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"She literally left a key for a total stranger to her home, without doing ANY due-diligence. Someone basically sent her an email, and she said "okey-dokey, here's the keys, have fun.""

I don't use Airbnb from either side, but isn't the big problem here that you can't do due dilligence? As I understand it (and again, as a non-user maybe I am wrong), Airbnb pretty much blocks you from knowing too much about your temporary renter as a measure to avoid you using them as a match up service and then doing the deal directly to avoid paying them their fee.

And that's a good reason to avoid Airbnb, not a good reason to give a stranger your keys.

I agree with you. I recently took a weekend vacation by the beach and did my very best to use AirBnB. The fact that email is the only way to communicate with the host made it really difficult for me to get a good feel for the place I was renting. I want to use AirBnB, I really do. But preventing me from typing my phone# in the text field really annoyed me. I don't think that renting a place is like buying an item on eBay where it is best that the seller and buyer not bypass the entire auction mechanism.

I don't mind at all if AirBnB gets a slice of my money and in fact I prefer to pay them than a random person. However, I want to talk to the host on the phone before I agree to anything. You can't express friendliness and warmth textually (or at least most people can't) but it is very easy to pick up on the tone over phone. In the end, I found a wonderful beach cottage via vrbo.com. If vrbo had a website like AirBnB, they would get my money every time. I understand the financial mechanism is very different on both sites but seriously, AirBnB, let me talk to potential hosts before I book anything - I will even pay a fee to become a premium-phone-enabled-renter.

A possible solution would be if AirBnB required hosts and guests to be friends on Facebook before a transaction could take place..this wouldn't prevent anyone from making a fake profile in order to seem more trustworthy, but this is an area where Facebook's privacy situation would be helpful. You can learn a lot about a person's character by examining his or her Facebook page.

The guy spelled his name wrong- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know something weird is going on.

As someone whose name looks like a misspelled English version of the name, I think you're jumping to conclusions there.

Jumping to conclusions is the name of the game when you're giving your the keys to your apartment to a stranger for a week.

The only due diligence possible is an AirBnB-provided, essentially anonymous, IM conversation. Anyone who attempts to use the AirBnB service who isn't running a legitimate short-term rental property (with all the associated insurance and safeguards) is playing russian roulette with their property and possessions. And if they're home during the rental they're potentially risking life and limb.

This is a failure of the business model. If they are unwilling to get into the business of creating a safe, vetted community for short-term rentals, they need to disallow personal rental properties and stick with full-time rental companies.

She pointed out in her post that AirBnB makes it close to impossible to do better checking on people, and she had the impression that this was because they were doing the vetting.

That's a step few people will bother to take, just as is the case with most vacation rentals. A credit card is enough ID for even commercial operations.

Her only real mistake was to leave her "passport, cash, credit card...grandmother’s jewelry...camera, iPod, an old laptop, and my external backup drive...birth certificate and social security card" in the apartment. It seems they were locked in a closet, but removing them from the house altogether would have taken a lot of the sting out of this unfortunate experience.

>but it rubs me the wrong way that AirBnB is getting this massive amount of bad press

Press is not that bad, they probably got substantial increase of awareness about their still niche service in the general public segment of the population. It's in the same category as iPhone 4 antenna issue - Apple would have to pay billions of dollars to get the same exposure on all TV channels, while this allowed general public to see new iPhone for free, to learn that all cool people have it and are worried about antenna, and to forget about antenna next day and buy it.

They SHOULD get bad press, their service is MASSIVELY risky.

After this incident I feel very disinclined to rent out my personal residence through Airbnb and I think a lot of people would feel the same way.

Unless they really need the money.

"left a key for a total stranger to her home"

Exactly. You have to be crazy to be a host with AirBNB