Covid-19 forced Airbnb to rethink its product offerings
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The most reliable way to find out who actually had good wifi was by searching the reviews for the term "wifi". However, AirBnb refuses to implement the ability to filter your results by terms inside review. They claim that it's because it's too technically difficult to implement this. I am no search guru, but I have fired up an Elastic Search instance to make a-one-to many relationship searchable back in my day without too many issues. I guess AirBnb's "scale" is just too awesome to to do this? I mean damn... google indexed the whole internet. You can't index your own reviews?
Then, a few months ago, I noticed that AirBnb got rid of even the search functionality on the individual listing page, so now the only way to search a listing's reviews for the word "wifi" is to go to the listing, infinite scroll the list of reviews for a few minutes to load all of them onto the page, and then use the browser's search tool.
Another legit non-tourism-related use case I can see still being relevant is for people needing temporary housing, whether due to moving into an area or because of foreclosure/eviction or some other reason why they don't have permanent housing. I don't know what the process of renting or buying a home looks like with social distancing (thankfully I moved right before the outbreak and didn't have the "fun" time of finding out for myself), but I can't imagine it's particularly easy or quick. And likewise, while you'd hope that banks and landlords would have the slightest bit of human decency and be a bit lenient on late mortgage/rent payments, I strongly suspect there are plenty of assholes out there.
what they're planning now to do is to invent completly new business, utilising assets they have at hand (relations with hosts, but this is it).
their 'online experiences' is a lesson on 'wishful thinking' or 'painting the grass green'. Quoting article: "we have nearly 100 hosts offering experiences online and thousands more who’ve offered to host experiences".
Let me remind them, that they have at least THREE..FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE bigger hosts number (problem 1), there is no space in youtube/twitch area for that amount of content creators (problem 2), and most hosts can't do it (problem 3).
For myself, I'm hoping Airbnb go bankrupt. In my mind, they're similar to Uber in that their only true innovation is a willingness to disregard local laws.
In general I am not sure how their business will pan out over the next year or so.
Because of better adherence to social distancing rules? Are you a SWE working remotely?
The three stages of airbnb:
- actual sharing of spare capacity on a temporary basis (for example effectively a house swap while on holiday)
- rental of permanent properties by "early adopters" who saw the loophole and the gap in the market
- inundation of full time speculators who own many properties and lots of highly leveraged "owners" who have one or a handful of properties, plus landlords who couldn't add up and had negative yield on their long-term rentals and bailed to short term
The last layer here are going to get hit hard. Many will retreat to long-term rentals again, which will see rents fall. For those who already had negative yield before moving to airbnb, this will be even worse now.
Also many airbnb rentiers will have a low skill set, with bad qualifications. They got into it because it seemed like easy money, and they will be the first to suffer in the coming recession. Forced sellers.
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I'll add my comment here as I mentioned unearned income, which hacker news really don't like, so they gave me the fake "you're posting too fast" even though I've posted nothing for over 20 minutes.
They used Ireland as a proxy to avoid tax? God these people have zero shame.
> AS: They are donated or offered at reduced pricing.
This decision was made by the market, not by AirBnB, because they can't get anywhere near your former price.
> AS: Yes, like “Sangria mixing with Pedro,” which is a cocktail mixing show
This isn't going to work.
AirBnb's sole "value" proposition was exploiting a regulatory loophole to allow offering accommodation that has:
- lower to no safety inspection
- zoned in residential spaces often with angry neighbours
Does it have another idea like this, that allows them to extract value created by the community?
I don't see any.
I'm highly unlikely to use the service but I still think it shows they can respond quickly to radical events.
This is discussed in the text of the very first question in the article
five stars hotel like westin sells a 2days voucher for 1mil rupiah (~70 usd), valid until dec 31, 2021.
Sure they have disrupted the property market and inflated rent and property prices already, which are now ironically crashing a little bit.
Support good hotels and chains, who hire and invest in great staff.
Critically, this means that an AirBnB has a greater chance of being able to disinfect the entire property between groups of guests, at a much lower cost. Now, whether or not AirBnB hosts are doing this is a different question, but it's at least feasible for an AirBnB (as opposed to borderline impossible for a hotel).
Hotels (short of the “accommodation” in Chung King Mansions) have never made me feel this way...
That was probably one of my more memorable stays while traveling, it wasn't all bad though. Just not something comparable to other places I've stayed before.
I imagine being a repeat complainer is one way to make the list unless you bring enough business to be worth it.
AirBNB used to fill the midpoint in a way that was fairly difficult to do otherwise. It's a shame it became what it became. I only had good experiences back in ~2016-17.
This was the very first night of solo travel for me, and it changed the day from starting out anxious (Where’s the subway? Where am I going to find food? What if I get lost?!) to starting out with a fresh cup of coffee and some delicious breakfast.
Could you get a similar experience in a hotel? Sort of. There’s usually a restaurant where you could get breakfast, but I don’t think you’re usually going to get this feeling of “someone actually cares”.
I haven't generally had social hosts most of the times I was staying with airbnb, but I'm also fairly anti-social myself, but even just this last year, I was up in Buffalo NY for an event and ended up asking my host where to go for dinner, which turned into us hanging out the next day because he was starting his own brewery and wanted to share some of his homebrew.
Even without something like that, for me, a lot of the value isn't even in interacting with a host as much as it is the feeling of sharing a lived-in space with someone. Small bits of personal decor, or looking through what random DVDs they have on the shelf provides some warmth that a chain hotel never will. It's a bit trite, but I think you can often tell the hosts that really care about providing a good experience from how they describe the rental, as well as looking at the actual decor and the space you're renting.
I don't know - I have a lot of colleagues who love meeting a wacky host and their dog, and like the varying accommodation styles.
It's not my cup of tea either, but a lot of people genuinely seem to love the vibe and don't want to go back to hotels.
I just think that those still enamoured by it haven’t been burned yet. There is very little [effective] recourse when your AirBnB takes a turn for the worse. There are enough horror stories out there. I personally think the value to risk ratio is way off for them these days. It isn’t cheap anymore and that makes it way less appealing.
Generally, I'm either doing something where I'm renting a whole house in a VRBO style thing where it's likely someone's full-time rental property and has been for a while or I'm essentially looking for something barely above couch surfing where I expect to show up in the evening, go to bed, then wake up and leave for the day.
I've had plenty of minor sub-optimal experiences, but usually nothing that wasn't called out in the listing, and I've also had plenty of experiences with hosts that took things seriously and were amazing to work with. Most of the stories I've seen of people getting burned was though listings that at least personally, I would have found a little suspicious in terms of price-to-quality, and level of professionalism. They seem to prey on people who want the experience of a hotel, but don't want to pay for it.
I have one of each: a funny AirBNB caper and a totally disgusting hotel story I wouldn't bother telling. The latter involves stains of the uhh... lonely masculine sort... on towels. Shudder.
I don’t think it makes sense to say that a product is something that never has those sort of negative externalities because that is certainly not the case.
Also, this article is not about whether AirBnB can work in general... it’s a billion-dollar company over a decade old. Whether you like it or not, it’s silly to act like the idea has yet to be proven.
The article is about how they pivoted their homepage to add value to their product during a crisis. I would think that topic would be very interesting to the HN audience. They are certainly acting more agile than a hotel chain; I don’t see Marriott offering online “host experiences” to their guests.
That's not remotely a good characterization of what AirBnB was offering. Like them or not, they were successful for more than a decade because they were objectively providing a better product than traditional hotels.
Complain about the externalities of their service, sure. But let's not pretend that they didn't make something people want.
A cheaper, unregulated, tax-free product. I get that there is a demand for this but there are demands for lots of things that are harmful to society as a whole.
By what measure? You imply that their product being cheaper or unregulated is harmful to society, but you haven't offered any reason as to why. It's also not a tax-free product.
I would be willing to be that most AirBnB hosts are not registered businesses and paying the taxes they owe... for running hotels
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From @amiga_500
I'll add my comment here as I mentioned unearned income, which hacker news really don't like, so they gave me the fake "you're posting too fast" even though I've posted nothing for over 20 minutes.
Ah so that’s what triggers it! Same thing just happened to me!
Housekeepers at my hotel has to fight just to make minimum wage since our pay was pegged to the number of rooms we cleaned (about $2.50 per room). Managers would tell us to clock in late and clock out early so we’d “get paid more”, and most went along with it because it was 2009 and jobs were hard to find.
I realized instantly that these guys were fleecing the housekeeping staff because my checks were always just a little short of where they should’ve been based on hours worked.
I stopped clocking in and clocking out when they told me to, and instead punched my card based on my schedule. My manager caught on and started punching my card for me (which was illegal).
I calculated how much they’d shorted me over that summer, went to the hotel manager’s office, put in my resignation and demanded the extra pay they’d shorted me, which they agreed to.
I’m not saying every big hotel is this shady, but the idea that minimum wage workers are invested in these days is pretty laughable, because there’s a hundred other people ready to take that job.
Those who patronize big hotels tend to get caught up in the marketing, but I assure you that perception in no way aligns with the reality of that work.
Occupancy taxes actually really bother me because they're usually cash grabs targeting visitors who have no clout with the local officials that put it in place. It's taxation without representation, or a slightly different take on the speed trap on a major road through a drive-through small town.
An occupation tax is because you're using public resources and don't normally pay taxes to that jurisdiction.
You also didn't touch on how there's no electoral protections as a check on these taxes.
There are electoral protections as a check - for the residents who live in the town. You're a visitor to a place, you don't get to change how it's run. If you don't like it, don't visit that place.
Something Airbnb and Uber have shown is that licensing for these services is overkill. There are a handful of exceptions, but in general, anyone can do them safely enough. This isn't to say there shouldn't be any licensing, but that it can be lightweight.
Protection in my case meant an opportunity to spend months, or even a year, taking a case to my state’s Division of Labor over a few hundred dollars. Fortunately for me, my family had money so I didn’t have to worry about it.
Had I not come from means, reporting a pay dispute like that might’ve cost me my job and possibly my reputation. Labor laws, although well intended, do not do enough to deter businesses from stealing from the poor.
The reason labor laws don't work well is because so few people are willing to actually to use them.
> Support good hotels and chains, who hire and invest in great staff.
It's a bit less so now (pre-COVID), but this is the Airbnb discount. It was cheaper than hotels for a reason. It's like buying a used item from a third-party seller on Amazon. The product offering is completely valid, but the quality and support are hit-or-miss, so the risk you're taking is baked into the price.
It's impossible to scale a platform to 10s/100s/1000s millions without finding an ever-lowering lowest common denominator.