Hacker News Reader

Comment by megra | Hacker News Reader

Surprised but not surprised at how many commenters are fed up with Airbnb. After ~20+ stays with a few frustrating experiences, I had my breaking point about a year ago. After ~20 hours of flights, I landed in my destination city at 10pm only to receive a message from the host telling me to go to an address different than the listing. There were no pictures of the new place and it was in a different neighbourhood which was no longer walking distance to where I had work meetings. Plus, it just felt unsafe and sketchy. AirBnB eventually refunded me, but I still paid more for a hotel and lost many hours on the phone with customer service. I haven't used Airbnb since.

View on HN

This is a common fraud method that I've read a few articles about over the years. I initially had sympathy for Airbnb in that it's much harder for them to deal when a host is a "bad actor", but that sympathy evaporated when I saw that they have no recourse for making any type of resolution swift or even possible.

I've worked on fraud, at scale, before and it is a hard problem. But when you're giving fraudsters $$$ by letting scams happen and hurting people's lives in the process... for years... it escapes understanding.

When you turn a blind eye, you're effective "creating" a world for fraudsters to thrive. As a founder, myself, I'm always thinking about what the world would look like if I am successful. At some point it's your duty as a founder to put your foot down and "be the change you want to see in the world" even if it hurts your profit margin.

But maybe this is also the difference that lets people rise to the top. It's just sobering. At least people like Bill Gates have been able to distance themselves from their ruthless business tactics and steer that influence towards promoting positive change.

They find you a new place now https://www.airbnb.com/aircover

They do not. I cited this exact policy and it fell on deaf ears. I couldn't believe it myself -- maybe I should write a dedicated post about the details just for visibility.

Setting aside freeqaz's response to you explaining that they do in fact not follow the policies on that page, even if they did it wouldn't mean they "find you a new place". It says right on that page that they'll find you a new place _or_ refund you. A last-minute refund is basically airbnb doing nothing at all.

This exactly! I have my own Airbnb horror story and what most people don't realize is that their policy says find you a new place OR refund you. And this is the real kicker. It's at THEIR discretion not yours.

This means you can tell them that you just want a comparable place nearby (due to some unforseen issue with original booking) and they can say it's too much work or too much money to book you one and just kick you a refund last minute.

Ah, that's a very good point. They _did_ refund me so I guess they did satisfy their AirCover policy! I'm glad you noticed that detail. Thank you.

Had this experience w/ vrbo:

- support didn't offer to find a new last-minute place for our big group, but they did say they'd cover a new place

- basically 0% availability, so only $$$$ places left, and multiply that by a big group: 5-figure bill for lodging

- vrbo explicitly agreed to cover it after going through internal approvals, so we pulled the trigger. big event and clock was ticking before we'd be sleeping on the streets, so we were relieved.

- ... and then I got shafted with a 5-figure bill because, after-the-fact, they put up bureaucratic hurdles & denied our claim

After that shockingly fraudulent experience, I did some googling, and apparently this is common practices to all big players in this space. Multiple (winning) class action lawsuits.

On the plus side, better motivation for our business: we do gpu graph visualization & graph neural networks to help companies detect & prevent this kind of behavior based on all sorts of account metadata (transactions, image forensics, IPs, clickstreams) so personally motivated to help others target the bad guys causing problems for everyone else :)

I had a fun experience being told to go to some random shop to pick up the key for the property, which I had trouble finding. Then I had trouble opening the door (it had like 3 different keyholes and none seemed to work) and couldn't reach the host by phone to get some help. Was a really bad start to the trip.

Just book a hotel. Same price, less hassle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com