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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

Their search now prominently encourages odd stays like this as well. It's puzzling as it seems to be at the expense of other search filtering.

They've reduced useful search filters like 'has a desk' and there is no filter for 'not a tent or van' which is increasingly common. Some areas (Hawaii) contain vans as the majority of their listings. But no filters against them.

Their direction reminds me of the progress of Netflix to be less searchable and more about content they want to push. I guess it works out in the a/b tests but likely misses the forest for the trees.

A tip: use airbnb.com.au instead of .com as you'll get the real full price in the searches as they must comply with Australian law. This works all over the world.

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Great tip, but I'm probably done using Airbnb. At first they were a no brainer. Quality listings and you'd have a good time. Now it is like staying at a crap hotel and often more expensive. I'd rather just stay somewhere nice using a traditional agency.

I think I'm coming to the same conclusion.

Currently on a 2.5wk trip around Europe, only two nights of which are in a proper hotel. I previously had great and unique experiences with Airbnb, but lately, I'm paying what's probably more than a hotel, and the experiences have been... Awkward and sometimes kinda skeezy. The one thing I really want is a convenient washer to do laundry, which almost every Airbnb I've stayed in has. Not so much in hotels.

Hotels in the US often have washers and dryers but yeah, they won't be in your room.

Not with that attitude!

I once got bedbugs at a hostel in Argentina. They were kind (?) enough to refund my money, but then I was left uncomfortably itchy and roomless. Plus I was freaked out that there might be bedbugs in my clothes and backpack. I bought some detergent and booked a room at the Hilton, put every belonging I had in the tub and filled it up. I've wondered at times what kind of gross stuff happens in hotels, but on this night, I was the gross one.

After a few poor experiences airbnbing in London I switched entirely back to hotels. The Airbnb experience was either: have your own place, but it's more expensive than even a nice hotel; or stay in someone's house who, when it gets down to it, would really rather you weren't there, because most people actually don't like having strangers in their house.

>Now it is like staying at a crap hotel and often more expensive

not surprising, companies like Uber and AirBNB were initially cheaper because they were basically ignoring most laws and getting away with it, plus subsidizing cost with VC money. Now they are being forced to pay for compliance and taxes, and trying to turn a profit, costs go up. Plus their renters don't have the economies of scale compared to traditional hotels, so it makes sense they will be more expensive

Those searches maximize their profit, that it comes at the expense of your utility is your problem.

The same with google: google search is going down the drain but google search income is up.

This is exactly the kind of thing that tends to enable competitors in normal markets, but on the internet monopolies are propped up by all kinds of tricks and then you can make moves like this without expecting to be punished.

It seems like A/B tests failing to capture long-term effects is a common trend among these companies.

Assuming you’d want to work data-driven, what would be a better approach to figure out what works and doesn’t? Or is it a conscious decision to capitalize on the short-term at the expense of the long-term?

I think there's an aspect of the recently-discussed right-hand pole instability: an A/B test continues just long enough to see an increase in a given metric, but basically never long enough to determine whether that increase results in a change in behaviour that results in a longer-term net-decrease in that metric.

e.g.: Putting emojis in your notification texts increases engagement… until it kills your engagement entirely.

You dervserve what you get when build superstar teams of l33tc0de bots

I agree with the sentiment, but if you keep performing small A/B tests (including emoji vs plain) this would be discovered in the future as a performance gain and reverted. Assuming no manager says "we already ran that test".

Not necessarily, because once the result has been generally has been rolled out, you've started altering the population your experiments are drawn from.

No amount of short-term testing will discover [*the cause of] a long-term decline, if the long term response of the system of customer/product/company is swamped by an opposing reaction in the short term.

Exactly, there will be no way to determine that why negative effects you measure were actually due to the emoji.

The only real way to deal with this is to run these types of A/B tests “forever”, which is not desired. Which is why I’m very much wondering, what is the appropriate way to deal with this?

I agree with your point. Just to add to the conversation.

The population is already changing long term for reasons outside of our control. If for instance, other companies are adding the emojis and people are tired of emojis that will affect the performance of our experiments.

It is by no means perfect, but at least it offers a way to get feedback (given enough users, not annoyed enough :)

Yes because they know at the back of their heads, competing with hotels for a good experience is hard and they can't handle it. No airbnb is a four seasons. However they can compete in weird exotic places like a potato or a loft. It's basically Ringling Brothers circus as a temporary accommodation.

walking by recently, it appeared to me that the Four Seasons in downtown San Francisco has been converted to some kind of time-share ownership model. too much demand? insider club ? no idea

edit not the Four Seasons with a door on Market Street, the sign I saw was closer to the Moscone Center..

Agreed, the main app prioritises showing you gimmicky tree houses over places which are much more interesting (perhaps with a more convenient location, or remote work friendly for 2 people).

They are probably trying to push back against the commodisation of AirBnB stays. In the last few years they seem to have become extremely standardised, within a certain price range and star rating you know almost exactly what you'll be getting in terms of service, cleanliness and outfitting of the apartment. I like it a lot as a cheaper alternative to hotels for longer stays! But perhaps lower margin than littering the countryside with wacky constructions.

We used AirBnB extensively in the past for our trips accross Europe with the kids, camping isn't always an option, especially for city trips. Not sure when, but at a certain point Booking.com just surpased AirBnB with selection, availalability and price, plus it does include hotels and the like. In some regions you find tons of options on bookong and basically none on AirBnB, Iceland is recent example where AirBnB was mostly useless.

Maybe those two things are related, AirBnB searching a nieche to occupy with more "exotic" options. After all, hotels didn't go away, did they?

I just don't even bother with them anymore. Booking.com has scummy UX tactics, but the filters work, the prices are accurate and the range is wide. Once you find something, always good to check agoda or similar to see if they're cheaper. Also always double check on apps - for some reason they discount more, seems marketing execs still dream of app based e-com. And the websites of the places you want to stay, even holiday houses tend to have their own websites.

Airbnb is just frustrating from start to finish.

As an alternative theory... A lot of the airbnb and hospitality industry got annihilated in the last few years. An adaptation to this state of affairs has been more and more hotels or AirBNBs where travelling to the hotel. In Japan there seems to be quite a lot of this[1]; maybe they are the most pronounced example hotels needing to evolve or die.

I am not deeply sold on this idea as a whole, but it seems like having a very low-maintenance van has its advantages right now compared to a hotel room which has probably sat empty for the majority of the last few years. As you say, it seems unlikely that airBNB is explicitly pushing them at the expense of other listings; more likely, it just is a consequence of the world we live in.

[1]https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000586.000030117.html (Detailing a niche hotel where you get to pretend to operate a main tokyo train line and be woken up by the same device train conductors use)

Been using Airbnb on and off for 10 years and I'm really not convinced it's a better model than traditional hotels. Maybe it's because I'm always looking at the cheaper end of the scale but when browsing Airbnb I can't help but feel suspicious at most listings, based on previous experiences. It's ALWAYS shittier than the pictures. Often there's a feeling of "oh well could be worse, we'll just deal with it" after walking in to these places.

I just checked a bunch of normal boutique hotels and their listing inspire much more confidence and are actually cheaper. At this point I have no idea what Airbnb offers that hotels don't do better.

booking.com is often cheaper than directly booking with a hotel.

I've worked for a hotel chain in the past. They're using the same rate codes you could be using booking directly with the hotel. They just know how to show the lowest rate code possible.

If you look at hiltons on booking.com and booking at hilton.com you'll see different prices, until you go through the hilton.com process and select non-refundable/non-cancelable rates, then they're the same rate, expect if you book via booking.com you don't get any points with the hotel chain.

> I have no idea what Airbnb offers that hotels don't do better.

As a business? They avoid tons of regulations there for zoning, public safety, etc. That leads to higher profit margins.

To a consumer? I'm not 100% sure anymore. Except some places where hotels are booked through AirBnB to gain better access to customers

In my personal experience Airbnb is good when you are travelling with a large group of people (6+) and/or with children. You can get a house with 3-4 rooms, a few bathrooms, a functional kitchen, laundry area, etc, for about half the price as it would be if you got double rooms at hotels for the same number of people, and it's much more convenient since you're not spread across different floors.

For solo travel tho, I'd rather book a hotel sight unseen than use airbnb, since too many people try to make their couch in the corner look like a nice private room in the listing.

It's really easy to find an airbnb that accepts dogs and really hard to find a hotel that does.

At some point over the past year or so, they even removed the ability to filter by whether the stay has a crib.

The information is there, but there's no way to limit your searches to only those properties, so you're forced to open up all that seem interesting and scroll through the listing just to see.

You still cannot order by price either. Very frustrating to be beholden to their machine learning algo when you are actually researching a stay.

Painful.

that's so bad that i instantly closed airbnb and opened booking.com

Oh no have advertisers found out about HN? Lol

what ?

Lots of people mentioning the service in weird ways makes it seem like there is some PR going on in this thread for a certain website. I'm half joking.

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