Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I've found myself just using hotels now, there's less hassle - but probably less good stories to tell.
I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.
But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much.
Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.
Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips.
Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich.
[For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]
It's a job, sometimes you do in the family sometimes you outsource. No need to be super-rich for it.
They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher
And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.
Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?
What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.
How often are these people brought on holiday?
Wow this blows my mind TIL
It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.
I don’t think you are..
Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?
Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.
Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.
Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.
If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.
I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.
what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me
Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.
The number of airbnb's that I've stayed at that have awkward rooms or incomplete amenities has been increasing year over year (such as a counter that prevents a refrigerator door from fully opening due to a hasty remodel, or a kitchen with a full set of pans but no silverware). The toiletries are almost always lacking, the bed sheets are always of the lowest quality - whatever the minimum the host can do to check the box on their AirBnB profile. The photos, reviews, and amenity lists on the host's profile never tell the fully story.
This is more the norm than the exception in my recent experience.
It makes me quite furious as I've had tame reviews removed.
Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.
Airbnb tries to scare the hosts about the lack of insurance if they rent out their place directly to the guests... but I guess reading the stories about how Airbnb fights insurance claims all the way, it's not like this insurance cover is worth much after all..
I really like their direction of enabling month-long/flexible stays and considering whether I replace my lease with that so that I can move around more easily and see different places rather being stuck at the same place for 1+ years.
As long as you know that you're getting those cute feelings at the expense of contributing to screwing everyone that actually lives there (who isn't a landlord) by contributing to a market that creates a situation ever more hostile and unaffordable to renters.
I don't think you thought your reply through before typing it out.
Clearly Airbnb is, even with the best of intentions, harming local economies by making housing unaffordable and/or unavailable to locals and has been documented over the past decade[0]. It's only recently (last few years) that cities have even caught up to tech like Abnb so for years they were and active drain on the local economy by dodging taxes and regulations[1]. It does NOT support the local economy in the same way as hotels and its benefits don't seem to out weigh its costs to the local economy[2].
[0] https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
[1] https://curs.unc.edu/2015/03/26/a-roadmap-to-regulating-airb...
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...
Many times Hotels are located in areas that are zoned commercial and not residential.
So no, hotels really are not competing with housing the way AirBnb is.
(Unless they're zoned exclusively commercial - but I don't know how common that is.)
I'll often stay in B&Bs in less urban areas, but especially for urban business travel, the hotel is not really a big part of my experience and I just want to keep things simple, maybe have a place to leave my luggage after I check out, a usually 24 hour desk, etc.
Feels like you get a more "traditional" type of vacation rental owner. More professional? More likely to outsource all the management to a professional management company? I've been scammed on AirBnB, never through any other site.
(The AirBnB scam was fortunately "only" the one where they switch you to a property in a different building because the one in the pictures is "under repairs". I didn't make too much of a stink about it because we had been traveling for a long time. But it's still fraud.)
My last rental in West Seattle was a super cute little house that I found on Zillow and I was lucky because it was owner rented, which saved us both on all those pesky lame fees.
The days of VC-backed low prices are over. Now we get to experience the joys of paying them back for their investments.
AT&T has an unlimited 4G for business plan that is only about $100/month. They accept 'consultant' as a business (I went into a store to simplify the process of setting up the account). Get a mifi (Netgear M1)... it has 2 ports for a mimo antenna. Get an omni directional antenna and the shortest cables you think you need. That should get you coverage in most places. I've taken my daily zoom calls on the tops of mountains in the middle of nowhere. There is a newer Netgear 5G mifi out now too, but I haven't looked into it yet as I'm ok on 4G and 5G coverage, especially in remote areas, isn't that great yet.
I spent 2 years on a small motorbike going all through super remote areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and living out of hotels and short term rentals. Living in a van is easy after that. =)
I doubt you can find information on the website...
2. I love a good challenge.
3. I write software that optimizes a large amount of GPU hardware.
We've taken to using AirBnB as a search and then booking directly with the provider. AirBnB's fees are exorbitant and they cost per night is marked up as well. I think we saved $600 or so with the last stay and got more favorable terms.
How do you book directly? We find that anytime we’ve tried AirBNB strips out all portions of conversations that would allow the two parties to get in contact (email addresses, phone numbers, websites, addresses)
Yep:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/48602487?check_in=2021-07-16&ch...
https://www.brett-robinson.com/search-results/?startDate=202...
>How do you book directly?
You can usually find out the building and then look to see if they have their own site.
It's like a hammer.
Useful in certain circumstances for me.
This is why they remove reviews which are negative. I stayed at an AirBnB in Hawaii once, which was filthy. In the middle of the night I decided to just leave, and I told the AirBnB CSR that I couldn't stay there. They agreed and refunded me that day's cost. But they wouldn't let me leave a review, claiming that since I had not stayed, I couldn't leave one. If only I had read a negative review before booking, I would not have booked it.
And recently, I tried to book a place to get away into the boonies for a bit. I noticed that none of the reviews of that place were more recent than May 2020. I put in a request, and never heard back from the host. How rude! Once again, if they had some reviews in there about hosts, I wouldn't have wasted my time.
And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart
If you are single with no kids and usually eat out, then yes. But is this still true if you are traveling with your family ? Just the ability to cook breakfast in an AirBnB seems like a huge money saver. It's likely why some AirBnB hosts claim that properties with more bedrooms have a much lower vacancy rate than smaller properties.
Screw hotels unless the company pays (if it ever does). That's the appeal of AirBNB - unfortunately. They've offloaded customer service but they have the upper hand due to the superior real estate over the hotels with their tiny rooms - did I mention the lack of soundproofing between rooms.
It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.
You mean they spend millions of dollars to make nightmare PR go away?
As a consumer, I appreciate the low prices and high purchasing power that I currently enjoy - I can get trinkets from distant lands on a whim and have many things done on my behalf without my lifting a finger, hedonistic luxuries that would have been only accessible to a king in centuries past. And obviously, the powerful AI-like corporations that optimize for profit above all else are profiting from the situation. But as a human being it kind of sucks.
Of course, this implicitly depends on informed consumers, so it’s a bit troubling that Airbnb is leaning so heavily on NDA-based settlements. I don’t have a feel for how common that strategy is in competitors, say hotel / VRBO.
In the case of AirBnb, while you certainly have some people looking to pick a particular kind of property/experience vs. a hotel, my sense is that most people are going with AirBnB vs. hotel to save money.
It may be even harder for these niche businesses to survive on the Internet, where instead of clinging to existence through the local customers who don't want to drive to the big city Walmart, the more local source for Internet customers is the first ad from the Amazon conglomerate they already have an account with. That's a lot easier than drilling down through the search results to the specialty site (that you've vetted as an actually more valuable option, not a scam forwarding cheap junk) and creating an account there.
Rational, informed consumers do not exist, human beings do. Capitalism does not create an infinite spectrum of a free market where all needs are met, there are winner-takes-all effects that distort the result. I don't claim to know of a better system, and I don't have the power to change the current system, but I can imagine some changes to resolve various injustices that the system's current incentive structure will never arrive at.
* Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.
* Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in.
* Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs.
I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources.
It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.
The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.
/s but I kinda want to see such a tech and head-explosions of the announcement.
I mean, would you be cool with letting someone charged with a violent crime work at a daycare until found guilty?
I saw how hard she worked. I saw how important her role was, and they threw her aside. AirBnB is a disaster when it comes to anything involving safety, health, or disaster response.
I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events the price goes up the closer the date arrives. A host that cancels on you can cost you hundreds of dollars in higher charges. I've never had a hotel cancel my reservation to upcharge me down the line.
A memorable one was where we booked a Airbnb for my family. The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. Since it was a small town there were few places to go except a small, 1-star hotel [0] under partial renovation.
One of the things I found was even with its billions in valuation they didn't have anything in place for these delivery problems. When Airbnb ran out of Airbnbs they couldn't fix that. When Hyatt runs out of rooms they send you to Hilton.
[0] they have 2-stars now! post renovation
What else could have happened? If you have special needs you should send a small message to the host prior to booking to confirm it's compatible.
As someone who's family has run a couple rental properties, I can not imagine trusting a high tragic rental that doesn't use a keypad entry.
You would have to be negligent and perhaps criminally/grossly negligent to rent a vacation rental without changing the locks and/or code. Many states require changing locks after every long-term renter... short term rentals have an even greater need to rotate the lock.
At a minimum the code should be rotated a few times a year and only if you at least get door unlock alerts. If you aren't likely to notice suspicious unlock/entry times then you need to rotate every time. And this is for a remote, secluded rental.
For a high traffic unit in a major city, you should assume that renters are going to stay longer than they paid, enter early, cleaner will skip a scheduled cleaning, etc. The only way to run a decent/safe vacation rental is to use unique codes for every visitor and verify entries e.g. cleaners entered and left at X & Y times, etc.
Then I understood. I went back to look at reviews and saw most of my reviews weren't there anymore. I was looking for one in particular, which was somewhat negative about location, and of course that was gone (the listing was still there with 5 stars). But others, too.
I spent a bit of time reading online about this, and came across Reddit forum messages in the AirBNB sub where hosts tell each other tips on how to remove reviews (there are a ton of messages on the topic). Then the other week Bloomberg wrote an article complaining about the same thing (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb...).
The horror stories in the linked article above are of course a bigger problem. But a company that censors reviews on a peer to peer system (it's not Walmart or Amazon selling goods) is worse. And it's not just peer to peer, it's where you fly thousands of miles to lay your head and bring your family.
Crappy neighbors can exist in many different forms, whether they live there full time or their renters do. I see lots of shit raised regarding bad AirBnB neighbors, but I think they're just an easily identifiable target - there is no big company to blame if you just have a plain shitty neighbor.
Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.
Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.
Right now, I need a place to stay in Denver for 8 weeks with my wife, child, mother-in-law, and 2 dogs.
We’re staying with my MIL for her knee replacement surgery recuperation. So, there can’t be any stairs, has to have a walk in shower, must have a kitchen and have 3 bedrooms.
Impossible to find a hotel like this. We found a suitable AirBNB in about an hour.
In my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open.
I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself.
And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk").
So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.
Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.
It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.
But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.
You do this in AirBnB by actively harming the locals. You do realize this right? Every AirBnB in a 'local' area is one less house for the actual locals to live in. It's becoming a huge problem in many cities in the world.
I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season.
One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!
For cleaning, they could hire out cleaning to the hosts or even the guests for a discount, or they could acquire someone like TaskRabbit or an Uber-for-cleaning type app.
To me, it seems they're taking the easy way out by not doing much about the issues and letting hosts deal with it.
I found the site after my own bad experience: bait-n-switch in Hong Kong ("executive suite" was really a nasty cockroach infested mess). Airbnb was utterly useless.
I still occasionally use airbnb, but am much more cautious and revert back to using a hotel if anything about airbnb's offerings look off.
>[...] difficult to draw useful conclusions about the correlation between the short-term rental industry and crime. Academic researchers say [...] limitations have frustrated their efforts to study the link. Only about a half-dozen scholarly studies have been carried out on the subject, and their findings are contradictory.
Contradictory findings are a positive and useful result: They're evidence that there isn't in fact a link, that the two are uncorrelated. This is some tragic ignorance of statistics on the part of the journalist...
That being said while I have never had an AirBnB nightmare. I have had some lulz. If I were female I would hesitate to use one if I were traveling alone.
Pointing the blame at Airbnb therefore feels odd. Things like these can also happen (and they do, probably even more often) at your own place, and would you sue your landlord if so? Whether these things are more probable to happen at Airbnb is also a very hard thing to prove. IMO your own place might be riskier as an attacker can study your routine over time, which opens up more security holes.
These type of attacks are probably outside anyone's control and I don't think the Airbnb places have an implicit responsibility to ensure a higher level of security than you have at your own place (it can be a Airbnb luxe feature, though?)
for additional fee
They aren't spending money out of some altruistic intention.
AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident.
The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
My assumption is that minor incidents would take 5-15 minutes (e.g. in your case of the toilet overflowing, perhaps a refund). If this dominated, you'd be looking at 30+ cases per day per agent.
More serious incidents would probably take a few days.
I kinda took a geometric mean, but I have no idea the threshold for incidents escalating to this team.
I will disagree with this no matter who does it.
Even feeling as strongly as I do about this, I would personally have a hard time turning down millions of dollars — the power imbalance is so large here that it's the illusion of a choice.
The alternative would be no payment and immediately drag this out in court very publicly. If I were the victim I would definitely prefer the option above or at least prefer to have that as an option. These kinds of things are incredibly rare and I'm glad we didn't have a news-cycle obsessing over something like this.
"By the time she realized she wasn’t alone, the blade of a kitchen knife was pointing down at her. The stranger grabbed her, shoved her onto a bed, and raped her. Drunken revelers were wandering the streets outside, but the woman was too scared to scream."
There is a HUGE difference...
The perpetrator was caught and presumably prosecuted. Again, what alternative chain of events would you have preferred?
But the article then highlights more (separate) incidents where Airbnb potentially has more responsibility because it was the hosts themselves taking the actions, highlighting weaknesses in Airbnb's background check process:
"Lapayowker’s lawyer, Teresa Li, says the suit was able to proceed, despite the arbitration requirements in Airbnb’s terms of service, because the company hadn’t done a thorough background check of the host. Airbnb only flags prior convictions, and though the host had previously been charged with battery, he wasn’t convicted."
The article then goes on to explain that Airbnb had under-resourced their trust and safety teams. As part of the 2020 COVID layoffs, Airbnb also laid off their entire trust and safety team in Portland, Oregon.
I don't want to quote more from the lengthy article, as it's not my piece, but it seems like Airbnb could be doing more to improve the safety of their platform; such as mandating keyless entry (which would have prevented many incidents, including the aforementioned rape in the lead of the article).
There's a discussion to be had about how criminals can be reintegrated to society- but shared sleeping accommodations on vacation may not be the best scenario to have it.
Is the implication here people should be punished for pre-crime as well?
Do you feel the same moral indignation about crimes committed in hotels? Here are NYC stats from 2017:
> In 2017, there were 2,656 hotel crimes reported city-wide, compared to 2,223 in 2015, a 19.5-percent increase... This includes felony assaults, which soared 51.9 percent, from 81 to 122, and third-degree assaults, which jumped 38 percent, from 255 to 352.
How much should the hotel where the 2017 Las Vegas shootings be liable for?
https://nypost.com/2018/06/04/crime-in-nyc-hotels-has-skyroc...
Yes. Sorry, I would share stats about Airbnb crimes with you but the company keeps most secret by paying people off.
Second, if you want Airbnb compared to hotels, then the firm should be paying all applicable hotel/rental taxes and following all respective hotel regulations, but they don't because Airbnb markets itself as a "platform".
A trivial issue is I don't know of a hotel in New York that would have the key exchange be at a bodega.
> Anyone registering on the site is required to sign this agreement, which bars legal claims for injury or stress arising from a stay and requires confidential arbitration in the event of a dispute. Former safety agents estimate the company handles thousands of allegations of sexual assault every year, many involving rape.
I am assuming after the victim decided to file a lawsuit. I would be surprised if that was a preemptive offer.
Let’s say i absentmindedly leave my door unlocked at home and someone comes in and raped me. Am I partially responsible for my own rape because I left the door unlocked?
Why isn’t it 100% the fault of the rapist?
Hence there is a "duty to guests" in most hospitality law. That requires that the proprietor maintain a property reasonably free of forseeable risk.
It certainly indicts ABB for not meeting their obligations here.