Airbnb and security camera disclosure

I've never got this at all. Why should you pay 5x price for AirBnb's risk?

0. https://youtu.be/RJHScbdp15s

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)_/¯"

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.

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.

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'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?

(I no longer use Airbnb btw)

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.

I have had similar experiences to yours (as, obviously, have many other repliers in this thread).

I have mostly switched to booking.com, which also has some homeshare type listings (or maybe that's only in Europe?).

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.

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.

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.

I prefer to stay away from any company that doesn’t offer a human to talk to when things go awry.

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.

I am definitely going to do comparison shopping again, it was an awesome experience.

An industry can only be disruptive for so long. Eventually, it will either fail, or be successful and become the new status quo.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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 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 ... ").

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.

Every startup is banking on consumers forgetting this. "Hey, X is far too inefficient/expensive, you deserve Y".

If the startup becomes a unicorn, it's never going to be long before they start following the same rules as the incumbents they toppled.

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.

There needs to be some reasonableness to this. And consistency.

I wrote them an insanely negative review. I also unplugged their router, because fuck them.

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?

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?

The interviewer was likely looking for an anodyne coding suggestion, not critical thinking.

[1] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/recode-decode/e/5518597...

I hesitate to let close friends stay at my place when I am out of town. I can't IMAGINE letting strangers stay.

* 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.

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.

No router login required just the WiFi password.

This doesn't apply to people who buy houses with the intent to airbnb them, they are purely about avoiding hotel regulations.

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.

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.

Also even if it's your home, if you rent it out, that's a commercial activity even if it's your personal residence.

The ECHR clause on right to private family life would certainly seem to curtail your rights (by giving rights to family/friends).

Getting a set of clean towels isn't what I would consider "white glove" service. It seems more like "basic level of service".

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.

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.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2018/02/27/...

Step 1 to adapt my own apartment to be possible to AirBnB would be to remove any cameras.

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.

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?