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A hotel speeded up the international outbreak of SARS in 2003.

"The Metropole Hotel hastened the international spread of the 2003 SARS outbreak by the index case infecting visitors from Singapore, Vietnam, Canada as well as local people via close contact with the index case and the environmental contamination. The one-week quarantine of more than 300 guests and staff at the Metropark Hotel during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu exposed gaps in the partnership with the hotel industry. The subsequent guidelines for the hotel industry from the Centre of Health Protection focused largely on the maintenance of hygiene within the hotel premises."

https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

"This hotel is infamous as ground zero for a SARS ‘super spreader’ in the 2003 outbreak—here’s what happened"

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/14/hong-kong-hotel-hosted-super...

Can't overemphasised. The fine print of the travel insurance is very important!

However, I don't get why cancellation policies will be a major reason of the spread. Your explanation on sunk cost fallacy and cancellation seems to be missing. Airbnb has a clause to refund under "Epidemic disease or illness"

The link says you can only automatically cancel for mainland china and korean trips.

So any trips to Italy, Iran, Washington State etc can’t be refunded. It encourages people to still go.

Sunk cost fallacy: people might not take a free trip to italy now, but they may go if they previously paid for one.

If I were a billionaire I'd tell these people, "Fine, I'll refund you out of my pocket, stay home and don't be an infection vector!". Obviously I'd make them sign a contract to make sure they stay home (or the contract would stipulate that they'd have to pay me back, plus a punishment on top).

I would be surprised if Airbnb does business in Iran...

You don’t need Airbnb in Iran. Walk down 2 block of Tehran and by the end one or more people will have offered you their homes, for free..

You only need to book somewhere to stay for downtime/private time.

>Walk down 2 block of Tehran and by the end one or more people will have offered you their homes, for free..

Wait what? Is there more to this?

Iranians are very nice and friendly people is my guess.

They've been under US embargo for decades. In the US, Blacks historically couldn't use commercial hotels which were Whites only. They had to arrange to stay at private homes to travel.

I imagine it's sort of akin to that.

Actually you’re right, they don’t do Iran.

Ticket prices are getting lower to Italy, and I see more and more articles that this is the best time to go to vacation because it's so cheap. People don't care about spreading the virus, because they don't care about other people.

The only way to be protected is to stay home and not follow the herd.

I'm not sure that qualifies as a sunk cost fallacy. Most people have limited budgets for vacations. If they already booked a trip to someplace and cancel it without a refund, they may not be able to afford going somewhere else. On the other hand, if they haven't booked anything they can go somewhere that's of perceived lower risk or just hold off for the time being.

I heard from somebody the other day that he would not cancel his trip to Japan under any circumstance unless he was fully refunded for his 500CHF JR pass and 1,200CHF flight, or the flight was cancelled. It mystified me, as somebody who has been penniless before, it still strikes me as beyond stupid.

OK, but in a society where we've been taught that the thing that makes money is the right thing to do, simply telling people won't change their decision-making. Should we spend public health funds on cancellations? Should we also fund people with non-salaried jobs to stay home?

I haven't worked through the numbers but it wouldn't surprise me if these were among the highest-efficiency ways to spend government emergency health funds, especially in the early days before a vaccine has been developed.

I'm guessing spending them on tracking the people infected, tracing down other people who might've been infected, helping enact quarantines, etc, is a far better use of funds than helping people cancel reservations on the off chance they are infected.

> OK, but in a society where we've been taught that the thing that makes money is the right thing to do,

Also, huh? I think more people in this society think that "money is the root of all evil" than what you're suggesting.

The major reason is far too many people exhibit an exaggerated state of self entitlement which they use to excuse their actions including those which put others at risk. Some will do it just to spite others, some will do it out ignorance. We just have so many people who have the means to travel that you cannot properly contain any outbreak so you do the best to mitigate the impact

The end result usually is the same, someone else will pay. Which means business big and small for which some litigant finds a twist which a jury is sympathetic to.

I know a few ppl that are saying the flight can’t be refunded and just be pretty ignorant about everything around

I think you mean corporations display an exaggerated sense of self-entitlement, and by not making full refunds easy and well-understood, they create these negative externalities.

Asking individuals to bear the financial risk related to these types of emergencies seems wrong to me on all levels, moral, pragmatism, effectiveness, social fairness, etc.

These types of risks should be borne by corporations in the form of strictly less profit for executives and shareholders. Not by raising prices, not by cutting staff, not by reducing employee benefits. These are risks that have to absorbed by classes of people with extreme financial reserves to cushion the blow, not by classes of people without those means.

Corporations are people. Not just legally people, which they are, but in plain fact they are legal fictions which are wrapped around the actions of people.

I don't understand why people have such a hard time with that.

If Airbnb cancels the reservation, the person renting out the room has an empty room and doesn't get paid. The housekeeper they hire to clean up after each guest doesn't get hired. The guy in the sandwich cart the guest would have bought from doesn't get paid. The corporation doesn't make a profit from the transaction (that was the one we're supposed to want, right?), but that wasn't most of the price to begin with, and the profits go to "shareholders" which are mostly the retirement accounts of ordinary people.

They should cancel it anyway.

Agree with you although it’s a very, very unpopular opinion in North America where most HN readers are from.

AirBnB is probably not the best example given that the cost of last minute cancellations is mostly borne by the people renting out their places (some of which are admittedly full-time businesses) rather than AirBnB itself.

The costs of the cancellations may exceed the profits of the company (In which case it's still appropriate for investors to take the loss, I'm just pointing out that there's a wider range of possibilities).

Or the pricing of refundable tickets vs non-refundable tickets. It turns out if you agree to take on the risk of cancellation, most corporations are willing to give you a lower price on the ticket. Constraining the conditions that they can factor into non-refundable tickets will impact prices, so you can't just ignore consumer behavior, which for things like airplane tickets is to pay as little as possible...

There are some kinds of trips where there's no real option to book in a way that you can cancel a week before the trip. But, by and large, you can book flexibly if you're willing to pay the premium. I'm not sure it's usually worth it in the case of airline tickets given that flexible tickets are often 2x and you can usually cancel for a $250 or so fee. But hotels usually have flexible rates for a 10% to 20% upcharge. That's what I usually do anyway (it's work travel policy) and it's certainly what I'm doing over the coming months.

> “ It turns out if you agree to take on the risk of cancellation”

This is a common fallacy that we can use the pricing mechanism to account for the risk. But whether it’s food poisoning (cheaper prices for expired goods), labor externalities (cheaper prices for goods made with slave / child / exploitative labor), or geopolitical risks (cheaper prices for travel that can be cancelled for reasons that regular citizens simply cannot adequately prepare for), across the board it’s a failed idea.

The information asymmetries and burdens are simply too lopsided against regular consumers. Pricing as information aggregation (thus reflecting correct understanding of risks impounded in prices) is not a thing. It is theorized but fails to exist.

And risks of insolvency are far worse for individuals than for corporations, on multiple levels.

I'm not suggesting the pricing mechanism can be used to fully account for the risk, I'm suggesting that it isn't simply a matter of banning certain contractual conditions, that it is prudent to also consider the inevitable increase in prices that will accompany some of those actions. If you are comfortable with the higher prices, fine. As I point out in my other comment, real world behavior suggests a preference for low prices.

I'm not arguing against regulation, I'm arguing for regulation that acknowledges that certain regulations have an obvious impact on pricing.

There's plenty of middle ground. Bed and breakfast regulation could include a provision allowing the government to make public health the higher priority and require refunds during some declared period of time, and let operators set their own terms otherwise.

> “ that it is prudent to also consider the inevitable increase in prices that will accompany some of those actions. If you are comfortable with the higher prices, fine.”

I addressed this in my original comment above. These risks must be borne by shareholders and executives and not passed on to customers or employees.

Price increases to maintain the same level of profitability is inherently predatory. Rather, it’s simply a cost of doing business borne by the corporation and its shareholders. Airline prices are not higher in response to the airlines bearing the cost of cancellation risks. Instead, airline profits taken by executive bonuses, equity, c-suite perks, and shareholder returns are just lower, while prices, wages and benefits remain the same. Any other outcome where the corporation tries to deflect its responsibility to bear that cost without impacting consumers or employees is immoral predatory behavior that must become illegal, like lobbying, deceptive pricing, price gouging, extensive contractual fine print that consumers are not equipped to read or understand, offering consumers tiers of lower pricing that does not include necessary protections, layoffs or benefit cuts to preserve executive compensation hundreds of multiples above average employees, etc.

If this causes a business to fold, it only means they did not have a viable business. Consumers don’t want the product. Figure out how to bear the cost of these risks or else you haven’t got a business.