Ask HN: Banned from Airbnb? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Banned from Airbnb?

65 pointspeter3720510 comments

After years of living a semi-nomadic lifestyle and spending many thousands of dollars on the platform, it has finally happened to me: I got the dreadful "We'll be unable to support your account moving forward" email.

In my case, I was banned "because information on your reservation or your account may be associated with a pattern of activity linked to property damage".

When and where did that supposed property damage take place? No answer.

I assume I must have been wrongfully flagged by an ML model or something similar.

Unfortunately, traveling without Airbnb is hard, as they have by far the largest portfolio of vacation rentals.

I'm reaching out to Hacker News because it seems like this topic has been discussed here before (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523056).

Any information helps.

My attempts at contacting someone at Airbnb that isn't just a call center agent reading a script have so far been unsuccessful.

If you work at Airbnb and you're reading this, let me make you the following offer: You look into the supposed "property damage" and figure out what actually went on. Then: - If it turns out I didn't actually damage any property: You unban me - If it turns out I did (I must be suffering from amnesia): I pay for the damage, plus a crisp USD 1000 for you personally, and you don't even have to unban me

I hope the format of this is correct, I have read Hacker News for a long time but never submitted anything.

In the age of ML era, we are going to see more and more cases like this. Few people will be able to successfully get the attention of our AI overlord. There needs a way for customers/users to have a voice.

Whenever a service becomes so large that it is not realistic to chose an alternative, the government should take action and either regulate it like a utility or set up a complaints regulator and fine the company for unhandled legitimate complaints.

I believe network effects are what creates this really strong draft that keeps you on top once you're there. Hosts want to list their places where they have the most possible guests – and guests want to book where they have the largest selection of listings. Hard to break that cycle, even if the company makes mistakes that would be punished if it was easier for competitors to grab market share.

Yeah I have a strong suspicion that an ML model mistakenly flagged me in some form. I believe that reasonably any bans/blocks/other important decisions should only be augmented by ML and always, in 100% of the cases, need human review. You're going to have false positives, and that's okay, no model is perfect – but that needs to be taken into account when making decisions based on its output.

I read about a case here on Hacker News a while ago – I can't seem to find the link again – where the police arrested a guy for committing a crime because they had ran a face detection model over drivers license pictures and CCTV footage and it flagged the guy. Problem was – he didn't look like the perpetrator at all, it was clearly just a fluke. But since the police was not trained to scrutinize the face detection results, they arrested him and had him in custody for a good while.

Another thing that gets more and more common is that when traveling in a foreign country and using a foreign credit card, transactions at tourist-heavy businesses like restaurants or rental car companies go through smoothly. But try to order a T-shirt online? Oh no, that must be fraud! It's constantly blocked, and always on the merchant side, my bank knows about my traveling. Turns out, many fraudulent transactions are made with stolen, foreign cards, and so a primitively trained model might look successful enough if it simlply blocks all transactions with foreign cards.

But of course it could have also been some other mistake that lead to this. ML is a good possibility though.

Trying to understand how something like this could happen. Is there an incentive for Airbnb hosts to flag people as property destroyers? Does Airbnb compensate for this in some way that could lead unscrupulous hosts to do this?

Since I haven't gotten any information on where that flag came from, one can only speculate. I certainly find it imaginable that malicious hosts could make up some fake damages to get compensation. But in that case, why wouldn't Airbnb have tried to recoup the cost from me whenever that happened? Instead, I got suddenly banned when making a new booking after not using the platform for a while. No questions asked or information given

Turns out being "disruptive" and cheaper comes with its downsides.

It certainly got them a large market share. I'd love to pay a few percent more for the option of getting _actual_ customer support when things derivate from the happy path. If that was a box you can tick during the checkout process, I would go for it.

I was an Airbnb superhost for a few years. I’m not aware of any incentive for hosts to report damages that aren’t legitimate. I’m also not sure why, if this is due to damages, they wouldn’t attempt to charge you versus ban your account.

I’ve always had surprisingly good experiences with Airbnb’s phone customer support. Perhaps try calling them again to ask for clarification. It could just take connecting to a more helpful support rep.

Best of luck!

I've tried phone support and so far, unfortunately, it seems like the call center agents that run the phone support aren't allowed to actually escalate this issue or even provide information, let alone investigate what's going on themselves

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