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Comment by julienchastang | Hacker News Reader

There have been a few threads about AirBnb lately with a lot of people reporting negative experiences so I will add my own $0.02. I have stayed in many AirBnbs. The reason is, I find it is the only way to have a tolerable family vacation is when everyone has their own sleeping quarters. When we are all piled into one (often overpriced and not so clean) hotel room, it makes for less than ideal sleep and everyone ends up grouchy. Plus when you travel with children, it is really nice to have a kitchen and a way to do laundry. At any rate, my observation for all my AirBnb stays is most of them are quite nice. Many hosts go to great lengths to have their guests have a nice stay. There have been a few crappy experiences, but not many. The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

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>> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

In my view this is major. To describe it better - need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties.

Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys. Then the list goes on.

AirBnb expects and encourages misrepresentation of properties and misleading descriptions to stimulate cash flow. Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.

How is this different from a hotel? From rentals in general?

I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.

"What you pay is what you get" rule applies.

Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews. During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week.

This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation.

But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background.

And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.

"What you pay is what you get" -- not quite. Tell that to the folks who bought Enron or Worldcom stock.

It is more accurate to say "You don't get what you don't pay for".

HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved.

Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.

In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.

In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.

>HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system.

How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?

HotelTonight always had awful customer support. They sold me a hotel room during February fashion week in NYC. Some sort of mistake happened with either HT or the hotel, and the room was not available upon my 11pm arrival.

Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable.

After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city.

Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.

Damn, that is brutal... Shoulda stayed at Hotel Penn that price ....

Had a similar situation and ended up having to book someone a $2000 a night hotel room. It’s no joke being out of a room in a place where hotels are 100% sold out, or non existent. This is one of the reasons I refuse to use Airbnb in most normal situations. It’s a wild card.

The good news is that now there's a simple solution: if this happens in the future, you book a $200 Uber helicopter, $100-200 room at the airport, then another helicopter back in the morning, and you save ~$700. Easy! :D

I had an issue with HotelTonight last year after the hotel I was staying at ended up charging my "incidentals" credit card for the entire room+tax for the night (vs what I paid HotelTonight for).

Between HotelTonight and the actual property (a Kimpton Hotel), it was resolved in under 90 minutes.

Look -- I've had issues with Hilton, Marriott, and HotelTonight -- that just comes with the territory when you spend 200+ nights a year in hotel rooms. How they deal with the issue is what brings you back (and honestly, it's why I'm lifetime diamond at Hilton, even though I did a LOT of work for marriot.com a few years ago).

One important difference is that hotels get much larger review volumes than a single AirBnB, meaning sites like TripAdvisor can give you a good picture of what the place is really like.

Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general.

A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.

Not sure I feel the same way in my experience. I find airbnb photos to be accurate for the actual place I’ll be in, even if they might be leaving some details out.

I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up.

Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.

For one thing, hotels have a robust ecosystem for anonymous reviews and established reputation.

With a hotel, if you complain and write a harsh review, you don't get penalized yourself. In OP, people complained and got B.S. made up about them, which impacts their future ability to travel. The author didn't even write a review. The incentives are all there to only write the happy stuff for future travelers. You, as that future travel really can't trust the reviews. At least at a hotel, with its more numerous but possibly fake happy reviews, you can look at what the bad ones say, because they won't be incentivized out of existence.

> How is this different from a hotel?

It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.

Note also that if a host cancels on you at the last moment, you can't give a negative review at all.

That would never happen with a hotel.

This does happen with hotels, in fact a few posts up someone does mention this happening to them.

That said, in December my ex wife had an Airbnb cancel just before her trip. She had to find another place in a hurry at twice the price.

You can usually leave a negative review for a hotel even if you didn't stay at it. AirBnB doesn't allow it.

Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.

I have seen the automated messages along the lines of "host canceled booking 24h before check-in" on many or even most Airbnb listings. Is this not still a thing?

You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.

Yes, that's indeed nowadays happening. In practice if they cancel two days before you arrive and you have fly to another continent to stay somewhere, it still sucks. Add to that for example a fair like CES and no normally priced hotel alternatives, and it's a big issue.

> Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.

-I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country, but after using AirBnb 30+ times traveling with wife and three kids in Northern/Central Europe, I’ve only had two issues - once the place we were to stay was double-booked (and we arrived last!); the other it turned out what was described as a ‘bedroom’ in the listing was a storage room with no windows, hot water tank, a few shelves packed with all sorts of junk and barely room for a dirty mattress on the floor.

In both cases AirBnb promptly decided I was due a refund, my only minor gripe being it took a couple of weeks before the money was actually refunded.

I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. (good customer service says the replacement will be better, hotels try to reserve their best suites until last just to ensure that they have the better room around just in case). I'm some new city and I want to get my family to sleep...

>I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW.

-Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have no fuss at all - but when a bad experience occurred, AirBnb were better than I had feared with regards to setting things right.

The double booking was after a ten-hour drive with kids aged 10, 5 and 3 in the back seat. I didn’t need that.

Luckily, the host had friends nearby who shacked us up for the night, so disaster was averted - but this was way out in the Swedish boonies and I envisaged having to drive another couple of hours before finding a hotel.

To me it sounds as if you are saying "I want the charm\location\social experience of staying with a local resident AND I want the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of the hotel industry AND I don't want to pay for the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of a hotel."

As with software, pick two.

Airbnb has functionally became where it is expected to get the latter two. When I've used Airbnb I have never expected nor cared about the "charm" or the "local resident", it's been a de-facto hotel. If there was a problem, of course I would expect Airbnb to do their job. Why wouldn't you?

I'm not defending AirBnB, because they totally enable and profit from scams as documented in the original article. But it is just the user expecting to get hotel services (rebooking and room swaps) from a non-hotel (whether genuine homestay or micro-hotel-entrepreneur).

AirBnB wont play down that expectation because again they profit more from it, but from the website and concept it is clear that you are dealing with random unprofessional strangers with a minimum of guarantees. Its kinda like the Uber contractor-vs-employee categorization for drivers.

AirBnB should definitely do a better job, but I maintain the risks are inherent in the business model, and you and the other users want the benefits of the risk (lower prices), without accepting the consequences of the risk.

To be fair, I expect the major corporation to have the "resources of a hotel" and handle the rebooking/room swap. They get a big fee on every booking, right? Am I just paying tens-to-hundreds per booking for the privilege of using their search engine and (apparently worthless) rating system?

I completely disagree. I never start an Airbnb search assuming that the hosts are hospitality professionals. I don't expect hotel-level standards. In fact, my spidey-sense goes into yellow-alert when I come across a listing that appears to be for a hotel.

I don't want to stay with a local resident - in fact the only times I've stayed at an AirBnB (twice so not a significant sample) I never saw the owner, we just got the code to the lock box and used the house for a few days. This is a hotel.

I'd stay with a hotel (and sometimes do) if they would offer me as many bedrooms and a kitchen to work with.

When my fiance and I stayed at a place in Paia on Maui, the place looked immaculate from the pictures. But when we got there it was full of cockroaches. We had literally just gotten in at like 4 pm, put groceries down on the counter, and the little buggers were on them almost immediately.

We were exhausted and didn't have the energy to really do anything after our 6 hour plane flight. The hosts came in and tried to resolve things first by removing all the appliances and then by offering us a bribe. I had documented all of this on the AirBnB website via private messages, taken pictures of the cockroaches, and found a can of bug spray(the hosts knew they had an ongoing problem and still rented to us!) to spray the roaches with. They were falling out of every crevice that I sprayed in the kitchen.

We ended up spending a very restless night there, and in the morning I found a single roach in the bathroom. We were going to move out the next day, but ended up scrambling to find a hotel room in Maui that afternoon after driving the road to Hana.

When I called AirBnB to report the cockroaches the representative basically said he couldn't guarantee me any kind of refund, and moreover that I should be used to staying in "less than clean conditions" as a bachelor who has traveled for business. I was flabbergasted.

They eventually got us a refund but I have never had such a terrible customer service experience from any company, period. I will never stay in AirBnB again. Evidently they don't enforce any standards of cleanliness and they take all hosts at their words as to the fitness of the property. The CSR that initially handled my case was a huge asshole and made me feel like he didn't care about me at all. The later CSRs were better. Staying in an AirBnB was the most stressful vacation experience I have ever had and I will never trust them again.

As an aside, you should make it a point to call their support line during the hours of business in the EST or CST timezones. Their day shift CSRs actually seemed to care about the problem. But their night shift appears to be an overseas call center, and they treated me like shit.

I had a similar experience in Honolulu. AirBnB with baby German cockroaches.

I was not happy but at some point reality has to set in. Cockroaches are somewhat normal in tropical zones. I Googled around and found several tourists advising others that cockroaches are a reality in these locations. Even proper hotels had quite a few reviews involving cockroaches.

I would have been fine with one or two adult cockroaches. I've killed them before in my apartment. But this was an established infestation, with adults and nymphs of various ages crawling all over. They were crawling on the bath towels, in the appliances, in the kitchen etc.. Moreover, a hotel would not knowingly list or rent a room with a massive cockroach infestation.

> Their day shift CSRs actually seemed to care about the problem. But their night shift appears to be an overseas call center, and they treated me like shit.

This was my experience as well. Called in the evening about the listing not being described. The CSR was pretty useless. Called the next morning and got someone from California who was far more helpful.

At least cockroaches don't bite. We got an Airbnb once in Belize that was effectively open air (it was too hot otherwise and there was no A/C) and the bed had mosquito netting around it which didn't go all the way to the ceiling. The host said "Oh just use the fan. Mosquitos hate fans." Of course the fan didn't work. We vacated that place quick. I still don't know whether this was a scam or simply a case of the locals being completely used to something an out-of-town guest would find horrifying.

The latter. Mosquitoes really do hate fans.

> The host said "Oh just use the fan. Mosquitos hate fans."

This is true: Mosquitos home in on CO2, and fans scramble that quite a bit.

Whether that is sufficient or not is your own personal choice.

I should clarify: The fan was broken.

It's amazing that a billion dollar digitally facilitated reservation system in 2019 allows for double bookings.

Oh, the problem was the host, not AirBnb. She’d registered with more than one service and had forgot to update her AirBnb calendar with the booking from $SITE, whichever it was.

The problem is that a property is listed on multiple sites and the different sites have incentive to not play nicely with each other. It's up to the owner to manually black on dates as they are booked on the other services. Most of hte time it works fine but since it's humans involved things can slip through the cracks.

> -I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country

Would not be surprised if it did. I remember one rental in the Netherlands where the english text said free parking, but the dutch text said parking available. The problem was AirBnBs translation and they refunded my parking expenses.

> need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties.

I've never had a problem with this, but I also don't bother staying anywhere that doesn't have a 4-star or better average. If you just set your filter at >= 4 stars, then these problems go away, and we also comb through the reviews of our top picks to make sure there's nothing unexpected. Consequently, we've had nothing but good experiences.

AirBnB doesn't have anonymous reviews and there is extreme social pressure to only give 4 and 5 star review.

TFA addresses why reviews are inflated and misleading:

>Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future. Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review. Choose the latter option, and you could come across as too demanding by other prospective hosts, or, in extreme cases, even receive a retaliatory review.

I don't think this is entirely accurate.

What's going on here is that Airbnb has essentially made a pass/fail review system, where 5 stars is pass and anything less is fail. Thus, short of a visit being completely terrible and the host awful, I would feel bad giving anything less than a 5 star review, since it would adversely affect the listing and the host.

On one hand, this does encourage hosts (and guests I suppose) to do their best. On the other hand, this eliminates honest reviewing, making reviews either "Best stay ever!!!!!1 (5/5)" or "This place sucks! The host is terrible!(1/5)"

I hate star-based review systems.

A review system should just be a series of factual questions that are aimed at determining whether a potential customer is likely to have problems, be satisfied, or enjoy their stay. And the scores should be subjective; e.g. if you're single then the questions that impact a family should be eliminated from calculating the score.

For example, down the hall, there's a dog with a persistent high-pitched bark. If I'm reviewing them, ideally, I just answer a simple question, "are there persistent noise disturbances from neighbors?" Yes.

I think the reason it's not done this way is because you'd have to put a lot of thought into maintaining the questions.

What you described sounds exactly like "reading between the lines"

I meant that the review score should tell you whether or not you need to read between the lines. If you don't want to read between the lines, stick to results with 4+ star reviews (maybe 4.5+ star reviews). I _also_ read other reviews out of an abundance of caution and to give some insight into how the top results differ. We should be able to agree that this is not meaningfully "reading between the lines" even if we don't agree about the reliability of average review score as an indicator.

Yes. I'm in charge of booking a ski trip for ~15 friends each year, and the amount of reading between the lines I have to do to make sure everyone has a comfortable place to sleep is crazy.

Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.

Hotels have it right up front: 2 Queens. Period.

This isn't foolproof either, though. I booked a hotel for 2 people in Chicago for an anniversary trip. We arrived to find the hotel had 4 very narrow and short bunkbeds. I checked the booking and it makes no mention of this.

The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.

There are also hotel brands and official indeoendent star ratings.

KingsNQueens. Like AirBnB, but for people who want to know what they're getting :).

What ridiculous is when you try searching for 'whole homes' and you end up getting 'apartments' which are nothing more than someones basement. Airbnb seems to encourage this too by letting people put whatever tags they want. It's kind of a joke. In addition, hiding the address makes it hard to double check on google street view.

Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.

I get that they want to hide the address to total strangers, but I'm sure it would be easy for Airbnb themselves to pull up the google streetview and have it as a static image on the listing.

Now you'd need to add some AI in to blur house numbers and $identifying_features - Street View's own AI knows to blur signs but leave house numbers intact (I only just realized this) so you can positively ID somewhere you're looking for.

I have even seen this on Zillow recently. Searching for rentals, choose type as House, and then it's the upper floor department in a house and the listing reads "you will be sharing the top floor with me".

I rarely book for more than two people, but when I have I found that filtering on "2+ bathrooms" very quickly gets me the flats that really have several bedrooms.

I suggest reading "whole home" to mean "whole space". In fact, that's basically what I see on Airbnb now - "Entire place". Personally, I have no issue when that turns out to be a separate apartment in a larger house, as long as I'm not sharing the entrance/exit and living space with others.

Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.

And then they have the nerve to complain to AirBnB if you hold an all-night drug-fueled orgy.

> Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys

Sadly that sounds like mort advertising of everything, so I can't say I'm surprised.

> Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is

As does every single hotel ever in existence.

I've stayed at 22 airbnb's 11 were fine. 11 had issues most with false advertising in some form or another. One listed the wrong location and if they had listed the correct location I would not have rented even though the room's interior matched. A few claimed to include onsite parking but didn't which of course is very inconvenient. The last one that did that claimed "Easy Street Parking" as AirBnb's blatant lie. I usually had to park a mile way or pay for a $25 a night garage a few blocks away. One claimed wifi but was actually just stealing it from the neighbors and it only worked in a corner of the apartment if lucky. Another who I asked if their heaters worked, because a previous one was cold, said yes but when I got their the heater was as loud as a vacuum cleaner and their wifi had a notices "don't use much as it will run out". This for a place I expected to get work done. AirBnb in Japan is full of listing claiming 2 or 3 bedrooms but that actually only have 1 and this isn't a cultural issue. Look at any J-apartment rental site and there is zero ambiguity about what 1, 2, and 3 bedrooms are.

It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund. It's totally within their power to say in so many words "be evil and we'll pull your funding and report you to the authorities". IMO AirBnB is complicit in these issues. There is no punishment for bad listings and often AirBnB doesn't even have the options in their system to list them correctly. They even removed my review that included pictures of proof.

I have a similar rate with AirBnb -- 50% were great, the rest had "issues," which ranged from exaggerated claims ("minutes from downtown") to serious safety problems. Agree that Airbnb's policies (or lack of them) are contributing to the situation -- for instance, no serious punishment for false advertising.

But I have a hard time dumping bad policies on YC's plate, or demanding that YC "report you to the authorities" unless criminal activity/negligence is involved.

YC owns a tiny tiny piece of AirBnB. They definitely do not have any sort of power over the issues that you bring up.

I would say that YC has a relatively large cultural impact, given its investment size. People outside of SV barely even know who Sequoia is, let alone care about who they fund. But a lot of people know about YC and what they are doing. While financially, YC pulling funding wouldn't have a big impact, culturally it'd be a huge bomb.

They likely do have the power to disassociate themselves from Airbnb though.

(Like, I don't think that Y Combinator owes me anything or gives a shit about what I think or whatever, I just think "they are a minority owner" is weak sauce)

The value of YC as an investor is not the cash they offer but the advice and guidance. As such their influence is disproportionate to their investment.

Maybe back with AirBnB was just getting started. But not anymore.

Compare that to 100% of My priceline bids being accepted by hotels that were much better than expected and at rates about half what you'd book directly.

I'm so glad now after years of never booking an airbnb I can say that with pride. I never gave this scummy company a single dollar. I knew who they were from the first experience.

I've gone 100% Booking.com/Agoda and been really happy with all my bookings, and I've traveled at least 4-6 weeks every year for the last 3 years. I like being able to read 100s of reviews and not just relying on owner provided information.

PG wrote an essay about how he and and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams, as long as they aren't too evil.

Remember that AirBnB's first marketing campaign was hiring women (or men using female names online) to violate Craiglist ToS to spam people posting housing listings.

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

>...Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. ...They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

>...we asked [Sam] what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers.

That's what you meant?! I can't see which other part you might mean - it's only 750 words. Describing it as "an essay about how he and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams" seems as misleading as the worst of the deceptive AirBnB descriptions written about on this page. Maybe you meant to link to a different essay.

I think the parents is somewhat justified, there is a very fine line between "hacking" as described here and scammy. It is almost inevitable it gets to AirBnB level if that is your thought process. Would be interesting to hear their take on issues like airbnb are facing, and if they thinking this "room owners" in these cases are also "hacking".

I wonder what kind of class action or civil enforcement exposure Airbnb has. Certainly this has to be revealed honestly in their S-1 docs.

> It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund.

They do: https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

YC founders are told to review these guidelines before we accept the investment.

From the ethics page:

> To maintain our community, if a founder behaves unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status.

Has this ever affected anything before? Just about every organization has "we are ethical" in some document somewhere. "We always comply with local regulations" is often spouted by companies immediately after being busted for breaking regulations.

So, what about making the company return that venture funding money to boot?

I can think of several YC-funded companies pretty much raping our privacy and YC does nothing to fix that.

I would second this experience. We travel with our five kids and its sometimes impossible to find a hotel that can accommodate us. That said, I did experience a switcheroo in Chicago similar to the article. However that’s where the similarities end. The place was in the same neighborhood, it was comparable to the listing but the only catch was we were told not say Airbnb to anyone in the building but to say guests of xyz. I felt like a criminal but otherwise the place was very nice and the host was super-responsive even though it was clear he was running multiple properties. Another time in Chicago, the bath tub hardware was broken off when we arrived. My side hustle is house flipping so I fixed it for the owner and they were thankful. I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is the rise of “420 friendly” and the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. That’s just beyond ok. As for 420, I just have an issue that if I’m going to take my kids someplace that I’d want reasonable assurances that it’s clean but with cities like LA where there’s a huge number of 420 listings, I’d rather just pay for adjoining rooms in a hotel than take the chance. As far as being an investor in Airbnb, I think a lot of ink has been dedicated to how Airbnb is going to upend the hospitality industry. It’s clear at the beginning the hotels had no response, but I do see hotels adjusting their brands and as someone who uses both hotels and Airbnb’s I’m increasingly more likely to just stay in a hotel. The exceptions are when we vacation in groups... we visited Toronto this summer with family and it was absolutely awesome to have a giant house on the beach for about half of what we would have spent on hotel rooms if there even had been a hotel in the beaches neighborhood. I see a place for both styles of accommodation but given that Airbnb is likely more of a class of property among many rather than an upending of the entire industry, I think valuation is going to be a real challenge.

I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is ... the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed.

Yeah, it's policy that you have to disclose any cameras inside the room in the listing. It's not clear what happens when you do find one though. You spend all day traveling and are in a strange city. On the one hand, you're entitled to get out of there with no penalty, but on the other, it might be hard to find alternate accommodations.

If I was not traveling internationally, I would absolutely file a police report. Pretty sure it’s a felony to record guests even in your house unannounced, and probably compounded if the area being filmed is one where you could reasonably be naked.

Cameras are problematic for AirBnB due to the tremendous scam potential. Consider these scenarios:

1) I'm a scammer. I stay in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room, and proceed to make a big deal out of "discovering" it. The room is refunded and the host is penalized or worse.

2) I'm a pervert. I spend the night in an AirBnB. Before I leave, I conceal a small camera somewhere in the room. I get off by watching the resulting footage, get paid by selling it, or both.

3) I'm a renter. I spend the night in an AirBnB. In the morning, I find the camera left by Pervert #2, possibly months earlier. I scream bloody murder. I get refunded, and the host is penalized or worse. Pervert #2 simply goes back to Ali Express and buys another camera.

There are probably numerous other variations I'm not devious enough to think of, all of which leave the host holding the proverbial bag.

Maybe hosts should think about such risks before they get into hosting.

Yep. But ultimately what's at stake isn't just a few extra bucks for the host with a spare room or ADU in their back yard, it's the whole AirBnB business model.

I was on board with this, but doesn't more or less all of this apply to traditional hotels just as much as AirBnB? I don't make a habit of checking my hotel room for hidden perv-o-cams but how often are the housekeeping staff checking inside light fixtures, above wardrobes, etc? Guess I've got one more thing to worry about, so uh, thanks?

I'm surprised you still seem to recommend AirBnb despite these experiences. As a family of 5 (3 kids) I know it can be frustrating and expensive to find hotel accommodations that work. But the strange (switcheroo, don't mention AirBnb to anyone!) to downright disturbing (cameras above the bed?!) experiences would never have me using AirBnb again. Maybe I just have issues trusting people... I'm sure there are great hosts but I don't like to gamble.

Curious were the cameras in the bedroom pointing at the bed and attempting to be concealed? Huge fear of mine having some psychopath watching videos of my wife and I getting (un)dressed or intimate.

I don’t think I endorsed Airbnb as much as just tried to relate my experiences. In both cases I was traveling alone or sans kids and didn’t give either situation much thought. That said we’ve had many delightful experiences and have come to get to know real people who are sharing their homes. At the same time I don’t buy the story that Airbnb is going to upend the industry. Hotel chains have gotten pretty good about adding properties with suites / extra room at reasonable prices. So I tend to see Airbnb as filling a property category rather than a industry disruptor. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them start to book traditional hotel properties as more and more communities and hoa’s regulate the home sharing business. I can also see where they might branch into fractional ownership for customers that need to live in multiple cities and don’t want to have to lease/own a property they aren’t going to use full time. Right now both cases can be achieved with some workarounds but I can see maybe a class/designation within the system emerging over time. But as I read through the comments the real issue is trust and I would agree that there’s probably more work to be done there - I’ve seen recently a new category for homes that have been verified... so all in all I’m not ready to dismiss the platform but I would agree there are some issues.

I haven't stayed at Airbnbs in the US but it has been a common experience in Europe to be instructed to say we're guests of the owner if asked. I assume this is about either HOA rules on subletting, or tax/insurance/regulatory issues.

that's tax evasion

I doubt that would hold up for insurance purposes. Also, I think it's relatively unlikely that tax inspectors come around and talk to suspected guests, at least compared to the common situation of HOA/lease policies restricting subletting.

I think it makes more sense. If you just say "I am at the airbnb", it's confusing. Maybe they don't know what unit you're talking about. If you say "guest of blah blah" there is some clarity. Eg. even if they don't know their neighbors, it's likely that the host's name is at least on the buzzer or mailbox. And if you remember your host's name, you may know which buzzer to hit at check-in, for example.

I've definitely had that "If anybody asks you are guests of Tiffany" from the bearded guy doing the checkin. Apparently the building management was hostile to AirBNB, but the funny thing is that we saw the occupants of two other apartments on the same floor that were clearly people on vacation just like us. I had a strong suspicion that most of the building was bought up by foreign investors and turned into AirBNB rentals.

But the location was in walking distance of the major attractions in downtown and cost a half of what the local hotels were charging for "three" bedrooms (really two bedrooms and a closet with a bed crammed into it) vs. a single room with a pair of doubles at a hotel. It even had free parking, unlike the hotels that were charging $40-$50 per spot per day.

I mean yeah, it feels sketchy as hell, but the place is nicer and literally hundreds of dollars cheaper than a hotel.

>> I mean yeah, it feels sketchy as hell

Usually does when you are participating in fraud.

He said he was told at checkin, your options are pretty limited at that point. Especially when you have only soft/anecdotal evidence it is actually in some vague way not legit. “If anyone asks, you’re guests of Tiffany” is not a definitively incriminating statement, and the fact that building management is hostile to Airbnb doesn’t mean any lease or city code is being violated.

Ideally there would be an anonymous review system to let people disclose this sort of fuzzy evidence though because who wants to be party to a sketchy situation? Not only are there legit Airbnb’s, there are long-standing legit vacation rental markets (think summer cabins) where Airbnb is taking over from the old alternative sites. So it’s not like every Airbnb listing is circumventing the law.

> I had a strong suspicion that most of the building was bought up by foreign investors and turned into AirBNB rentals.

I push back against this in my own building. I obviously refuse to let random people into the building, and I've left through the back exit to avoid obvious AirBnB "friends"¹. (Although having read the article, I now see people are much more reluctant to leave a bad review than I thought.)

Short-term sublets are against the contract in my building. Apartments in nice European city centres are for people to live in, not visitors on a weekend break.

I've just reported the current listings to the owner of the building. Last year their leases were terminated pretty quickly :-)

¹ Or whatever bullshit term AirBnB's marketing uses.

The place is cheaper precisely because it is sketchy as hell and doesn't have to spend to meet any of the requirements and regulations hotels are subject to.

Its only a matter of time before authorities catch on and it isn't so cheap anymore

Sounds like they did the switch to avoid getting caught running an illegal or otherwise somehow contract-breaching Airbnb. If they used their correct address, their building would figure it out and shut them down.

If I had to fix a bathroom fixture on my own on a vacation, it would definitely piss me off enough to never use the service again. I'm surprised that you're so nonchalant about it

Well I just stayed in a hotel in Vegas and the air conditioner didn’t work. It was 2 am when I arrived due to late plane. The last thing I wanted to do was wait around for a repair guy or pack it all up and change rooms. At least with the faucet it was a pretty easy fix I could do in about two minutes and it helped the homeowner out. After reading through most of the thread below I would agree I’m generally more nonchalant that many others. I guess I never appreciated the range of awful experiences people have had and how they feel about it. Travel can be rough... I just had a flat tire in the Mojave desert and had to pay $55 to fix it at midnight. The rental car company initially wanted to accuse me of doing donuts or riding off road but once I got someone sane on the phone they gave the straight up policy on these situations. Upon return I showed the repair receipt and they deducted $100 off for the inconvenience. That was cool. I guess you just have to take each experience differently and assess the situation you’re in.

Because I have kids (they're smaller, under 7) I can't really risk getting shafted at an AirBnB. Our experiences were so up and down that I rarely look to the site anymore for options. Suite hotels are prevalent, and work great for families, and you can be relatively certain it'll be a fine place to hang your hat for the night.

For longer-term rentals, I find it's best to work through local property managers or maybe VRBO, where you're dealing with the person more directly. That said, the destination probably makes a HUGE difference in terms of how you are treated.

The fact that AirBnB's rating system is so gamed that you can't trust any reviews, and the fact that their policies for refunds skew towards the property owners and not guests means that my trust in the site is low. I'd probably only risk it again if there are hotels around as backups. That said, I'm also typically looking for cheaper places, so the scam-level density is probably higher.

I also have had great experiences on Airbnb, with only a few less than desirable ones, but the fact that Airbnb isn't refunding these people, and not paying the extra cost for the last-minute accommodations they had to take in is extremely disturbing and makes me completely lose faith in the platform.

If Airbnb would take fraud seriously and refund people who have been defrauded on their platform, it would be fine. The fact that they push the risks of fraud to the customer and refuse to pay for reparations is not acceptable.

Funny, having young kids is what has sent me back to hotels (at least for the time being), simply because they are mostly designed with accessibility and some level of child-proofing. Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Cooping the kids up in a grown-up oriented space with fragile table decorations they can't touch can be exhausting.

> Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity.

Letting toddlers run up and down the hallways is a good way to make you the most hated guest in the hotel.

Depends on how many kids, and their ages. Between the ages of ~2-8, they're going to bed much earlier than you, and they won't fall asleep if you're still in the room. Add multiple kids—especially different ages with different bedtime routines—and a single room (or even a suite) can be challenging.

We have a favorite AirBnB listing in one town we visit frequently (to see family that doesn't have space to host us) that has some fragile decorations. When we arrive, we do a quick sweep and put them all up high. We're also up-front with the host that we have small children, so they're free to reject our stay if they'd prefer. So far, it's never been an issue.

> Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity.

Please, PLEASE don't do this. You don't know what time people are trying to get some sleep in their rooms. Not everyone keeps your schedule.

You can wander around with your toddler without waking folks up.

Plus the dining area in hotels is usually far removed from any guest rooms.

Toddlers are usually fine - 14-17 year olds (or worse college+) shouting and running - yeah, that's infuriating.

> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

How do you corroborate the information on those properties? The clean, affordable, well-placed hotels I've stayed in had reams of reviews and news articles from various sources to confirm they were indeed clean, affordable, and well-placed. The cost of faking all those sources must be orders of magnitude greater than faking property images/reviews on AirBnB.

You roll the dice and hope for the best. There's only so much you can do. Pick 2, cost, comfort, reliability

You use common sense - I have been a host of properties and I would say Airbnb does not go to any lengths to encourage you to misrepresent. In fact they do the opposite - with your listing you are building a contract so they encourage you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible. They also strictly govern guest interactions so you can’t provide a phone number or email address during negotiations to side step the system. Overall I think the people who are saying it’s a scam are amplifying a bad experience to suggest that it represents the whole system. It clearly doesn’t and I say that as having seen how it works both as a host and a user.

While AirBnB nominally "encourage[s] you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible", in reality, the way it handles feedback and complaint resolution discourages the candid reporting of problems, as was evident in several places in the article. The root cause of this problem is that AirBnB makes no attempt to determine the truth of any complaint. Nor, apparently, is it doing much to identify patterns of abuse.

> They also strictly govern guest interactions so you can’t provide a phone number or email address during negotiations to side step the system

In every single AirBNB I have stayed in, after the initial transaction the rest of the communication was done over phone or text.

I only stay at Airbnb's that have at least some reviews. It doesn't take too long to determine if reviews are sock-puppet-generated or genuine. You have to actually stay at the property to write a review, which means paying for the stay since Airbnb process the payment. Obviously you can create wash transactions but the transaction fees would still be significant.

Another approach is to sent a question to the property manager. Invent some pretext to ask a question. I find that people trying to scam customers on the product also have poor customer service skills. So if I don't get a prompt, cogent and polite response, I move on..

This sounds like great guidelines and "filters". Any bad experiences so far?

> Another approach is to sent a question to the property manager. That's a great idea. Thanks.

I find it telling that you use the phrase "property manager" instead of "host".

> How do you corroborate the information on those properties? There is no way to corroborate. For most listings, Airbnb is the only source. However, I've never found this to be an issue. I don't believe I've ever been "scammed" by an Airbnb host in 40+ bookings.

I use a Chrome extension to show the true cost per night on Airbnb. I find the fees variable enough that I want to see the real price as part of my analysis of listings.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n...

There might be others, but this one has worked well for me. No affiliation, just a happy user.

You have to hack them to get the real price? That seems profoundly wrong to me.

This used to be an issue with Airbnb, but I believe they fixed/changed that a year or two ago. The one line item they leave out of the total price on the search results is "Occupancy taxes and fees", which I can understand.

If you haven't tried recently, a lot of traditional booking sites (like Booking.com) now have a pretty extensive apartment rental catalogue. When I'm going somewhere for more than a couple of days, I'd much rather have an entire apartment. I used to use AirBNB to book a full-fledged apartment. But now I just use Booking.com for everything.

It also used to be the case that AirBNB had some really nice places for pretty cheap. I think now that the business is more mature, it's not as easy to find really great discounts. Any more, it seems like the better value is on Booking.com, too!

I also have repeatedly used AirBnB in the past to try to make life easier with children. After getting burned repeatedly, I gave up. You can book a place like Embassy Suites for a similar amount of money and have a bit more space than a standard hotel room. It just isn't worth the hassle of researching AirBnB listings and dealing with the fallout from the bad ones to me anymore.

Speaking of "long analyze" have a look at my script - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420140

Yeah I've stayed at lot of airbnbs (20-30 a year) and only had good to great experiences. I've met a lot of hosts that I specifically look up when I visit their city again. I've had plenty where they weren't exactly what I expected, like thinking a cabin I was renting was in the woods from the pictures but it was on a gravel driveway with trees in the background, but my trip wasn't ruined or anything. I've unfortunately had reservations cancelled in the 24hr window and had to rush to find something else, or accepted an insta-reservation but never heard back from the host. I've not looked over the fine print, seen airbnbs with pictures of ovens and shown up to microwaves (this is my fault but the pictures don't help). Those are my biggest host issues.

I will say though that I dread what you said - analyzing listings. The airbnb.com UX is atrocious. I thought it was pretty sub-par when I'd look at listings just planning trips for myself. But now I try to plan trips with my partner through it and she has her own account, so I share lists and listings within lists. It's awful. I recently went on a 2 week road trip and stayed at different places every day. I'd have to have google maps open to plot distance between airbnbs and parks, I couldn't go back into a listings actual ad to see its details once I confirmed a reservation (I had to search for the listing again and go to it, the reservation details don't show the actual posting), I'd have to keep a separate app open just to keep notes of each listing, I use my todo list, which I then also had to share with my partner separately because there's not really a way to thumbs up/down/leave comments on listings. I'd send her listings and she'd get errors or they'd just never end up on her account. If I add her to a listing I don't think it shows up in her reservations so I still had to send all the info to her, she'd just get an email about it.

Does anyone do this sort of stuff on any of the other sites? Vrbo, etc? Is there a really good roadtrip planning app? Are they easier to use in these situations? I honestly don't want to deal with it again it was that frustrating.

Also, while I'm here ranting, and as an ex-airbnb host and very avid airbnb user. Please, chill out on your cleaning fees. I cannot believe some of the cleaning fees I find. Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. Nothing turns me off from a place more than putting a reservation together and noticing that my 2-3 day stay will incur $150+ in cleaning fees. I would rather pay a slightly higher daily fee than $45-80/day in "cleaning" when I'm a single person renting your studio just so I can spend 80% of my day hiking outside of your place. I can't remember if I could control this based on the number of guests staying but if you can, please do it.

Nothing about what you describe sounds like it falls into the "good to great experience" category to me.

My airbnb stockholm syndrome..

A "great" hotel experience I had recently was when I happened to casually mention to someone in the hotel restaurant that it was my wedding anniversary tomorrow. When I came back from touring through the city the next day, the reception staff gave my wife flowers and wished us a happy anniversary. Then when we entered our room, we found a small cake with anniversary wishes.

That kind of attention to detail is what I would classify as a truly "great" experience.

Having a fixed cleaning fee and a per-night charge actually reflects the property owner's costs. They have to pay someone to clean, do laundry, re-stock the crackers and cheap wine. Of course this can be taken too far, but I actually prefer this cost structure because I get a price break if I have a long stay vs an average flat fee per night.

Source: I know several Airbnb owners, and the people who clean their properties.

I think the point is less about the existence of the cleaning fee and the fact that the site doesn't include the fee in the mapping UI. It makes it very difficult to compare properties when there are large fee differences that you cannot see until clicking through.

I usually search with specific dates for a stay, so it's weird that they don't summarize the listings by total cost instead of the nightly rate leaving out the fixed costs. That'd fix the problem, right? (Of course they could divide that total cost by the night count if they can't let go of normalizing to nightly rate. The point is to not incentivize accounting shenanigans.)

Overall I've been happy with airbnb as a traveler, but if they don't step up their game it's going to be like having been happy with the early web, or Amazon reviews in the early days when it was easy to ignore a few fakes. That general problem of evolving predators is hard, but this particular change seems easy.

I used to be an active Airbnb host for a vacation house I own. For reference it was a 4 bedroom Victorian.

I had to pay $150 to clean the house each time I had a booking, that's what it cost me. I passed it along to guests at exactly that cost.

Not sure if it was "worth it" for some guests, or people staying only one night. But that's what I had to pay, it wasn't part of any nefarious strategy. In developed countries it's going to cost to clean that place, that's just the way it is. You don't have the economies of scale that a hotel has with a team of maids.

I'm clearly not a single guy renting 4 bedroom victorian homes. I'm more talking about the people who charge you $80-150/night to clean a 1 bedroom studio, especially if it's a guesthouse in their back yard and I'm asked to do half of the work (put dishes in dishwasher, take out trash, take sheets off bed, etc) and still charged more than I know it costs to clean. Also the fact that it doesn't show up on the map when plotting trips, I have to go into the listing and wind up rejecting half of the options after.

At that point unless I'm looking for a specific experience (cabin in the woods, victorian 4 bedroom home) I'll probably just get a hotel to not have to deal with it.

I think my biggest issue is the DAILY clean fee. I'm fine with a one time clean fee if I'm there for 3-5 days. Hosts aren't coming in and rolling my sheets every night.

Wait, they have daily cleaning fees?

Fair enough; not everyone is abusing that feature, and I can understand how a large home like that would legitimately cost $150.

But many are, and Airbnb isn't doing anything for the UI that lets you adapt for that and sort by total cost. There's almost an arms race for how much of the cost you can obfuscate that way.

> Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. When looking through search results, my eyes always go straight to the total cost, which factors in the cleaning and service fees (but not the occupancy taxes and fees).

> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

Completely agree. If you don't want to put in the time or effort required to analyze for “assumed”, “missing” , and “bonus” amenities, scrutinize each listing’s description, photos, and guest reviews, and sniff out the nature of each Airbnb and the host’s motivations, I say stay away from Airbnb. More thoughts here - https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo...

The more negative comments I read here, the more I think that most people shouldn't use Airbnb. With that being said, I've been happy with Airbnb, warts and all.

If hotels had two bathrooms we’d probably go back to hotels. But instead they have single low-privacy bathrooms.

Book adjoining rooms?

As a family we do the same, but never in the US, we've been caught in a couple of scams the same as this article, fortunately when we were traveling for business not as a family, but still.

AirBnB in Australia, Japan & the UK has never been a problem for me. The USA has a 50% scam rate so far.

Exactly this. For one or two people, Airbnb isn't lot cheaper than hotels. The big win is when the traveling group is more than two people. That gets very expensive at hotels because you usually have to book more than one room.

I really used to like Airbnb, but for the same usage - family vacations. But after couple of bad experiences, where host canceled while we were on the way, I prefer holiday homes which are professionally managed and have better contracts.

With the amount of research you may be nearly just as well off searching craigslist. I'm bitter about my experiences and won't subject myself to abnb any further.

There are hotels with laundry rooms; and many chains have suites that give you an extra room, including doors, or connecting rooms. Very often the price difference isn't that significant. (Given how expensive some Airbnb's are, booking with points or through various deal sites is often much cheaper for a proper hotel rooms, too.)

The only bad experience I had was a decent looking apartment type room in a house (from the pictures), but it ended up being the moldy basement of the house, and the bedroom didn't have an egress window. It wasn't unbearable, but it wasn't good either.

However, you can't go wrong with superhosts. I've never had a bad experience with them.

>The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

I just spent 7 days (20h total) trying to make one booking. Tons of reading between the lines and analyzing involved, as well as bad or non-responsive potential hosts. To top it off, AirBnb Support the whole time was very poor.

I'm sure most people have fine experiences, but this is more than just "reporting negative experiences". This is a probably super profitable scam, and I'm sure it's not the only one, since there really aren't performing any sort of checks on hosts or properties.

Yeah, if it is me and my wife we go hotel 90% of the time at least now. If it is more family members coming, like my parents or her parents, we will book an airbnb so everyone can get their own room and we can eat together etc.

What does this have to do with the artice? You've had luck with Airbnb. You're just saying oh it's a company fraught with fraud and deception since its inception, but that's fine. My kids get their own room.

This company has no moral compass. Why are you advertising for it? Distracting from the reality of the company described in the article?

You know it has illegally ruined communities in the name of profit, right?

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