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Comment by billclerico | Hacker News Reader

though he humbly suggests the opposite, this is a great example of how to deal with a crisis

I think it's fantastic that they're implementing this, but it's still rather depressing that it took a month of time and a weekend of bad PR to get them to do it in the first place.

the fact that AirBNB has managed to implement an international insurance/guarantee program in as little as a month is a heroic feat.

To be fair, they've said they'll implement it, not that it's implemented already. The truth of this will be shown when someone who isn't EJ and isn't riding on the crest of a wave of internet pitchforks tries to collect.

it's going into effect in 15 days. that's pretty good.

They have $112m. They can self-insure for as long as it takes to set it up.

I think they did a great job on this response, except that it took too long. Individual incidents should have been handled as exceptions and handled well, and then this policy developed and announced once they noticed a trend of such exceptions in their CRM (or in weekly support team meetings with the founders)

you can't just snap your fingers and self insure. there are a tangle of regulations to think through, claims processes to setup in a variety of languages, adjusters and investigators to train, policies to write, etc.

the fact that this is the first major incident to make headlines after 2 million nights being booked means that they have probably been doing a great job handling exceptions. mistakes happen. especially in fast growing companies.

This is pretty much exactly what they should be doing. The fact that it took them several weeks to do it is what constitutes a poor response to the crisis.

Regardless, it looks like they're doing what they should be doing, and I hope it works out both for them and their customers.

I disagree. Changing your support model to a 24 hour call center in a month is a big, impressive feat. Think of the hiring/training/management/infrastructure challenges.

Not to mention the insurance policy, which is international?

This is not trivial stuff. It would take most companies several months to even get close to this.

Granted, but this is a PR statement. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is "in the process of beginning to implement" stages, not "We were waiting to have everything fully functional before making a statement about it".

But that said, yes, good on them.

>>It would take most companies several months to even get close to this.

I think that if a company's ability to remain in business was dependent on getting this sort of infrastructure change in place, most would be able to pull it off. Pulling it off well is another question entirely, and I'm going to be interested to see what kind of service they provide in the next couple of months.

I agree that these are no small feat, and while I honestly think that these things were huge gaps in the service previously, I do applaud the quick implementation of them.

However, even if they could not be implemented immediately, coming out early, before the story really blew up, talking about it openly and frankly, and announcing these changes would have done wonders. Instead, they've been beaten up in the press for the last week or two for their relative silence.

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