Renters From Hell (Airbnb and the Limits of Trust Online)

It's a perfectly fair comparison; both eBay and AirBnB are marketplace businesses that facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers and do not vouch for the trustworthiness of either.

It seems possible that AirBnB will be able to enhance the trust features of its site over time, for a certain subset of its users. I don't think that day has arrived yet, and this piece addresses that in a way that's fair (he does point out "the two horror stories we know about are clearly outliers"). There's very little chance that it's going to disrupt the hotel industry for the kinds of travelers who use hotels frequently (particularly business travelers and families).