Hacker News Reader

I booked a hotel room in Paris earlier this year over AirBnB out of curiosity, as the room was cheaper than advertised on other platforms. The day before, I thought to call and verify it wasn't a scam and the hotel manager had no record of my stay. A scammer had just uploaded pictures of the hotel room to AirBnB. I got a full refund (and the hotel, in thanks for me letting them know they were scam targets gave me a discount) but the scammer account is still online. No clue why AirBnB didn't scrub this. And I don't get why the scammer thought it would work, as they don't get paid until at least one night stay with no complaints.

Because the scammer may be using this as a way to launder money or to extract money from stolen credit cards.

They may not be scamming legitimate bookers, but rather, using the listing for other kinds of scams.

In a similar vein, a good friend of mine (+ all his family, about 10 in all) was kicked out of an AirBnB at the last minute because it had been double-booked on Booking.com at a higher price, and had just been rented via that site.

I've come across a few such stories.

A family member of mine had something similar happen when using booking.com. She showed up at the hotel and they had sold her booked room to someone else. It was late and a bit of a nightmare to find another place to stay.

Overbooking airplanes means someone might be stuck sitting in the terminal for hours. Overbooking.com means someone might be made to drive around late at night, tired, with nowhere to sleep.

When we accidentally took a double booking for the same place, booking.com demanded that we arrange and pay for equivalent accommodation for the booking.com guests. That is what we did, I do not know what would have happened had we refused to do so.

Wow that’s messy.

I have trip this coming month through Expedia and the last leg of our bargain basement flight got cancelled. The rep told me there were no flights for days surrounding our original flight date.

I had to sit on hold for a long time but I have to say they were great. United swept our transportation out from under our feet but the rep was able to wrangle a flight with fewer stops that arrives earlier without us having to pay the difference. We had those locked-in cheap tickets that charge you a couple hundred just to upgrade your ticket before the price difference is even considered.

Needless to say we were greatly relieved...

Expedia did that? That's great. I've always avoided them and their competitors and bought directly from the airlines because I was afraid if something went wrong I would get better service that way.

Yeah, that's what happened to me. I booked through expedia, and missed a flight (no fault of my own). The airline outright refused to deal with me, saying I needed to contact expedia to contact them. Half a day later, I still hadn't been able to hear anything useful from expedia and getting desperate ended up booking a new flight out of pocket (and never got compensation either).

I've since sworn to only ever book the flight directly from the airline.

Yeah I thought I was in for a battle. I’m not sure if it’s their larger policy or just a good rep. Can’t claim it’s a pattern as it’s only happened to me once.

She explained to me pretty thoroughly that the ticket change required higher approval to switch ticket classes and she seemed to do a bunch of back and forth with United. In all I was probably on the phone for 2 hours but on hold for 110 minutes of that while I was working.

I had no idea what would happen. I expected Expedia to punt me off to United to sort it out. But no, almost totally painless to my and my partner’s great relief.

Mind you I wonder if the order made a difference as we booked the flight, a vacation rental, and a car all at once through them and paid up front so the onus was sort of on them to make sure we could even check into our rental on time. And we’re heading to Kona so there’s not really an alternative mode of transportation available...

I recently made a rental car reservation through Expedia and hadn't noticed it was nonrefundable. When my plans had to change, I called them up and they took care of dealing with the rental car company and getting me a refund anyway. Pleasantly surprised how easy they made it for me.

> Wow that’s messy.

How so?

It sounds like a very reasonable policy -- the person responsible for making the mistake needs to rectify it.

No one's out of pocket -- the double booking was never going to make double revenue, after all. The time / inconvenience imposition is on the responsible party, who also likely has more service industry & local knowledge than the customer.

This policy makes me feel more positively towards booking.com.

As per TFA, AirBNB does that hand-wavey thing where they assert some problems are beyond their competence to solve -- the kinds of problems other sectors and organisations have already got policies and procedures in place to deal with.

> Overbooking airplanes means someone might be stuck sitting in the terminal for hours.

It also might mean you miss getting somewhere in an emergency, like visiting a loved one before surgery. And it also might mean you miss things you couldn't miss, like a job interview.

One of the worst memories of my life started by missing a flight (and it wasn't my fault).

What happened?

These days, it's thankfully rare that people are forced off a flight. The worst problems I've had have come from having a flight cancelled with all the next flights fully booked. As long as the airline can point to weather, they don't have to put you up in a hotel or pay your cab fare to get to a flight at another nearby airport.

That's a surprise. Hotels definitely do overbook however they'll usually not leave you stranded, they "walk" you to a competitor property that they then pay for. Here's a whole write-up on it [1] from the New York Times. It's been going on forever but you may only have noticed it more recently as occupancy rates are up. I've yet to be "walked" but it does happen. Nothing particularly sketchy going on.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/business/hotels-overbooke...

I got walked from my hotel near RSA Conference one year (Westin San Francisco Market Street) to the Parc 55. As compensation I got a free day, but since my employer was paying, it wasn't much of a compensation.

It sounds petty but having paid for a room, being exhausted from a Pacific flight and being moved to a hotel twice the walk from the conference (important if you're going to be back and forth all day) was mildly annoying.

I'm not 100% sure - but the one time I was walked I had picked the cheapest available room. You know those bullshitty-looking price differences where you can book on floors 9-11 for X and floors 12-14 for X+5? I suspected I had signalled my place on the hierarchy by picking the cheapest room available. Subsequently, especially while on an expense account (sorry, Intel! :-) ) I always picked the ever-so-slightly more expensive room and have never been walked again, even in the middle of conference season. This may be bogus reasoning, of course.

> Overbooking.com means someone might be made to drive around late at night, tired, with nowhere to sleep.

I would say most of these cases, the renter wouldn't have a car. I've been stuck in cafes after booking/Airbnb scams

Hotels have horrible inventory management. They don't have the revenue management tools that airlines have. I believe there are whole call centers of 1000s of people at expedia who call hotels to verify room availability and rebook customers.

Another example is Marriot will commonly let the local management control inventory. They commonly use the cheapest room to book to max capacity and upgrade people until they are fully booked. It almost never makes sense to book a more expensive room unless you are booking within 30 days.

People don't understand the value of a high trust culture until it's gone.

Yeah, Couchsurfing was incredible.....oh well

Couchsurfing was awesome and partially killed by Airbnb. It was an amazing concept that I used both as a an host and as a guest.

Airbnb pushed for the commercialization of every single Square meter (Thanks to VC $$) and now this high trust community is gone forever.

I wouldn't attribute any of the downfall of Couchsurfing to AirBnB, rather the new owners. There are a ton of reasons which were laid out by multiple disgruntled ex-couchsurfers in a myriad of blog-posts. I went looking for some of them but the best I could find was on Quora[0]. For me it was apparent that they new owner only cared about the number of users and proceeded to advertise instead of relying primarily on word-of-mouth, ignoring critical feedback from core members/ambassadors, as well as destroy the usability of the site (e.g. search and the groups got progressively worse), among reasons. The site was rather quickly overwhelmed with people who just wanted a free hotel while they go out and party, while the core community abandoned the site, leaving a vacuum to be filled by people who didn't care about the original "spirit". I went from hosting people every week, making lots of spontaneous trips and organizing events to not being involved at all. This was also true of tens of CS friends, many of whom pleaded with the new management to stop breaking things and to listen to their feedback. I knew at least 15 ambassadors personally who deleted their profiles around the same time all these changes were happening, particularly because their feedback was being completely ignored. I kept my profile up in hopes that things would eventually return... and also out of curiosity about how bad it could really get. Only last month have I received the first "worthy" request, where somebody actually read my profile and seemed to have some of the original couchsurfing spirit. Perhaps things will change again?

[0]: https://www.quora.com/Is-CouchSurfing-dead

A company that is based on a tax loophole doesn’t behave ethically?

There may be other reasons Airbnb is unethical, but minimizing one's taxes legally is not unethical.

I found a loophole that lets me sell kids organs.

The best part? I can use the new American ethics system to absolve myself of any guilt by saying "it's not illegal"!

What wouldn't you do if it became legal?

The organs belong to those kids. They are in their possession, and they made them. I’d have to take those organs from them by force or threat of force.

Kind of like my money that the government calls a tax and takes by threat of force or, if it decides, by force.

Your analogy is terrible and is completely oblivious on who the bad guys actually are.

And the land belongs to us all.

Who lobbies for those loopholes?

I am not sure I completely understand:

Is the host able to unilaterally change the dates of your booking on AirBnb? Did your agreement to the text (asking for $20 extra) allow him to make the changes?

> Did your agreement to the text (asking for $20 extra) allow him to make the changes?

It's this, because technically you are making the changes (by agreeing).

If I understood correctly, then that sounds a bit like a UI issue.

The host should never be able to change the dates. I mean, why should they be able to? It's up to the traveller to decide when the stay should take place and the host can either accept or decline.

Agreed. I made a change to the dates of a stay earlier this year (cottage booked on Isle of Skye in the UK). I needed to shift the dates forward by a day or two. This was easily accomplished in the website UI, no direct contact with the host was required. Not sure why the host would ever be able to change booking dates, or really make any changes to the booking after it's confirmed.

Yes they usually are.

There's a raft of AirBnB horror stories[1] about hosts pulling a confirmed booking at the last moment and AirBnb's "awesome" customer support leaving the guest high and dry if they were approachable at all.

AirBnb may have been a great idea in 2010. Nowadays what you get is very oten a cheaply outfitted cooky cutter appartment managed by some faceless management company.

You may also be asked to sneak to your appartment through the back door because the lease is actually illegal at your destination and other such fun shenanigens, while the price essesntially is no more cheaper than a comparable hotel room.

[1] https://www.airbnbhell.com/

Nice I didn't know this one. I did a quick search and found a lot of stories like mine where people tried to used my now defunct account, and they got zero support from AirBS

Interesting - makes me wonder if this scam is what was being pulled in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21410039

Though in this case, the difference in price is about 50%.

That is such an elegant scam. It's like a magic trick complete with misdirection.

Is there market where HN-type people come up with these and sell them to people to implement?

I doubt it because people are ethical (I hope).

But this is so true. I feel like I always come up with so many loopholes but because of their nature of being "scams" I obviously don't do them.

You realize you just “hoped” people are ethical as a reply to a post describing a way in which at least one person was claimed to be unethical

If you can use a pattern to grift off the system someone is using it. What’s most likely you’re not aware or emotionally predisposed to avoid connecting those dots

I hope not! Better put your efforts into creating value rather than winning zero-sum scams.

Negative-sum TBH

You can't make a business of an honest marketplace based on selling services only to dishonest people. Eventually your own customers will ruin the business.

This is the fundamental reason "Organized Crime" always fails in the end.

Organized Crime mostly fails because people get thrown in jail. Obviously not happening here.

Usually because someone ends up betraying them, e.g. the Chicago Outfit. In other words, dishonesty ends up ruining them. So the comment still makes sense.

Well, yeah, a faction ends in jail because someone rats them out—either inside or a competitor.

Isn’t that what all those credit card dump sites do?

I'm not saying you can't make the business work in the short term. But ultimately the more successful it becomes the faster it will fail.

I don't think it is true that Organized Crime fails in the end. OC organizations like Cosa Nostra , Yakuza, Triads and many others are not disappearing any time soon.

Look closer at what you are calling "organizations". I would just call that an Industry. The individuals and businesses (Families) fail at a rapid rate. Just because they are replaced by other businesses in the same industry, doesn't mean that criminal organizations are successful in terms of longevity.

There are some notable exceptions in the Yakuza, but I would argue even those fit the pattern because the most successful Yakuza are working in grey areas and aren't fully engaging in illegal actives.

lol, you're here too. This sort of reminds me of people at bars complaining about the type of people they meet at bars. :)

What does "HN-type people" mean to you?

0week vulnerabilities for sale on the dark web. /s

Yes, it's called blackhatworld.com