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Comment by yibg | Hacker News Reader

Seems like they have enough cash to ride this out. But yes very possible that they'll need to scale back dramatically and change their business model entirely. I'm guessing even after restrictions are lifted, people will be hesitant to travel and stay at airbnbs, and also many hosts will be nervous staying on the platform.

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Airbnb (anecdotally form what I've seen) is one of the largest employer for data-engineers and data scientists. I wonder if this will be a watershed moment to see if they actually do need the amount of data work business wise.

That's fair, but since the economics of giant ecommerce companies are extremely sensitive to every step of the funnel, I think they'll discover it's worthwhile.

An 0.1% increase in conversion anywhere along your funnel is significant with billions of dollars pointed at the funnel.

Yeah, the 2 billion dollars in loans will be enough to ride it out. I doubt whether they'll ever recover in the long term from this, though.

Yes, even aside from all the ill will AirBnB has generated (both cumulatively and specific to this event), you have to ask: when was the last time you went to an AirBnB and it felt clean? Most hosts seems to do the absolute bare minimum since they know that the review system is mutually assured destruction.

I've used AirBnb maybe 20 or so times and I've never had an AirBnB that felt or looked dirty.

I've only used it twice, and it was mixed. The worst was the smell in the 2nd place.

yeah it's def region dependent. There's hacker hostels in the bay that look and smell like frat houses. You can't help but get the feeling the host is exploiting immigrants/summer interns who don't know any better.

I used them quite frequent and overall never had an issue.

In my experience, there is a large range in the effort hosts put in, and low fungibility as a result. There is a bit of signal in the reviews, but not usually enough to be very helpful. Some hosts really do try to make it a hotel quality experience and sweat the details. On the other hand, a host once blamed me for not bringing my own bath towel after I was surprised to find that there were no towels at all in the unit, including in drawers and closets.

I've used AirBnBs a lot and there has been a range of cleanliness. I've never had one that wasn't clean enough to stay in though. The large majority of my AirBnB/VRBO/etc... experience has been in Europe so that may contribute to my experience.

Kids left some coco puffs in bathroom. Traveler freaked out.

Guess he thought they were bugs or turds.

Became zealots about cleaning after that.

Never had another issue

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