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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

They need to sort out the issues with poor service, hosts going dark, properties not as described, cleaning fee rip-offs etc.

Hotels are also cheaper nowadays by the time you account for hidden fees.

After my last 3 attempts went bad, I'm done with AirBNB.

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Yep - I also used to use airbnb without even thinking twice about it in Europe. Last few trips have been getting steadily worse, culminating in a stay where the residence was completely unsuitable for habitation (extremely cold & heating was broken, no linens/towels, mold & damp issues) and airbnb caught us in some sort of bizarro catch-22.

Basically they said: "we can't refund you until you give the host a fair opportunity to address the issues, so get back to us in 24 hours if the host hasn't done anything". When the host failed to do anything and we re-contacted airbnb, they said that the period of validity for us to file a complaint and get a refund had expired, and they would not do anything to help us.

My wife and I fought this, HARD. One of the few times I've basically seen red while trying to sort out a simple issue like this. The host was contacted by airbnb and was livid, and became extremely hostile and unfriendly to us in communications. We ended up getting a hotel nearby and working out the whole thing through travel insurance. Honestly, fuck airbnb.

> culminating in a stay where the residence was completely unsuitable for habitation (extremely cold & heating was broken, no linens/towels, mold & damp issues) and airbnb caught us in some sort of bizarro catch-22.

This isn't normal? Unfortunately I've used Airbnb twice and this was my experience both times. Put it down partially to someone else booking it and probably being a bit cheap but yeah I'm just gonna use hotels haha. At least you can point issues out to them in person.

For me Airbnb has a reputation of being the place landlords list the shitholes they can't rent to people normally

I had one bad host experience, with a listing that as far as I can tell just didn't exist. Sent info to airbnb, including screenshots of trying to call the host. Got reimbursed in full in a few weeks. Pretty much what I expected them to do.

Since airbnb is a marketplace, it pays to look at host ratings and reviews, or just filter by superhost. If you pick somebody with 2 reviews that just opened, you have to be aware it's a gamble. It's not necessarily a mistake, depending on context, but a gamble.

Had this scenario in SF and lost out on $4k. Support just closed each chat to stop responses. The transcript of the phone calls they provided was inaccurate and they refused to provide the original audio.

They have a large problem of "hosts" being businesses, and not individual people.

I booked an apartment in Dublin with "Johnny", but upon paying for the booking, discovered it was a company called "City Break Apartments Limited" who required a large deposit upon check-in.

Nowhere in the advert was any indication the host was a company.

And a large problem of individuals wanting the money for running a business, but being disinterested in any of the work such as answering emails, showing up to give you the keys, or taking dishes from the dishwasher after your 100 EUR "cleaning fee".

This is an endemic issue in various services that say they're just people like you and me, but have businesses underneath. ebay leaned into it completely, it USED to be a buy / sell from peers deal, but nowadays it's basically aliexpress and co.

Yup, tried to book through them recently and there were technical glitches which prevented me from doing so. Eventually AirBnB support told me to tell the host to perform various actions to "reset" their availability status, etc. After a lot of fruitless back and forth, I messaged the host via AirBnB and told him that I was going to book his place through Booking.com. As a final insult, AirBnB wouldn't let me send the message because it contained "booking.com", so I ended up saying "the other platform".

Frankly the other platform seems to often be cheaper when the room's listed on both (there's surprisingly little overlap even in the self catered apartments and spare rooms category)

Sure, it has the irritating design patterns telling you that 3 people have looked this room in the last hour to try to encourage you to rush a decision, but manages to be still more honest in displaying the actual amount you pay per night rather than an amount plus 14% fees...

This is Kafkesque

I live in Soho, London as an owner-occupier in a building with 6 other flats (7 total).

Of the 6 others, 3 of them are being used permanantly for AirBnB's, in direct conflict with the Leasehold agreement, which explictly states that the accommodation cannot be used for short-term, hotel-esque businesses and directly against the law (London requires that a flat not be used for more than X days per year). These are operated by a company that manages 10s to 100s of them in the area

Having complained to the building management, they simply don't care/don't do anything. It's on my todo list to take it up with the council/lawyer up against the building management, but I just don't have the time. It seems like AirBnB has just completely outsourced the fraud elements as "not their problem".

Will never use an AirBnB again, and will aggressively advise against it for friends & family.

Yep. AirBnB is directly responsible for exacerbating housing crises and ruining neighborhoods world wide by making it easy to break the law and providing perverse incentives to do so. A negative externality of society if there ever was one.

I don't know anyone who trusts Airbnb anymore, whether host or visitor. Several years ago I booked a week in SF at what looked like a very nice place. Naturally, the reality didn't remotely match the photos -- everything was broken, in tatters, filthy and it reeked of mold. Airbnb's resolution process was to have me wait several hours for someone to come and re-wash all of the bedding, but everything still smelled like mold afterward. This cleaning person actually told me the owner is aware that everything in the place is filthy, but refuses to change anything.

Unfortunately, Airbnb wasn't satisfied with my story because I couldn't prove that it smelled like mold -- yes, they actually wanted me to prove the presence of mold over email. They also weren't satisfied with the cleaning person's story, or the dozen photos I sent of the place being in shambles. They not only refused to help me find another place, but refused to refund me, as well. They didn't just steal $4,500, they forced me to spend my entire first day finding other lodging at premium last-minute prices during Salesforce Week.

My choices were to cancel the whole trip and head home, or spend another $6,500 at the damn W, of all places. I decided to stay thinking it would end up only being an extra $2,000 after the Airbnb refund, which was a mistake, because they never refunded me and brazenly told me to bring them to small claims court. But after travel expenses and attorney fees, I would have only ended up getting a few hundred dollars back.

So, Airbnb effectively screwed me out of $11,000 and their representatives seemed genuinely happy about doing it. I honestly don't recall a single apology from anyone at any point.

This is what credit cards are for -- you can dispute the charges. I hope you did. Credit card companies tend to err on the side of supporting consumers.

That might have once been true, but my own recent experience makes me think that the tide has turned. I no longer expect the card companies to advocate for the consumer in these kinds of "ambiguous" situations, particularly when the business is willing to misrepresent the truth.

I disputed it, but after three months of waiting, the bank decided there's nothing they can do because Airbnb's position is protected by the user agreement and CA law. It was a severely disappointing moment.

I would have thought you would have been able to recover associated expenses in small claims court like the cost of your other hotel?

Despite the circumstances, it was technically my own decision to spend that money, so I wouldn't have been able to claim the hotel. I would have been limited to claiming the $4,500 plus partial attorney fees. But not only would it have cost roughly $4,000 to make that happen, the attorney warned me there's a chance I could actually lose due to Airbnb's solidly anti-consumer user agreement.

very funny how both airbnb and uber are now both worse experience and more expensive than hotels/taxies.

in the same time both of them disrupted their fields and really improved the service and price of hotels/taxies.

They both have the same problem of needing large margins for being a middle man. Good ones no doubt, that provide good services for buyers and sellers, but they're still middle men. The kind of technology and services they offer seem pretty vulnerable to competition and becoming increasingly commoditized. Whereas the cost of providing a house/car and person to service it is not coming down. So the idea they can just keep extracting billions of dollars per year out of this (and massively growing that revenue to cover their vast operating costs) seems optimistic to me.

My feelings exactly I'm literally writing this from a hotel

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