also their facebook login asked for a list of all my friends as well as all my likes. What the hell does that have anything to do with them?
I just booked off their platform. It was easier and cheaper, and definitely more private. I also wouldn't recommend anyone to get vendor-locked so hard as to have their livelihood depended on this company's policies.
I have used around 20 airbnbs and had no problems, some are better than others, I have also used hotels and hostels, with problems, like bedbugs, noise etc... For a cheapest and more local experience AirBnB is awesome, just find a good place with good reviews
> I looked at the home guide again, and it did say that there were cameras “at the entrance,” which these cameras clearly were not. I contacted AirBnB about it, and long story short they said the single photo above was proper disclosure of both cameras.
> A lot of other weird stuff happened during this trip stemming from this -- AirBnB told my host we asked about the cameras, he sent someone to snoop on us, he left us a bad review, etc. My favorite has to be when my host discovered that I had unplugged the cameras, he wrote:
This is why I prefer established hotels and Yelp. It's much easier to deal with professional management instead of someone trying to make a quick buck on the side.
I still love Airbnb, but I have the same feeling that I’ve always had about it and Uber and Lyft and every other sharing economy disruptor - the existing industries had evolved the way they had for reasons, and the associated regulatory structures around them also evolved for reasons. After you have enough thefts and rapes and murders and property destructions over enough years, Airbnb will necessarily look a lot like a hotel chain, and Uber will look a lot like a traditional taxi company, and so on and so on.
There are two reasons I’ve decided to not use Airbnb again - specially when I’m overseas.
1) fear of getting locked out of Airbnb. I stayed in an Airbnb in Dublin in late 2017, place was OK, not too great -cheap ikea bed, cheap ikea couch, heater that was either tundra or Sahara. However getting in to this place required memorizing 8 digit number or having your phone on you. After that stay I genuinely appreciated 24hr staffed front desk where you can get a new key pretty much instantly.
2) a safe for your valuables (passport) and daily house keeping.
because if you get mugged abroad and that piece of paper goes away along with your wallet, you are shit out of luck. A hotel can give you a lot of support in situations when you're stranded abroad. On top of granting you access to the room, they can call people on your behalf, provide a wellfare check in case you've gone missing, etc..
Exactly this, I do try to keep note in my wallet but mistakes happen, wallets/phones get lost/stolen. I like the safety net of having a hotel frontdesk staff that can help out in the worst case scenario. From a personal experience - I got really sick during a trip abroad and frontdesk staff sent someone to a pharmacy to pick-up medicines for me and they were willing to call doctors if needed.
I was nervous the first time I stayed at an Airbnb and needed to remember a gate code and apartment code (in addition to the complex set of turns required to get to the apartment once you were in the gate), but eventually I realized that I’ve never not got my phone on me and in the absolute worst case I can blow the money on a hotel room for a night until I can get things sorted back out.
Of course in the scenario where you get mugged in a strange city none of that applies and I honestly have no idea what I would do... show up at the embassy and cry on the door until they opened on Monday, probably.
As for a safe for your passport, I guess it depends upon country. In many you’re required to always have valid ID and proof of visa (ie: the stamp in your passport) at all times. Usually those are also the more likely countries for being robbed, so there’s a bit of a catch 22 there.
When you read about the litany of issues that guests have, as evidenced here in these comments, does anyone have better experience with competitors like HomeAway?
If not it's a gap in the market. For example, for delivery services in the States you have Seamless, which is like an AirBNB or Uber for restaurants for delivery (I think only recently Seamless offers delivery people, but before it was the restaurants that have to provide). But there's now Caviar, which a) provides excellent customer-first customer service b) curates the restaurants carefully c) provides their own drivers with meticulous tracking and of course, the kicker d) costs more.
I would pay for better customer service and proper curation. Yes, even if it costs the same or MORE than a hotel, I prefer to stay in an apartment when I travel. I've definitely had a few surprises in AirBNB, but I've had a lot of delightful stays too with top-notch customer service provided by the host. But it's a crapshoot! I'll pay more for it not to be a crapshoot. The ratings system is a joke in my experience. Fine, take away the ratings and let me pay you more, future Silicon Valley company, for your people to verify the apartment meets standards and to be available on the phone 24/7 with onshore staff. I'll pay.
Why would anyone believe that an Airbnb offers the same security, privacy protections, safety, and comfort of a hotel? I have only stayed in an Airbnb a few times ever because I can never justify staying in one over a hotel for these reasons. The product is so unpredictable in the sense that you really never know what you're going to get until you get there.
From the host perspective, I am still amazed that Airbnb has normalized letting complete strangers into your home.
Just to add another +1 on the poor AirBnb customer support...
I rented out my place on AirBnb for 3 weeks and it took nearly a month before I received my payment from AirBnb. I filed a support ticket with AirBnb and the support person was extremely slow in responding, sometimes taking 2-3 days for a response. I had to tweet at AirBnb publicly and post on their public FB page to get responses. I looked up the AirBnb customer support rep on LinkedIn and looked like AirBnb has a good amount of their customer support staff abroad in Asia. Their support team told me it was an issue on their end but wouldn't go into details. It was obviously an issue when i went to the billing section on AirBnb and saw 500 errors when using Chrome's debugger to see the traffic. I was close to just tweeting at AirBnb Engineering to offer some help to fix their bug when I hadn't been paid thousands of dollars for putting my home on AirBnb for a month. It finally got resolved and I got a couple hundred dollars in AirBnb credit for my troubles.
Many of the complaints of mistreatment illustrate a feature of this housing marketplace: big capital assets are in control, not the demand.
This runs counter to many other marketplaces millennials (+- 10 years) are used to. Shoes? Chocolate? Restaurants? Types of alcohol? Transportation? Whatever the customer wants, the customer gets.
It’s a simple reality that Airbnb will align with the host who brings in $10-30k/yr over even the frequent traveler who spends $1-10k.
I’m super interested in understanding how this might bite Airbnb or open opportunities for competitors. I’m very curious about these huge economic, behavioral shifts and what they mean for the quality of a product/service and how these services align with humanity’s best interests.
Reasonably, AirBnB has already served its purpose. It has bludgeoned the hospitality industry forcing it to be more competitive. [1]
There is real opportunity for hotels to earn back customers and they should get this chance.
Due to hotel architecture they do not have the same problems as one-off airbnb units in neighborhoods. So they should reasonably consider offering greater privacy and reliability.
That said, the Marriott hack did not do them any favors.
Hotels can't operate at the slim margin that would allow them to compete with airbnn, otherwise, they would already have.
Vast majority of customers choose on price, and hotels offering privacy just doesn't seem like it'd be a selling point, esp. if the feature is assumed default already.
Maybe airbnb renters should be required to post clearly labeled snapshots of what each camera sees in their listings... a bit like this: https://i.imgur.com/Fg9R0D6.png
I've had varying Airbnb experience but always positive. A couple were just cheapo rooms to lay my head. The best was on a private vineyard, the house rules said no one in the hot tub after ten. We asked if it could be 11-11:30 and we will be respectful of noise. "Sure no problem". The hosts cooked us breakfast and we chatted over coffee. They were the perfect balance of leaving us alone and engaging. Even gave us a really cool tour of the property before we left. They had no complaints about us, we wrote a glowing review. A couple weeks later we got a small gift in the mail.
I just had an absolutely horrible experience with Airbnb & Airbnb 'support.' So bad in fact I'm exploring my options to go to arbitration though that's mostly an emotional reaction since I'm fairly sure it would be a waste of time.
I've gone from spending months a year in AirBnbs to now planning to never use the service ever again.
Airbnb used to be almost magical but the last three bookings I had have been progressively more horrendous and support is maddening. I'd be happy to share my recent experiences but I don't have any social clout to attempt to get anything out of it :(
When you stay at a hotel, you are definitely being recorded in hallways and most public areas. AirBNB should modify their policy to allow hosts to have recording devices outside their home (public spaces), but blanket ban any recording devices inside (off or on). Significant fines/banning would result from discovery. This policy would not deter legitimate hosts, while significantly reducing the likelihood of a PR disaster involving serendipitous recording.
This "as long as it is disclosed" policy invites grey areas like described in this post.
I just looked this up so I could be wrong, but as far as I can tell there are no regulations at the federal level or the state level that prevent hotels from having cameras in the room. There are 12 states with laws that prevent you from recording someone without their knowledge, which would apply to both hotels and AirBnBs, and anyone else.
So really, the only reason hotels are "safer" in this regard is because they seem to be more concerned with protecting their reputation.
Likely yes. I’d say that’s the same as having a camera outside the front door (the hotel room being the equivalent of the whole apartment/house, not the equivalent of a bedroom of course)
AirBnB should launch a surveillance/alarm product that is a combined alarm and camera, which allows the host to look at camera images when the property property is empty ONLY (i.e. when the guest has left the property and armed the alarm)
It would need to have e.g. a mechanically closed lens that opens when the alarm is armed in the home (so no one is home).
This product could also include other helpful things for AirBnB like a smart lock etc.
The camera is on when the property is supposed to be empty, that is, when the alarm is armed and the guest is not there. The camera is for monitoring the property with a guarantee that the guests are not monitored. This is similar to how a hotel works. I expect the hotel management to be able to go in to my hotel room when I'm not there (to repair something, clean etc.) but I also expect complete privacy when I'm in there.
I have cameras in my house that are used together with motion detectors as part of my home alarm system. If the alarm goes off I can see whether the alarm was triggered by my christmas tree falling over or by a burglar. They aren't used when the alarm isn't on. If I were to rent my house out on airbnb I'd probably cover or disconnect the cameras, becauuse I couldn't make a guest trust that they are only part of the alarm system. That's why a product that guaranteed it would be good.
I think the point in this example is that you can compare pre-check-in and post-check-out photos and demonstrably show damage or (visible) theft occurred during a specific reservation without impact the privacy of the guests.
As an AirBNB host that manages remote properties, I think a camera that operates like this could be a good solution - provided that guests understand and trust such a system. While it wouldn't prevent a guest from trashing the place, it could be a useful property protection against theft.
I'm astounded by the number of people here insinuating that the hotel industry is any better. I realize I've probably been lucky with my AirBnb visits and unlucky with my hotel visits, but still...
Several times I've ran into hotels which advertise AC, but when you get there you realize it's impossible to get acceptable room temperature. When you contact the front desk, they simply tell you that during [this time of year] the entire AC system of the hotel has been set to [heat/cool] and we can not set an individual room to [cool/heat] even if it is 27C inside the room.
One time there was a sewage smell coming from the bathroom strong enough to be sensed in the bedroom. The front desk again did nothing to alleviate the problem, going as far as lying that they are unable to move us to another room because all the rooms are booked (despite us seeing very few guests in the hallways, indicating the hotel was mostly empty at the time).
Another time the hotel staff badgered us for extra money throughout our stay despite that the hole stay was paid for in advance. They claimed that we had "erroneously" been given too low of a rate ($200/night for a small room in Milan) because we had used a "bad agent" (a booking site they apparently disliked, yet chose to work with anyway). They had knowledge of our booking for a long time, and instead of contacting us before our trip, they badger us for additional payments after we arrive?
These are not really isolated incidents. The majority of the time I visit a hotel, something is wrong to the extent that I never want to visit that particular hotel again. In contrast 100% of my AirBnb experiences have been good so far.
This is a tough one. There are some seriously nuts and creepy people out there. If you use Airbnb with your teenage kids and somebody has hidden a camera somewhere for their own personal pleasure what can Airbnb do? Inspect every property that they list?
At least with a hotel the owners usually care about their business and reputation.
At some point if they don’t start inspecting every property they list, then a competitor will come out with a selling point on inspections and trustworthiness.
I'm about to embark on a nomadic trip so I will be depending on AirBnBs and hotels a lot. Can I just ask: If the host has not disclosed security/surveillance but such equipment is present am I allowed to run de-auth attacks against the cameras so I can 'disable' them temporarily?
You have a point :D. But I would expect AirBnB owners to lie about it and me being unable to find it when it's hidden in a plant or something. I was mostly curious about any legal ramifications that would come up if I decided to take my privacy in my own hands.
This is becoming a bigger problem lately, it is now part of my routine to de-bug Airbnbs, first by unplugging all visible cameras, then by scanning the network for other equipment, but maybe we also need to shut off the lights and look for IR noise to find hidden non-network cameras.
It's a pretty big opening for the hotel industry to be able to fight back against AirBNB by saying "stay at a hotel, it's safe, you won't be robbed, given a bad review, or spied on by hidden cameras".
I'm reading this thread comment by comment and it just reminds me of the PayPal stories right before Stripe entered the industry.
It seems that the market is ready for a new competitor.
If you only stay in Airbnb "bed and breakfasts" you'll likely have none of the issues described in these comments. Plus, I like to meet my host and have them make me breakfast.
While I totally get your reference and tounge-in-cheek nature, you'd be responsible for damages. Besides super bright UV LED device would be much cheaper and easier to carry with you.
Yeah, we had some weird experiences at an Air B and B which seemed to be part of an ongoing attack that we were experiencing at the time. You can read about all that here if you are so inclined:https://www.scribd.com/document/389212460/Antisemitism-in-We...
Airbnb is nobody's friend except the CEO and stockholders. Have a problem, tough. File a lawsuit, now we're communicating. This is how Capitalism works.
I feel like we need some sort of hub for consumers to get together and share cost of initiating legal action. When you're solo, you are indeed powerless in this system.
Can someone with legal experience care to chime in? I wasn't aware that binding arbitration can be enforced in this situation. I don't think you can sign your rights away like that. I recall I had a lease contract a while back which had something like that and my attorney laughed at it saying that it won't stand up in court.
Any implementation of sharing living quarters with other people has too many problems. People nowadays don’t understand what it means to be clean. Back wen cleanliness was up to you and of great practical importance, people were aware of beg bugs, Scabies, fleas, dust mites and the such like. Bed bugs are disgusting and when you stay in a hotel of any kind you risk picking them up. Their eggs stick to you, your luggage, everything and you trail them everywhere you go, including your own house. I just don’t understand why people want to sleep in bug infested cum stained shit hole shared rooms. I sleep in my car instead and while it’s not as nice as a room, it’s a lot better than sharing.
Over worried a bit much, no? A large majority of people staying in any given shared living place do not get bed bugs. Plus staying in your car doesn't really fly when you have a family or take an airplane and have no car.
Yeah. I still massively prefer carrying my own space with me if possible. But actually I think hotels could be an option even for people like me. If rooms were properly constructed then they wouldn’t be able to harbor any parasites at all and it would be possible to clean them thouroughly and properly between guests. If I were to start a hotel, I would make public the methods of cleaning and then offer some kind of verification for each guest. Like the receipt checklist you get on a ups, your room would come with some kind of receipt of cleaning. Mattresses would be sealed in plastic. All cloth goods like sheets and curtains would be autoclaved and come with proof of having been so. I honestly think hotels focus way too much on making rooms look homey and warm. Give me a small barren room that’s 100 percent guaranteed to be clean.
Is this really a camera? It looks like an infrared motion detector from the (low resolution) photo. It has an opaque bit of white plastic in the front, which makes for a terrible camera protector, but is what PIR motion detectors use.
This blog post is not true and not fair. Airbnb specifies that there must be textual disclosure of any cameras, and there is a section on the listing page that shows them.
It's also very rare for a security system to include indoor cameras. My own uses motion detectors to provide information about climate control and lighting needs, but absolutely no interior cameras.
It's not clear to me that the object in the picture is a camera. If it is, I do think the host should rethink having cameras in a bedroom, but if that's what it takes for him/her to feel comfortable renting out the home, then as long as it's disclosed clearly, then it's OK.
"Will we be expected to review similarly complex documents/photos every time we enter a physical space? How can we avoid the illusion of consent that we currently have in the online world?"
You could start by understanding that when you participate in an activity that is attempting to extend the online experience into the physical world, that might be exactly what you get. Caveat emptor.
I just assume that there will be camera constantly recording when I stay in airbnb, or anywhere really. They way I never have to worry about whether it exist or not. As recording technology becoming more and more advance, it's less and less reasonable to expect privacy. I rather adapt my life to fit this new culture.
I think expecting privacy will always be the reasonable approach. Giving bad actors an out because "oh well the technology's so advanced now let's just accept it" is giving creeps a pass.
I didn't say giving bad actor an out. Just because you have information doesn't mean you are allowed to use the information to harm me. Its still illegal to do so.
I'd be hesitant to have surveillance equipment or anything that could be mistaken for surveillance equipment because a review that there is a camera in any of a landlord's properties would mean I'm not renting from them, ever.
I really don't care whether they use whatever is recorded in a bad way or not.
That's because you don't really care about privacy. If it were something else 'you cared about' you would be saying something completely different and wondering why others don't share your concern.
These things are generational and accumulated wisdom about privacy, surveillance and their cascading consequences into other aspects of society including sleepwalking into a police state are well known.
For those on the other side of the police state or who gain from these shifts, and there are many apart from many who 'just accept', these are merely to be hand waved away, 'normalized' as 'inevitable', 'not such a bad thing' or 'accepted' with quiet resignation but perhaps those with a greater appreciation of history, evolution of human societies and the perpetual quest for freedom and democracy and what it entails can take a wider view.
You can choose to care about privacy, but then you have to accept that there will be cost associated with it, you have to worry all the time about every single thing to do. It mentally taxing and the cost is just going to be higher and higher.
>These things are generational and accumulated wisdom about privacy, surveillance and their cascading consequences into other aspects of society including sleepwalking into a police state are well known.
Human and its society always evolving and changing, you can't expect everything stay static, we human always have to adapt to changing society and environment.
>For those on the other side of the police state or who gain from these shifts
Then instead we should demand equal transparency for everyone, including those in the government.
On the contrary with surveillance there is a 'chilling effect' and people will be constantly wary and not speak their mind. These societal experiences have already happened, are heavily documented and thus we do not have to speculate, we know.
The only reason you don't live in a police state and in a democracy is because someone 'cared' about it. Its perfectly valid not to care about these things but its quite another to try to make a virtue out of personal passivity or indifference.
Since there is no reference to 'static' in the original comment that is a meaningless straw man, its like telling people fighting against surveillance, anti-democratic or fascist forces not to bother as 'change is inevitable'.
One way against police state is to fight/demand as much transparency as possible for everyone, including the government. Government want to surveillance the citizen, fine, we should be able to surveillance government too.
I'm no privacy nut, but I'd rather not have too many strangers making videos of my sexual activity.
What would you do, hide under the covers? Make the room as dark as possible? Or just let people record your sexual activity and simply not worry about any videos that may be floating around out there?
- Host listing quality has gone consistently downhill. Now, it's many slumlords just trying to make a quick buck rather than support the original community idea or provide a great stay.
- Airbnb support response times are horribly slow. They hide their phone number, then force you to go through a ticketing system for urgent issues. Then, they start assigning you a new "case manager" every few hours as their shifts change, which means the rep never is caught up on the issue. Sometimes, they forget to transfer you to a new rep before ending their shift, which could result in zero responses for days until the rep works again.
- When there is a problem, Airbnb supports the host and makes little to no effort to relocate users. For example, when our unit flooded, among other problems, the feedback was basically "well we can book you into another available unit". The problem was that it was peak Summer in Barcelona, we were there for a long period of time, and the only available units were minimum 5x the price.
- We had an Airbnb burglarized. Again, we waited hours for a response, as a police forensics unit was dusting the unit for fingerprints. We suspect that the host was complicit after realizing that previous tenants were also burglarized. Airbnb's insurance policy covered none of our losses ($10K+ in electronics, jewelry, watches, clothing, etc). We ended up feeling unsafe and canceling the reservation with 3 weeks remaining. As a "courtesy", Airbnb support credited our account for less than the cost of one night at a local replacement unit. Because we accepted the credit, they considered the matter "resolved" and did nothing else.
I've spent $30K+ on Airbnb. It started as a great alternative to hotels. Now, I can no longer recommend it, and I prefer a hotel.