Airbnb’s Coronavirus Crisis: Burning Cash, Angry Hosts and an Uncertain Future
wsj.com
wsj.com
Meanwhile, I have less sympathy about hosts angry at Airbnb's cancellation policy which offers guests refunds due to the pandemic. If their units are not occupied, then they shouldn't expect to be still making money. Meanwhile, if they were still able to receive their guests' money without said guests actually residing at their units due to the pandemic, it looks like theft on the host's part more than anything else -- they are profiting off a pandemic for free because of an overly strict policy that prevents their would-be guests from being refunded for social distancing and ensuring public safety. That just isn't fair.
It isn’t fair and it also isn’t smart. The hosts angry that Airbnb won’t let them keep the guests’ money after these forced cancellations are caught up in short-term thinking. The long view is that if Airbnb allowed millions of guests to be ripped off then they’d see an epidemic of account closures, chargebacks, and lawsuits that would probably kill the company. That may also create an opportunity for regulators to close the window, forcing all the professional hosts out of business.
Everyone needs to share some responsibility here, so using the term "theft" and saying hosts are "trying to profit off a pandemic" is absurd.
I would expect Airbnb to do the similar. It might be up to the government to help landlords out, since the government is forcing the stay-in-place orders.
It's hard for me to side with the carpetbagging rent seekers here who still want to keep their guests money even though they are not able to stay at the units. Either a service is provided and it gets charged for, or it is not.
The answers I saw were rather sanguine- saying Airbnb is in a much better position than most of travel industry because their business is not capital intensive. Makes sense, but being in a better position than a house on fire is not necessarily great. That was also a while ago and the situation is changing rapidly. It does seem that they’re cancelling offers which is not good.
What's there to understand?
However unlike the annual flu it does not appear to be changing super dramatically so until shown otherwise eventual herd immunity will drastically reduce the effective virulence.
Obviously a vaccine would be a great thing to have, but there is nothing at all to indicate that this is going to be an annual or seasonal outbreak going forward.
The flu has eight segments. With that you get a substantially higher rate of recombination.
That's why you need a new flu vaccine every year - every year a lot of time is (was?) invested in tracking what flu mutations are appearing and trying to predict which ones will be the main ones next year. Once they've determined what they think are most likely, the vaccines are developed for those. Happily flu mutations mostly impact the protein structures sticking out of the virus wall (the HxNy is an actual description of these proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase), so it's mostly a matter of retargeting an existing set of vaccines rather than creating a whole new vaccine from scratch.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coro...