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Comment by gesman | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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