Airbnb removed my negative review | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb removed my negative review

752 pointsluminaobscura456 comments

I recently had a bad airbnb experience. During check in the host requested a cash deposit. this wasn't explained in the listing or prior to arrival. i couldn't check in and went elsewhere. Then i posted a review* giving these details.

Airbnb removed my below review because "The review didn’t have enough relevant information to help the Airbnb community make informed booking or hosting decisions."

The rating of the place went back up after removal. The host still have "superhost" status.

Needless to say, i no longer trust airbnb reviews.

*my full review was:

I wasn't able to check in because [Host] requested 300 USD security deposit during check in. I told her - I don't have that much cash on me. - That is against AirBnB rules. - This should have been explained in airbnb listing. She can't just surprise guests with this at the last minute. She didn't listen. She said: "my house my rules", "you can't tell me how to run my business", "if you don't like it, you can cancel". I told her if i cancel, i don't get full refund so she should cancel. she said she won't cancel and me not getting refund is not her problem. I think she counts on the fact that guests typically wouldn't want to cancel in the last minute. you can see in some other reviews people had to agree to paying her this deposit. But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.

View on HN

Airbnb removed my positive review and accused me of being in cahoots with the host to leave positive feedback.

They said they have found an existing relationship between me and the host. Mind you have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb, I'm from USA and this was in Medellin Colombia, I usually stay at Marriott hotels and I only went with Airbnb because the girl I traveled with suggested using it because it was cheaper.

It was awesome place, host was great, so left a fantastic review. It was taken down and I was called a liar. When I asked to speak with someone about why I'm accused of being a liar in my review customer support promised me many times I would get a call back. Never once did I receive a call back from anyone at Airbnb instead I would get an email that they had conducted a thorough review and their position still stands that I am a liar. I'm not sure what thorough means in their mind but since they asked me zero questions or confirmed no information with me directly it's impossible that they conducted any kind of thorough review.

Airbnb is a horrendous company along with all of these gig economy companies. They need to be regulated in the same manner as they're non-gig counterparts are. I can't imagine that any Airbnb executive actually stays at Airbnb places not with the kind of customer service that Airbnb offers.

> have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb

See what happens if you ask a bank for a loan with no credit history.

Of course these are only tangentially alike, but public history is an important way to distinguish organic reviews from AstroTurf.

Since when is a social media account required to do online business?

You also don't need a social account to login, so how would Airbnb even know that user named "John Smith" on Twitter is you?

Don't exaggerate. There is a difference between doing online business and leaving an optional review.

OP was still able to use Airbnb, they just removed one positive review possibly because they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet.

I'm not the same person, and the question still applies. If you're so pedantic, then,

> Since when is a social media account required to leave reviews?

It's just as absurd when written this way. But, please, show me the exact place where Airbnb (or any other big company) says that a social media presence is required to leave a review. I'm waiting.

Show me where Airbnb promises to accept every review? I'm waiting.

Edit: furthermore spam prevention takes all sorts of random signals in to account. Having no online presence other than a single stay in Airbnb certainly looks suspicious.

Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy.

What indication do you have that such a policy is even remotely in use at Airbnb or another company?

Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy, but there is also no evidence whatsoever that social media presence was in any way shape or form used to make the decision here. Airbnb at no point mentioned it, nor would it have been something that crossed your mind if original commenter didn't mention it as a fact about themselves.

Maybe we're aggresively agreeing with eachother?

I'm not arguing that Airbnb does use presence/lack of social to make a decision here. I just objected to you saying

> Since when is a social media account required to do online business?

I interpreted that as you being outraged that Airbnb requires some form of social presence to do business. I felt you were exaggerating and responded by saying its just about the review. I meant that even _if_ Airbnb is checking this, it's not a big deal cause this is just one of many signals that could feed into spam detection and we're only talking about the _review_ not the ability to use Airbnb at all.

You raised a valid point earlier, I doubt they're actually checking this, my point is just that even if they are, who cares. OP looks suspicious by having no online presence at all and only one stay on Airbnb. That combined with the language in their review probably tipped the spam filters to say "hey it's probably safer if we don't let this review through, doesn't seem legit"

> they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet

Huh? Airbnb has the entire transaction history that matters – proving that this specific user paid a specific amount of money for staying in a specific place for a specific amount of time.

Thinking that you need to prove "online history" (how would you even track this?) as well is absurd.

My theory on this is the same as usual – Airbnb outsources or understaffs their customer service department as usual; some stressed out agent closed the case without even looking at it. Making some noise and opening a separate case will probably work if you're bothered enough.

Proving you paid for it doesn't prove that you have no affiliation with the host.

Indeed. It's easy enough to funnel the money back to somebody you know, paying the 3% commission to Airbnb. There are probably tax ramifications too but as a business cost for a glowing review with no effort, worth it.

Yeah, but I don't think Airbnb has sophisticated enough infrastructure to figure out if every person leaving a review has an online presence before deleting their review.

It's possible there's something more mundane, like not having a browser cookie when the review was left or something like that.

Weird part about this is that, at least when I onboarded, Airbnb made me do ID verification to make sure I wasn’t a bot or a puppet.

After that, they’ve already made the fees on the stay. Most people won’t be losing 20% or whatever to farm good reviews.

Why would the final and optional review step be the part where they decide to verify if the stranger staying in someone else’s house is a real person.

It sounds like they suspected you're in cahoots with the host. They don't need to verify that you are in cahoots or not for booking, if a host wants to put themselves then whatever, but if the review looks supisiocus they'll delete it.

>they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet.

Implying that a "bot" or "puppet" is paying to stay at AirBnB's just so they can write salty reviews?

In the case I commented on they left a positive review. I'm sure many hosts will accept the Airbnb fees once to boost their rating. Especially if they're starting out, early reviews carry more weight.

Yes this is exactly what they do, and what happens with many Amazon items as well, and for Booking.com

It is not really a big cost because you only really need to pay the platform fee (you control both sides of the transaction do the only real cost is the middleman).

Reviews are super important and it is hard to get booking when you have 0 reviews so it is not surprising that some hosts would spend some dollars for 3-4 fake positive reviews to kickstart their property (many people will bounce off the ad without at least a couple positive reviews, so it changes your business radically)

Except you are describing the opposite of what is being done. Not positive reviews, but negative reviews. I can certainly see astroturfing your own properties with great reviews, but negative ones? That is a situation where you do not control both sides of the transaction, so a high price to pay to put a "fake" negative review on a property!

Read the top comment that started this thread. It was about a positive review.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219765

> Airbnb removed my positive review and accused me of being in cahoots with the host to leave positive feedback.

They buy profiling information from data brokers. Cataloging online accounts is one of the services they offer.

Any idea who these brokers are? How do we opt out

> How do we opt out

Effectively, you can't.

Californians can opt out but you have to go to every company and there are dozens. Start with the big ones like Acxiom and Bluekai.

Many of them collect their data via third-party scripts so you should ensure those are blocked.

https://incogni.com/

I feel like, the reason is in the text in itself and the ML software flagged it, because it's to similar to fake reviews..

You're not wrong. However, if a company uses my presense (or lack of) on social media as a way to make judgements I will not give them a penny of business.

It's important to note that they were happy taking money from Guests. It's only the reviews they're blocking.

Reviews are an auxiliary cost to Airbnb. They need moderating and their Hosts complain and use up support time if bad reviews are let through. I suggest profiling users is a quick and cheap way they've done the sums on to weed out the easiest level of abuse (on both sides).

They're not going to lose any business until it affects you.

That doesn't explain the "We have detected a relationship" thing.

A lot of moderation is made to sound more certain than it is.

"We have a suspicion based on this data we don't have that you might not be a real customer so we're blocking your reviews" invites a whole lot more customer support time than "We're not accepting your reviews."

It is simply cheaper to be firm, however unfair it is when they get it wrong.

They mentioned not having social media accounts to show that AirBnB couldn't have any information about them or them being related to the host. (OTOH, their namesake may have a social media account and that may be linked to the host. In theory.)

Why do you care so intensely about this?

Edit: I should have expanded on my post a bit. It's quite obvious that the review was flagged by some ML model, most likely not because the reviewer is a liar but probably because the host has a high prior for shenanigans. Combined with the lack of social signals for the reviewer, I could see why an ML model might be overzealous. But back to my original question: nobody is being called a liar, why take it so personally?

Because we can't trust the systems we need to live our lives.

You can always book a hotel. AirBNB will not and cannot provide you a 100% care free experience because some guests are indeed liars and there are all sorts of scams both on the guest and host side. It's a kind of ebay. It's always a hit or miss.

If that’s the case, all the more reason to be mad at Airbnb for removing legitimate reviews.

Perhaps they rely on some flawed signals to make their decisions such how many positive reviews you have (the buyer) vs seller's reviews(i.e who is more likely to lie).

There could also be bad faith from Airbnb as some comments frame it but I believe most of the time it's just a tricky business. Check ebay and you see the same issues or even worse.

I'd much rather have one legit review removed for every 20 fake one, rather than have to wade through 20 fake reviews just to find a single authentic one.

I imagine being indirectly or directly called a liar/fraudster by a giant multinational is personally upsetting to the parent poster.

“Indirectly” is likely an understatement. I doubt at any point airbnb called this person a “liar”, that’s just their own interpretation of events

For me, reviews are a primary parameter when selecting a "thing" from "a platform". So when I experience that the platform is manipulating the reviews, I not only feel manipulated (maybe all previous times I overpayed, missed opportunities etc?) but I feel that what we all do know: we are there only to make that platform a nice revenue; it doesn't care about giving it's users the best value, it only cares about it's bottom-lines, which apparently don't align with my needs.

Why don't you? Our economy is becoming increasingly intermediated and employees are increasingly losing their rights (and access to basic services like healthcare) by being mislabeled as contractors. There's a myriad of issues with affordability in the housing market and AirBnB exacerbates them.

Because a huge amount of value in AirBnB is its reviews.

That’s how you’re supposed to know where is worth staying and where isn’t.

If those can’t be trusted, then it’s an inferior B&B platform with doctored reviews that you can’t trust.

My advice to those reading this is just to get a hotel unless there is no alternative.

AirBnB was fine for a bit when it was cheaper than alternatives, but, in my experience, it’s now as expensive (if not more) as the hotels they’re trying to replace.

There’s usually a massively inferior experience when compared to Hotels the majority of the time. At least, that’s been my experience.

> Because a huge amount of value in AirBnB is its reviews.

Reviews that you can’t leave unless other party reviewed you which self censors whenever there’s a slightest disagreement

See reviews for same places on booking.com and they are consistently 1 star less

I'm confused, you think AirBnB should pay random people as employees to let them host short-term stays in their house? And this will help make AirBnB's moderation of reviews more honest?

I think based on context it's clear they mean "regulated like hotels".

How exactly do you regulate it like hotels without changing the legal structure? Hotels either directly run their various locations (aka run by their employees) or franchise it. That's a totally different business model.

So just saying "regulate it like hotels" doesn't mean much.

You would do it by changing the legal structure, but not by requiring any employees of Airbnb to manage the properties themselves, any more so than TripAdvisor employees manage hotels today.

Require Airbnb hosts to pay for a license, have regular inspections, etc.

Right, so you're not regulating AirBnB directly really, you're regulating the local AirBnB hosts.

And how does this help with reviews on airbnb.com?

That’s what Airbnb plus was - vetted properties, annual inspection. They utterly failed to market it properly.

I don’t think this does much to solve the problem - “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”.

the idea of a secret shopper is common. i suspect abnb already does this. obviously they get extremely limited coverage if they do so

No reason AirBnB can't invest in improving their average host quality if they invested in it. Consumers just need to push back publicly.

These sorts of HN posts is often how change happens.

To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem.

There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist.

Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.

It seems like Airbnb is doing the gamification and manipulating it as well. I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves. As soon as some reviews get promoted and others hidden I stop paying attention to them

> I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves

That's not a realistic solution.

If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best.

Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.

Is there anything currently in place that prevents the 5% off situation? Seems like nobody is able to solve that one. Or wants to tackle it.

Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.

I left a negative review on a product on Amazon whose seller was doing this (but much higher than 5%). Amazon deleted the review.

I wish I could post the review on my own site and users could easily discover it when browsing items. That makes me develop and risk a reputation.

I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud.

If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake.

Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.

You should also be able to give extra weight to reviewers that broadly line up with your own reviews. That way; the things that are important to you will show up. It also incentivises you to leave honest reviews.

In my mental lazy file there’s a company called antipode that is able to find people with opposite and like reviews and can help people identify and avoid items.

So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.

Someone should just scrape airb&b reviews as they post and never take them down. Internet archive of air B&B of sorts

It is a problem, but it's also partially self-inflicted.

Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text.

Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated.

Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.

You can also only review an Airbnb once you have stayed within. Difference of opinion, I do not find the game examples would be relevant or safe to disclose in the scope of an Airbnb review.

Steam Reviews really should be a model for everyone else imo. They still have problems such as review bombing, but they are way better than anything else.

That’s true. Another reality is that there are bad actors on the customer side too. A single person who gets off on being awful to people can leave an unwarranted bad review and materially harm an Airbnb host’s business.

> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem.

True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale.

This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.

> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem.

I wonder if "tipping" could improve things.

A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip.

Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that).

Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest.

Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted.

I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality.

But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.

Personally I hate tipping. Long term it just makes everyone frustrated. Socially, it used to be 10% now the bare minimum is 15% if give 18% people then people start becoming happy.

Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...

> Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...

If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however.

Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.

> You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however.

The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer.

The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose.

Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture.

So then how do you make people care enough to do a good job if there is no monetary incentive? Should the employer cover this? That’ll will still end with the same, increased prices.

Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure. People don’t like surprise fees, inflated prices, etc. They don’t mind tipping as it gives them some control back.

My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.

> So then how do you make people care enough to do a good job if there is no monetary incentive? Should the employer cover this? That’ll will still end with the same, increased prices.

Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.

> Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure.

It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.

> My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.

Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.

> Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.

The market said no.

> It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.

That’s great, but it didn’t work in the US. Some of the larger corps ran the experiment for 4 years and when the waiters lost income they complained. You see, here tipping culture means they make more money.

> Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.

It’s exactly the same. It’s lay I would not have received otherwise.

Do you then also get ran after you when you don't leave a tip on top of the service fee the restaurant charges? Pretty crazy experience that was in the USA

Last thing we need is more adoption of tipping which leads to oassive aggressiveness around the event

Oh god please no more tipping. It's spreading like a virus. Each time I visit the USA there's more pestering for tips from every possible angle. Just pay people a fair wage already.

I don’t mind tipping, as it incentivizes people to perform better than standard work. I can’t see being forced to pay 20% to someone that can bring food on time for instance. Either way, this is Airbnb, the owner of the property sets the “wage”.

This is the correct stance to take. I've been to other countries where tipping hasn't been implemented, and the service and quality has _always_ been worse than in the grand USA.

You mean like in Japan?

> hasn’t been implemented

I’m not going to evangelize what a correct stance on this is, but IMHO tipping is a big, not a feature.

Southern conservative states in the US have much better service than in Japan, because it's authentic and enthusiastic. Other countries service is adequate, but there is always a tinge of resentment and jealousy of us here in the US.

I’ve actually been to Japan, I’m not sure how their service is substantially better than the US. the restaurants I went to you order from a kiosk and get the food yourself. There really is no service to tip for. One restaurant I went to was a mom and pop and there was some service there as they struggled to find forks for us. We tried to tip and they counter tipped and gave us the small beer glasses we were drinking out of.

This is why I went back to hotels. Airbnb is a scummy company and can’t seem to survive without out of control “gotcha” fees added by either itself or its hosts which now make many hotels cheaper. I also am not obligated to do work for the host with a hotel. Some of the hosts have become super entitled over the years due to Airbnbs policies. It’s a shame as using Airbnb was an excellent experience when it first began but that obviously was on borrowed time much like the rest of the gig economy.

I’ve stayed in 100+ Airbnbs and literally never have paid or been asked to pay an extra fee. I have, however, been surprised several times by hotels charging an extra “resort fee” upon arrival.

You’ve never had to pay a cleaning fee?

These are so egregious and can be 50% of a night cost.

I’ve had so many bad experiences with Airbnb. It’s never like in the pictures. It’s always noisier, low quality mattress and furniture that looks good on pictures but isn’t functional or breaks if you touch it. I also feel like I’m living in ikea showrooms around the world. And given how expensive the cleaning is, it’s rarely passably clean. Moldy corners in the bathroom, dirt under the bed, chipped dishes…

And good luck trying to get Airbnb to help you. Best they can usually do (after you explain your case over from scratch because it’s always a new customer service person) is “alright we’ll check you out, you get a refund, and good luck finding a place for tonight out of pocket”

Never again. It’s hotels for me every time as well.

>It’s hotels for me every time as well.

I like to search for newly built hotels as they usually offer the nicest accommodations.

Not the OP, but at least in my jurisdiction (Norway), AirBnB dutifully lists any cleaning fees before I press the 'confirm booking' button.

I think the point was 'No -surprise- fees.

They clearly meant a surprise fee, from context. The AirBnB cleaning fee is expected and already included in your bill.

Edit: top context is “That is against AirBnB rules” and “refunded” i.e. AirBnB has explicit rules against surprise fees or bonds, and it can enforce rules.

I am guessing you just responded quickly but it is always good to spend time to try to “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you're guilty of what you're accusing the responder with. The exorbitance of a $200+ cleaning fee is a well-known criticism of Airbnb.

And no, not until recently could you see the actual total prior to sunken cost of Reviewing your booking. That too, Airbnb finally implemented once the Biden administration compelled them by law - that is, not before making much fanfare about it with the pretense of them "doing it for the customers"

$200 cleaning fee? How big are the houses you stay in?

$200 isn't even that large of a cleaning fee by AirBnb standards (i'd say that closer to the median for a full home in the markets I travel in).

The last 3 bedroom home I rented on AirBnb had a $500 cleaning fee. We were there 4 days. Its ridiculous, but it's becoming the standard on AirBnb.

When I used a cleaning service 10 years ago, it was $275 for 2 maids to clean 1100sqft house. 1 bath, 1 bedroom, vac+mop everywhere, kitchen dishes. They were done in ~3 hours. NYC area.

> The exorbitance of a $200+ cleaning fee is a well-known criticism of Airbnb.

People criticize all sorts of things they don't understand. Our cleaning service charges us $280 per turnover. Separating the cleaning fee from the nightly rate makes our property more appealing for longer stays, which we (and our neighbors) prefer. It's not like a hotel, where the cleaners come every day; why should guests pay every night for a cleaning which will only happen once, after they leave?

As long as its transparent and included in the per-night price calculation so I can easily compare multiple properties I do not have an issue with any fee regardless of its name.

People are annoyed because these fees are often sneaky or not apparent at first sight which makes the UX annoying.

It is not the hotels, who charge it, but governments, most often the municipality. Usually there is no obligation to hide that from the guest or include it in the price. Just to pay. You can also go pay it straight in the town hall, the hotel is just doing you a favor.

A resort fee is not the same as a tourism tax.

Tourism taxes are per head, per night and generally Airbnbs are required to charge them as well (though they often don't).

A resort fee is a bogus surcharge added by hotels to "cover" advertised amenities, like if a cinema charged you a Dolby Surround fee after you showed your ticket at the entrance.

Anecdotal evidence, I have paid tourism taxes on both hotels and AirBnBs.

Ya we got charged a mandatory 20-30$ a day fee at a hotel recently for their “arcade”, which was 2 pinball machines.., and “bar“, which was a mini fridge in the lobby… (1 “free” drink a day).

I've always refused to pay the resort fee and only a single time has the hotel not caved. Course this only works if the hotel isn't sold out.

I tell them its a separate service because not everyone uses it. So if I am not using say the pool or the gym then I shouldn't have to pay it.

The single time I paid the fee was when it included Internet service which I needed. I wrote the CEO of the chain after my stay arguing that charging extra for Internet is like charging extra for electricity or water. Never received a reply.

I was inclined to say "speak for yourself", but then that would have been rude and your username indicates we are living half way across the planet.

Things are different on this side of earth, rest assured. I have paid extra every single time.

Further, there is always things like "parking available", but then either its not free of charge or always busy or its....public parkings.

Same with internet access. Available, if you pay and if its tourism months. And the internet you get comes from a router in the hallway and is shared and at times it seemed like it has the capacity for one concurrent user.

Airbnb enables hosts to publish such things in the name of revenue.

But if a host gets in trouble, they have a half arsed wannabe collection team which will drop them like a hot potato soon.

There are no reviews of truthfulness of the offers etc.

If you have had a good experience, then irs thanks to the host, not thanks to airbnb.

I have also found some Airbnb ads to be inaccurate.

Online descriptions and reviews should be more regulated.

Google, for instance, keeps removing legitimate reviews from myself and others regarding a builder that rented / sold houses with horrible snagging problems, e.g. bursting pipes and leaky roofs.

I have a similar experience with Google removing negative legitimate reviews while not removing fake positive review from the owners itself + family & friends.

The latest scam is having to pay either a $1500 deposit, or $59 "deposit insurance", which I assume the host gets some kickback on. I know I'm not going to trash the place. But I also don't like just putting $1500 out there either. A deposit that high only exists so someone can make money off the deposit insurance.

They, speaking of the hosts, do not make anythong from deposits, I am working in finance, rest assured the reason is a different, much more nefarious one.

They want to charge you for potential damages, done by you or not, as well as wear and tear.

Never, ever put a deposit for them, not even by credit card.

And if you pay for the stay, always , always use a credit card, not a debit card. That way, you can pull the chargeback trigger on them.

A chargeback is their worst nightmare, trust me, it can have so many implications and hurt airbnb so badly if they are subject to chargebacks.

> And if you pay for the stay, always , always use a credit card, not a debit card. That way, you can pull the chargeback trigger on them.

You can chargeback with a debit card, I’ve done it a few times myself.

Isn't it only possible within the first 24-48 hours?

Not in my experience. The network carrying the transaction may still be mastercard or visa in most cases and a chargeback is just debiting the merchants account for the amount.

Keep in mind you should treat chargeback as nuclear weapon. AirBnB/other website will terminate your account.

I was already losing satisfaction in AirBnb but have been open to it if traveling companions were into it. But the nail in the coffin is these deposits. The last few AirBnBs that I have vetted have had these $1,000+ deposits. There was even one I found that had $2,500 deposit (granted it was a large house).

I can stay at a 5 star hotel for a $50 deposit on my credit card. I'll just do that instead. Like you said, its not even really about tying up the money either. I would put this on my AMEX which has no credit limit, so tying up $1,500 isn't really the problem, its the need to authorize a host that I don't personally trust to be able to make any claim they want to justify keeping part of that deposit. I have much more trust in Marriott or Hilton and they only need $50. In all the traveling I've done, I've never had them refuse to release a deposit in full. By contrast, I've met enough crazy AirBnb hosts, that i wouldn't trust them with $100, let along $2,500.

Cleaning fees are also ridiculous. I've seen a lot of $500+ cleaning fees. Come on! What kind of cleaning are you doing for $500?!

I don't really care. If people want to go to AirBnbs, then great. I've had some good experiences with them, but i've also had several bad ones. I don't like the risk I need to take each time with the host. I also am getting fed up with the calculating the "real cost" for each one when comparing them. I'd rather go to Marriott or Hilton where they treat me like a God. So I'm basically done with AirBnb at this point.

It forced hotels to have more competitive prices.

Honestly, there was not much else it could do in the long term.

It did not.

Booking.com did that.

I do however always choose an apartment for corporate trips, but always via booking.com.

This is sort of a funny argument. I promise that AirBNB prices have no impact or influence on hotel prices. It is generally the opposite, AirBnB rates are often influenced by the prices of surrounding hotels.

The number of travelers staying at an Airbnb versus a hotel is under 1%. This is clear by looking at overall inventory available. Even a decent market _might_ have 100 AirBnB listings, that same market will have several thousands (possible 10,000+) of hotel rooms.

Generally the opposite is true. AirBnb hosts will justify their nightly rate based on comparable hotels in the area. But the average Marriot for example isn't all that worried about the handful of AirBnbs nearby that they might be losing customers to.

That depends on the place. Where I live the near touristic destinations have poor tourism infrastructure so AirBnB and similar is thriving there.

I've never had a terrible experience with AirBNB (although the week I spent working in Montreal living on top of one of the greatest party corners came close but it wasn't the fault of the host or AirBNB.)

Personally though I've come to appreciate hotels more and my experience is that you can usually find a decent hotel room for about what an AirBNB costs and I usually like going to a hotel better. (There was that one in Chinatown in NYC that the experience of finding it was somewhere between The Blade Runner and a James Bond movies, I'm not sure if that is a good review or not.)

Please email me at laforza@yahoo.com. I'm starting a class action lawsuit against Airbnb . I had reviews removed from my place because Airbnb claims I had a relationship with the guest, and they failed to provide evidence. We need to determine how Airbnb is obtaining it's data to access these relationships. Huge violations of data protection and illegal practices to act based on unsubstantiated evidence.

shhhh... you are on pg's forum. 'Member when he was shilling for this new billion dollar unicorn that was airbnb and how it would revolutionize the hotel industry? Pepperidge Farm remembers....

There is an old joke, how do you know that someone is a vegan or does crossfit? You'll know because they'll make sure you know minutes after meeting them.

In 2008-2011 on HN if someone worked at facebook you knew because they mentioned it so often.

Now you never hear anyone saying they work for Facebook because of all the negative externalities that Facebook and Instagram have had on the world that no one wants to be associated with them.

AirBnB is now in a similar situation.

When tehy first came out you would get lots of positive feedback from people about their service.

now that they allow whole home rentals and people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market people have a far different opinion of the company.

Couple that with hosts are squeezing people with 100's of dollars in cleaning and other fees that dwarf the nightly rental costs.

Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.

You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets.

Charitably I guess you could say that every company falls victim to the saying "You Either Die A Hero Or Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain."

To be fair, housing and rental markets in some places are kind of pre-ruined. There have been plenty of (and doubtless will be plenty more) scammy landlords for short-term rentals.

AirBnB really just provided a modern online interface with some customer service stuff that papered over the bad stuff for a while. But like with actual bad construction, you can't hide the stuff forever so sooner or later the magic disappears.

Well, they're ruined because of zoning (and tax law but that's a whole other story)

In theory zoning is supposed be in residents interest to stop things like fracking from happening next to playgrounds (it doesn't but again that's another story). Cities follow zoning law to the letter when it comes to new apartments.

Airbnb repurposes residential zoned property as commerical hotels. If we're going to take zoning seriously this shouldn't be allowed.

Comparing it to a commercial hotel isn’t really accurate. It’s more like a bed and breakfast. Size of the property matters a lot.

In every city there are multiple hosts who buy/rent out entire apartment complexes and turn them into AirBnBs. That's a hotel, not a bed and breakfast.

Yeah but at that point it’s just plain old tax fraud.

AirBnB sux but zoning has arguably been a net negative on most societies in many ways

https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ

https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o

for me what I noticed lately is that in California it's impossible to have a quiet modern apartment because nearly 100% of modern apartment buildings are only allowed to be built on busy noisy high traffic streets. If you want a quiet street you're forced to buy/rent a house

why is california not allowing apartment buildings being built in low traffic streets?

Because then they won't be low traffic streets anymore

temporarily, sure. doesn't mean you can't build there?

100% agree.

But if we take zoning seriously when it comes to new apartments then we should take it seriously when it comes to Airbnb.

Is it possible to build proper noise insulation, which makes the house as quiet as the a house in a quiet neignorhood, to a newly built, modern apartment house?

I think it is, but construction companies are trying to savd a few cents, and they don't add proper noise insulation.

Where I live the zoning laws require better noise isolation for new builds on major roads, because this is such an easy way for investors to save money and screw tenants.

Not true in SF. Plenty of apartments are on streets that are not main thoroughfares. In fact busy streets are often primarily zoned commercial

Name any apartment complex on a quiet street in SF that's not in Mission Bay that's been built in the last 15 years

I don’t know any that were built in the last 15 years.

Where exactly in CA? I live in an apartment on a quiet street and the worst noise problem I have is the upstairs neighbors have a heavy dog that likes to jump around.

Population density too

A lot of the macrolevel complaints about Airbnb are trotted out because customers had shitty experiences. I still bring up their douchey bus ads in sf bragging about finally paying their taxes after years of dodging then not because that campaign directly effected me but because I have been personally burned by the company a few times and this anecdote helps communicate the global nature of the problem with the company culture that a few bad stays doesn’t always convey.

Citation needed for the magnitude of Airbnb’s contribution to “ruining housing and rental markets”

You won't find one. The most cited article I've found shows that the most significant effect Airbnb has on rentals is a 0.5% rise in rental rates in Manhattan. It's not 0, but it's pretty damn close.

Yet my comment gets downvoted to oblivion because it questions the conclusion that everybody has jumped to

http://insideairbnb.com/reports/platform-failures-how-short-...

This is an interesting read about the market effects Airbnb has caused. They’re definitely moving prices and removing units from the market.

“Inside Airbnb” doesn’t sound impartial or unbiased at all.

> people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market

From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market. And restrictions on short term rentals have little to no effect on housing prices. It's just another scapegoat (like foreign owned housing) that people like to use because they can't accept the fact that the solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSING. (Reduce restrictions like exclusionary zoning and environmental/community reviews)

Well I did hedge my wording because AirBnB has different effects in different places, so there is no global effect that can be measured.

If you live in a ski town or beach town then it probably has had far more effect than the locals looking to buy or rent would want. if you live in a small town with very little tourism then people may feel like you do that its a non factor.

New York city seems to think that 10,000 distinct places to live will come back to the market, is 10,000 units in New York "negligible" to use your wording?

I don't know but I'm guessing it will have some measurable effect.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145709106/nyc-could-lose-10-...

“Locals”, heh.

https://reallifecomics.com/comic.php?comic=february-17-2021

Can you explain that comic?

I don't see the word Local anywhere on it and I honestly don't get the joke.

The joke (somewhat exaggerated) is that there are no actual local people who live there (i.e. in tourist towns which are small); all houses there are now Airbnb, leaving no houses for local people to live in. It follows that there are no such people as “locals”, which was the word used by the post I was replying to.

This analysis about the impact Airbnb was having on Amsterdam disagrees: https://www.ing.nl/zakelijk/kennis-over-de-economie/onze-eco...

The city has passed laws to keep down the amount of temporary rentals so the balance has undoubtably shifted by now. A later analysis by the same bank (https://bnb-beheer.nl/blog/2019/03/06/prijseffect-airbnb-op-...) says as much.

Ok, so ban AirBnB and more housing is available for people who want long term leases... but there's still a problem, because now we have a shortage of temporary housing.

Any solution that isn't "build a fuckton more housing units" isn't a solution at all. We need enough housing for permanent residents AND people who prefer to live in AirBnBs. Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea.

> Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea.

Amsterdam specifically wants less tourists.

They have a load of initiatives and policies to try reduce what they call "negative tourism" that are will just have the net effect of reducing overall tourism - the actual goal.

Similar issues in Venice and some other European cities.

Over tourism makes places less liveable for the residents who live - and vote - there.

Obviously the solution is "build a million extra houses". However, it turns out building a million houses takes time. Until the houses are built, get rid of the temporary housing meant almost exclusively for tourists this particular city doesn't want, everybody wins.

"Rich tourists" are good for purely tourist driven economies, but most cities don't exist to please the whims of tourists, and most local businesses in a wealthy economy aren't targeting rich tourists either.

What actually happens is that family neighbourhoods are forced to deal with constant parties and drunk and loud tourists because some multimillionaire set up one of the rare available houses for his personal profit.

I'm sure there are people who enjoy living in AirBnB's but that's not what AirBnB is even trying to accomplish. Hotels exist and are regulated for good reason. Tourists are put in touristy areas where businesses want to attract tourists, also for good reason.

When dealing with a housing shortage, the local population is more important than tourists, unless there is no economy other than the tourist economy. Look at what happened to Venice, the city that exclusively exists because of tourists because of overtourism.

> From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market

It changes depending on the location.

Some places e.g. Byron Bay in Australia have been significantly affected by short term rentals.

Maybe... though whenever I look closely it turns out that cities are suffering from structurally broken property markets, and short-term rentals are a convenient, highly visible scapegoat that puts the blame on something involving foreigners.

It depends on the locality. It is easy to forget even popular "tourist destinations" have their local population before they became so popular. Short term rentals have a very real effect on housing markets in such places.

Kauai is one of my favorite Hawaiian islands and has one of the strictest short term rental regulations. I truly believe if short term rentals are free for all it would end up being a billionaire's playground (more so than it already is) with no locals being able to afford housing at all.

Is there a big tech company that people brag about working at anymore?

Apple(if they would be allowed to)

The Apple employees at the nearby Apple campus are very open about working there when you meet them socially.

Apple, knock on wood.

Google is still mentioned by some.

Eww, no.

Microsoft is mentioned frequently

People are generally fine bragging about where they work outside the bay area (and Seattle to a lesser degree). The stigma of Big Tech is somewhat localized.

It’s a job - for many people, especially with families, they are fine with that, and they don’t wrap up their identity with it.

The same happens in the defense industry.

I regularly see "disclaimer: I work in Google" in comments here. Also, "Why I left Google" is still (surprisingly) a somewhat popular genre.

I've seen all the comments about cleaning fees but didn't really believe it until I was looking for a place to spend March break; it's completely ridiculous! How is it that they aren't capped as a % of nightly cost? This is like the outrageous shipping costs of old eBay.

you can now chose to see the totals with all the cleaning fees included.

And you still have to clean up before leaving.

Because an Airbnb listing is cleaned every time a new guest checks in, it doesn't matter whether you stay for one night only or 10 nights. It's a fixed cost to the host.

Then make it a % of a 1 night stay. A $150 cleaning fee is nonsense. It used to be 20-30.

How much cleaning fee depends on the local market price of cleaning. Depending on how big the place is, $150 is possible. In SF e.g. you can't find a cleaner with $20-30. Hotels pay less on cleaner labor because it's more efficient (cleaners are probably full time employees cleaning all rooms every day anyway). And why it would be % of night rate? Cleaning fee is flat for one cleaning service.

The owner can clean it themselves or the cleaning fee should be built into the overall price, you know, like hotels.

Only makes sense if the host is actually paying professional cleaning service, or doing it themselves at the level provided at those services, after each stay.

And I am very sure that's not the case 99% of the time based on my own experience. I'd be thankful if the kitchen counter is clean and there is no trash. That's actually not a low bar.

You've stayed in 100 Airbnb's and only one of them had a clean kitchen counter and the trash taken out? That's dedication to a service and also extremely bad luck.

All the vrbos we have been at were professionally cleaned. Maybe the low end is more scammy

It costs about 200$ to get my house cleaned so it seems like a pretty standard cost especially for a larger place.

We had a place booked on Airbnb near the end of the summer. Had a deposit paid, and the overall price was a bit steep, but needed to stay in the city at that time. Three weeks out we get an email with the "house rules" including disclosing that the owner would actually be staying in the house and would need to go through the main bedroom to enter and exit the property.

We were contemplating what to do with this information as the listing is under "entire place" when a few days later we got an email from Airbnb saying that there was a price adjustment of +$395 for cleaning PER DAY. We had it booked for 5 days so we needed to pay an additional $~2000. That was more than double the original cost. Thankfully we were able to cancel and get our deposit back with just the automated cancellation, but we did get a nasty message from the host that we we reported back to Airbnb.

I don't think AirBNB is blameless, but so much of this could be avoided by simply building more homes to allow supply to meet demand. US cities have not been building enough homes for decades--this is the main driver of home values going up because scarcity drives prices up. The fact that the President, Congress, and most governors never really address this means it's not going to be solved any time soon. Even in California we do half-measures like upzoning that will take years/decades to have any impact.

Its not just the shortage, its the change in usage. I live in fear that one of my neighbors will become an Air BnB house. Instead of friendly people next door you can grow with, there will be a continual turnover of short term people, parties and clueless behavior.

“People next door you can grow with” how quaint. I feel like I’m listening to a Hobbit from inside the Shire who doesn’t know Mordor has taken over outside. A little boost of positivity.

Don't you know your next door neighbours?

Building more homes requires infrastructure to support those homes.

The real solution is to tax each additional dwelling ~30,000$ (depending on area) to pay for the infrastructure to support it and then actually build that infrastructure.

I’d go with a percentage instead of flat fee. Or some tiered structure to the flat fee. Some of these mega hosts own 40+ properties.

Either can work, but a 500k house and a 5 million dollar house are likely to need roughly the same supporting services in terms of schools and transportation etc.

The goal of such fees is to avoid subsidizing any specific type of development but as long as it averages out then it’s presumably fine.

These are Airbnb units we’re talking about, they’re unlikely to need many of those services (like schools). My goal is to reduce the amount of properties one can own without paying more than they’re worth. It should be prohibitively expensive to buy your 3rd property, as in 1.5x market price or more with the extra 50% going to cover local service expenses.

> Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.

Twitter comes rapidly to mind

The difference is that Twitter is better than it's ever been now, while Facebook and Airbnb continue to deteriorate.

I'm sorry but I literally laughed out loud after reading your comment.

Laugh away, but Old Twitter was run by some pretty scummy people who allowed the FBI and CIA to backdoor the service. It was also a lot slower and broken compared to how fast it is now, especially outside North America (they recently added a lot more server capacity).

Also massively bloated as recently as a year ago. Loads of people working there who didn't seem to do much except tweak icons 2000 times, enforce DEI mandates, and hit their department's budget. Awful. Glad to see the deadwood getting cleaned out, speed enhancements, and new features being rolled out.

Added more server capacity? They just shut down an entire data center (they had 3, so that's a -33% reduction if you assume they're the same size.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/twitter-elon-m...

What's the speed enhancements?

I'm told most of the rollout was data centers outside North America: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1608324539779551232

> You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets.

I hear this a lot. I've always wondered if it was that easy wouldn't a lot more people be buying properties and airbnb-ing them out through local agencies ?

My nextdoor neighbor sold their house last year and now it's an Airbnb. Despite the fact that I live in a house in a normal residential neighborhood, I'm now forced to live next to a hotel. And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating.

I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.

Why would or should you have a say in what the property owner next door does?

What does having a say look like?

Cities and etc have zoning laws because it does matter what kind of activity happens next door.

I lived in a town house association where the unit’s being rented were the source of noise, trash, crime, etc.

People renting often don’t care as much for the neighborhood/ locals and they can move on at will. And you'd be surprised how much random citizen land lords are terrible at just being land lords.

After the numbers of rentals were reduced (and background checks required) the neighborhood improved greatly. It was like turning off a light switch on noise, litter, crime, etc...

I generally agree with you. But unless you're allowed to knock down your house and build a 10 story apartment in it's place then the argument kind of falls flat.

Why should you have the unchecked right to disturb the peace of your next door neighbor?

Who tf claimed that? It's two completely different questions.

The issue is not Airbnb or not. The issue is guests etiquette and difficulty to penalize bad/loud/disrespectful people.

You don’t have the unchecked right to disturb your neighbor anywhere in the US as far as I know. Who was suggesting anyone should?

Would you oppose a smelly wastewater treatment plant being built on the previously residential property right next to you? That's why they should get a say.

That’s not even remotely what we’re talking about.

Is it not? I think it's very comparable, you attempted to appeal to the freedoms of property owners but there are laws the govern the use of land wherever you go.

I’m genuinely interested to hear what are the specific harms you have suffered due to this.

Airbnb greatly contributed to the housing shortage in Vermont.

Is there some unbiased literature you can share that demonstrates this conclusively?

Long-term rentals getting converted to short-term rentals in a constrained, inelastic market drives up prices, prices are set at the margin. You don't publications for that, that's just a basic fact.

If it’s a basic fact then surely there is literature that backs it up?

Gee, how about having a parade of random people showing up at all hours of the day/night just to start? The erosion of community. Further commodification of housing so that only the rich and upper middle class can buy a house in any city?

That last point - that housing is too expensive - is not something that airbnb causes or can fix. That's a supply side problem and the solution is housing construction. It may marginally exacerbate the symptom by providing liquidity.

It removes liquidity from housing market, by repurposing flats/houses into hotels.

It's creating liquidity, just not the kind you value. It's liquidity of short term housing rather than long term housing.

Ok, then more accurately it’s moving liquidity. The next question is which is more valuable to society?

The United States is short O(10M) housing units[0], primarily due to anti-construction policies. Airbnb has O(100k) listings[1] in the US. Banning short-term rentals is a 1% solution. That's a policy distraction, not a useful lever to pull.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...

[1] https://www.stratosjets.com/blog/airbnb-statistics/

There are plenty of empty luxury condos in every major city. They mostly serve as bank accounts for foreign investors. There's plenty of construction, just the wrong type.

Maybe so, but can you show any data that it's a significant or meaningful problem and not a visible scapegoat? The data I found (above) makes clear that deleting the short-term rental market would not even dent the housing shortage problem in the United States.

I could believe (and maybe someone in this thread has data!) that in some extremely over-constrained markets that units are disproportionately used for short-term rentals. But I haven't seen any numbers. And in those cases, you still should be building homes to solve the root cause problem.

Americans persistently seem to want to find any reason at all to absolve themselves of responsibility for the housing crisis. It's investors! It's short-term rentals! It's corporate landlords! But it's never the locals who oppose construction.

Adding more houses to the market certainly will decrease pricing pressure. Nobody said banning Airbnb was suddenly going to make housing affordable but decrease prices.

And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?

It's not a zero-sum game. You can have both, but you need to build enough to have it. Regulating the use of a thing is a mark of market failure. How would you feel if the government told you that you could only use a pencil for writing because that has more social value than its use in making a model log cabin?

You're also failing to process my point: that banning short-term rentals is an ineffective lever, not that it won't have an epsilon of impact. Yes, you will increase supply by a tiny amount relative to the shortage. It will have near-zero pricing impact because the magnitude pales against the problem.

No, we have been ignoring your point because it’s one of those Econ 101 world views based on assumptions that have no basis in the real world and actual human behavior. You can’t look at the number of Airbnb rentals and conclude it’s not having a significant impact on the market simply based on the raw number of units. What we know from all systems theory is that a small portion of things has the majority of the effect. In this case, short term rentals are very likely setting the upper bounds of the pricing range.

https://time.com/6223185/airbnbs-empty-short-term-rentals/

Actual research suggests the effect is tiny.

"At the median owner-occupancy rate zip code, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices."

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mksc.2020.1227

Clicks on "actual research," finds the usual econometric voodoo. Even better, the use of instrumental variables to supposedly "isolate" effects. Totally representative, I am sure.

PS: the author's own words contradict your claim that the effect is tiny, although again I think this is a serious undercount resulting from a poor model and ever worse availability of data nationwide: "This means that, in aggregate, the growth in home-sharing through Airbnb contributes to about one-fifth of the average annual increase in U.S. rents and about one-seventh of the average annual increase in U.S. housing prices." https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...

It's amazing how lazy the supply siders are on this argument. Of course there's no good data-- real estate interests fight to prevent that data from even being collected. You only have to drive around major cities at dusk and see how many units have no lights on for weeks on end to recognize the magnitude of the problem. There may be data from Vancouver BC and other places that have passed vacancy taxes to address the issue. Further, the amount of construction resources that go into building luxury condos and other useless units are resources that CANNOT be used to build good housing. There is a limited supply of labor and supplies for that.

Liquidity for short term housing is valuable to who? Do you think most people here or otherwise care about speculators? We don't.

I think the ownership is not encouraged anymore.

Instead we have social mobility so that we can move anytime when better opportunities arise. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on which side you are.

Moving every time a better opportunity comes up is a privilege enjoyed by a small section of the population. The vast majority of people move rarely, and when they do move it's usually within the same locality.

Even for people who can, family (spouse, kids in school, nearby relatives, etc.), friends, and so forth tend to make moving cities a pretty significant decision at some point.

It's a cultural issue. Give it 1-2 generations and people won't care that much about nearby relatives, friends etc.

Th trend line has been toward significantly less mobility relative to past decades--though you'd probably want to correct the numbers for demographics given that 20 somethings move the most (as one would expect).

Exactly-- the number of young people still living at home has surged in the last decade. This is not surprising given that "starter homes" are one of the main targets of housing speculators. People who would buy their first house rent longer, driving up rental rates and putting the transition from family to independence further out of reach for many.

Without home ownership you are throwing away a large portion of the money you may make in your life. Even if you move frequently it still makes sense to buy so long as you’re not hitting the tip of the market.

A cabin across the street from me was an AirBnB rental: very loud parties all weekend, running long after midnight. Then COVID came, and now AirBnB has gone down the toilet, so the problem has not returned. Yet.

does the town/city not have noise ordinances ?

Good luck finding a bylaw officer to enforce it, I've made many complaints in my city only to be told there's only one person and they never showed up... and this is in a city of 700k.

curious where you're located? AFAIK Airbnb now banned all parties but it's hard to enforce

Is it difficult to imagine? Living next to a regular long-term rental has some of the same issues, AirBNB short term rentals just magnify that. Personally, one of the best things I ever did to improve my quality of life was move to a newly constructed mid/upper neighborhood where all houses are owner-occupied. It's amazing how much better people act and treat their property when it's actually their own.

Yes, it can be difficult to imagine for some people, based on their lived experiences. Those who have observed little or no unwanted behaviours from short-term renters wild tend to assume "It works." or "It works the vast majority' of the time.". Some combinations of hosts, their rules, and guests can be successful and completely non-problematic. I, having lived some problematic places long before AirBnB existed, sympahise with your experience. I've been fortunate to see primarily successes.

I used to live in a 4 unit apartment in SF. One of the units in the building was a full time Airbnb. On several occasions, the different Airbnb renters parked in the wrong spot in our small garage, which disrupted the parking situation for the non-Airbnb tenants in the unit. On another occasion, a renter got locked out of the front gate. I watched from my window as they bent the gate bars so they could open the gate without using the key. When I went down to the gate to ask them what they were doing, they denied damaging the property.

Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.

Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.

Aside from the annoyance of the lifestyle of tourists vs residents, you miss out on having a normal neighbor who you can build a relationship over time with. Our neighbors keep a key, water plants while we're away, babysit our kids, generally look out for each other.

Why do you care if your neighbor has guests stay over at their house?

There's a big difference between dealing with something from a neighbor's property once in a while, trash ending up in my property, guests not following neighborhood rules for parking, etc., and having to deal with it every single day.

Neighborhoods have a lot of societal norms, my house has frequently been referred to as "the rental" even though I've lived here for years and the prior tenants also all had long runs here... even being a rental house in the neighborhood is considered strange here.

I take it you have never experienced an AirBnB neighbour?

The people behind me have done it a few times. How can i tell they had "guests" over?

I find beer bottles, coke cans and garbage on MY property. There is the obvious noise from the late night "pool parties" as well.

Normally people dont care what their neighbours do, but when it starts to impact others, people start to care.

How is that different from you being neighbors with somebody that hosts parties?

The average person doesn't host a pool parties 100+ days out of a year as an Airbnb unit might. Filing complaints against a single noisy neighbor would also be a lot easier than doing it against people who will be gone by the time anyone looks into the matter.

The complaint would be against the property owner, no?

How's that different that having a neighbour in hot love with his lawnmover at 6AM ?

Noise ordinances.

Do they work?

I've read they're taken very seriously in some places like Germany and Japan, but in my experience, a lot of people in the USA won't bother reporting noise violations because they know the chances of them being enforced and/or investigated in a timely manner is low.

Enforcement in Germany is quite funny. Lived there for some years.

If you have a problem with noisy neighbours you basically must make a "noise diary" with date/time/description of the noise over a period of time before anyone will give a shit.

Even then, enforcement varies wildly. Seems to depend where you are, etc.

The best person to complain to is building management, but even then, they vary.

The next best thing to do (and the most German solution) is leaving passive aggressive notes on the buildings noticeboard.

It depends, of course, but yes, I have had noise complaints addressed by some kind of code enforcement officer (i.e. unarmed, but able to write citations.)

You can potentially come to a solution/agreement with a single neighbor. Less so if you’ve got a brand new neighbor every 2-3 days.

You have a say - go to your town’s planning and zoning commission, find others with similar concerns, and force votes on the legality of a full-time hotel next door.

In my town, stays of less than 30 days are illegal, and there's a 10% tax. And yet, AirBnb and VRBO show dozens of listings. So if the rental contract itself violates city code, surely no tax is being paid either.

This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal.

Come to Amsterdam. Its city wide hobby to shit on Airbnb by residents and complain to newspapers and city. They even had an official city sponsored online participation board dedicated to complaining about airbnb. And it was pretty successful. Now so much registration is required to rent on Airbnb and max days that pretty much only professionals are left. They also gave like 10k fines to citizens who forgot a few things or days in the registration process. So the pendulum swung the other way here.

So housing is cheap now, right?

Right?

Housing prices are more complex than that, but it’s inarguable that more houses on the market means cheaper prices.

Out of curiosity, do you own properties specifically to rent on short term rental sites?

No, I own a property that I exclusively rent long-term. So I don’t have an interest in short term rentals, except as a traveler that likes to use them.

You absolutely have a say in the matter, but it’s possible that on one will listen. Talk to your local city council person (or local equivalent) and see if they are willing to ban short term rentals in areas that are not zoned for it. My city did that and it’s pretty great.

My next door neighbor also rents out her house. She has 5 others she does the same in. These are long term rentals, which means when the tenant is bad it's bad for me long term. We got new neighbors last year, and while they struggle socially they're respectful and it's a huge quality of life improvement.

Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I'm forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?).

There's nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one's checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren't taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind.

Every time someone online complains loudly about an HOA, here is why people still choose to live in neighborhoods with HOAs.

I'm gonna disagree with this one. People chose to put uo with HOAs because 1) most new developments have them 2) SFH w/ HOA are more expensive

For every HOA that gets a Reddit post complaining about unreasonable behavior, there's a dozen others that just effectively keep people from turning their front yard into a wrecking yard, and probably a hundred others that don't enforce anything at all but just keep the common areas mowed.

I have 113 potions. 100 are just Gatorade in a fancy bottle, 12 de-age you by a year, and the last one turns you into a vegetable forever. Should I be allowed to give people one at random to drink?

> enforce anything at all but just keep the common areas mowed.

HOA style Large grass areas and office park landscaping mcdonaldifies America and is a travesty for the environment and water use.

Select grass areas for actual usage are okay but HOAs default to grass everywhere and bland non-native landscaping. And beige everything.

My county has laws about turning your front yard into a wrecking yard...def should look into it if you experience severely unmaintained yards or overloaded with trash with unmovable cars.

But whether I cut my grass every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, or god forbird I decide to have a vegetable garden on the southern side of my house (covenance says must be backyard)...that's HOA realm.

The associations are often mismanaged horribly because they are mostly lead by people that just want to use the power to get the changes they want to their property, and sometimes (this is not rare) the board will use lawyers to write letters coercing behavior which may be against the HoA constitution, also sometimes to save a buck they will operate based on policy which was voted by the board that is unconstitutional and has not been amended by owners. The only way to rectify this is to put your real life on hold and create a political movement against the board and/or hire attorneys to get them to settle, litigate, or start a class suit, which might I remind you will probably retaliate against you and waste more of your time. Meanwhile the HoA's liability insurance premiums will go through the roof from hiring attorneys to defend themselves and so will your HoA fees. Lawyers love HoAs.

Have heard about this from friends and family more than once.. it would be comical if it didn't impede their ability to live so much.

You may as well be renting from them. No, thanks!

One of the problems is that you don't know what you're buying. You might end up with a reasonable HOA or a terrible one. Even if it looks reasonable today, it might change tomorrow.

Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They're large enough that you're in the minority, but small enough that they don't have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you're using your own property.

I've heard that "just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs" argument many times over, but... I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I'm yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors' supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that.

Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn't mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes - or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes.

Specifically chose this neighborhood because there is no HOA. The goat/sheep/whatever was hilarious and was gone within a week. The point is that just because I don't live by an AirBnB (that I know of) doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to have no noise from neighbors. The renters before honestly did suck a lot, but if they wouldn't turn down their bass, and the cops couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, I doubt an HOA would have helped. I'd rather invest in quiet windows than live out the many many horror stories of my friends who live in HOAs.

>"The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated."

With who? I don't have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that's not what's happening in my specific situation.

Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It's a big change.

This isn't the same thing as short term rentals thru AirBnB. Long term tenants are part of the rental market, not the hospitality market.

Here in Romania there are different rules if you rent your house this way (hotel style). You have to pay much more for the administration/utilities costs, which has some compensation effect

The house next door to you was de facto rezoned from residential to hotel.

In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.

Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.

I am the opposite and I get asked about this a lot. I bought a condo in a building (and neighborhood) that is almost all STR's (near the beach). I'm the only person who actually lives in my building full time.

I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply... in the past, I've lived next door to people I didn't like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days.

I tried to buy a house that was instead bought as an Airbnb. I'm still annoyed, but on the bright side it looks like it's almost never booked.

> And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating

What say should you have in how your neighbor uses their house?

You can live in an HOA with covenants that restrict renting, but that has their own set of problems.

But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.

This so much.

There's a neighbor on the street with a 'unique' house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB'ing it to film companies. So...a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn't get the required city permits until after we complained.

Lovely people in the film industry. /s

The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They're going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there's a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we'll get some new regs passed with more teeth.

And, of course, AirBnB didn't care one bit.

Same situation here, and I was surprised to learn that my city doesn't seem to have any rules against this.

So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins.

The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it's a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them.

Work with your municipality to pass an Airbnb ordinance. We have one; it limits the number of nights you can list your house for, requires a shall-issue license, an insurance certificate, and inspections, forbids rentals of less than 24 hours, and charges a fee for non-owner-occupied buildings.

Isn't this a violation of planning law (zoning in the US)?

One thing I haven't liked about AirBNB is being told that I have to keep my status as a guest a secret from the neighbors.

Airbnb most recently has continued to ignore requests to remove houses that violate the building’s HOA where i live.

People have been turned away when they show up by security as it’s not allowed but the people just try to sneak them in. When reporting this to airbnb they refuse to do anything. I’m getting fairly sick of the laissez faire stances these companies are taking. It’s not just that we don’t want airbnb its that people in this area regularly rent airbnb with false names and rob the apartment and the ones next to it once in the building. Airbnb could care less about our safety though.

It would be nice if the companies could stop hiding behind stupid corporate policies and actually care about people.

Edit: to make things more sad when the building was sold as it’s brand new it was sold as no airbnbs and family only. Several couples moved in because they have been previously robbed in other buildings in the city and in nearby ones all from Airbnb rentals with false names.

Frankly I'll back AirBnB over an HOA any day. HOAs are a societal cancer.

Sure let’s delegate decisions that are entirely neighborhood and building specific to a company that doesn’t even understand the local issues. Yeah HOAs can suck and aren’t needed in some cases but in my case the HOA is doing the correct thing and legal action has been taken against these places. It’s a shame airbnb won’t enforce local government policies because it will eventually blow up in their face only after people like me and my neighbors are harmed.

I think there's a point to be made about single family dwellings, but it's hard to imagine how a 50 condo building would operate without one. Who takes care of the pool? Or fixes the elevator?

The governance is definitely poorly structured, though. In my (limited) experience I've seen a board that gets elected and then proceeds to abuse their power to advance their own financial positions.

I think there should be a 3rd party company that competes for the management contract and annual contracts are awarded based off democratic vote from all the owners.

My takeaway from dealing with a condo HOA is that condos shouldn't legally exist, because people owning fractional buildings is doomed to result in structural collapse. Elected residents aren't qualified to make decisions about long-term maintenance which becomes more severe and expensive over time, and they have perverse incentives to avoid spending money. Faced with a substantial enough cost, board members can opt to hide problems while they try to sell their own stake in the building.

That's being said, $&@# AirBnB.

"People owning fractional buildings" has existed for almost 150 years, at what point should we start to see NYC buildings collapsing due to structural collapse?

This is false. The first condominium in the continental US was built in 1960, the entire scheme is only 63 years old. There's some older buildings that have been converted, sure, but the legal concept isn't that old.

And buildings start needing more significant structural work after forty or fifty years. Which is to say, yes, I expect many more condos to collapse over the next couple decades.

> The first condominium in the continental US was built in 1960, the entire scheme is only 63 years old.

This is correct in the sense that it is technically correct (for residential dwellings; commercial condominiums have existed for almost a hundred years prior).

However, residential cooperatives (co-ops) have existed in the United States since the mid-1800s. These are functionally the same as a condominium with a slightly different legal structure. But the end result is identical: multiple owners jointly managing a building in which they all own a stake.

I mean, FWIW, the issue primarily relates solely with residential dwellings: Businesses generally have a better grasp on risk factors. Also, many residential cooperatives, to my knowledge, refer largely to house-sized structures, especially... in the mid-1800s. It's much more affordable to manage repairs for less floors and traditional wood frame construction.

It's also plausible the legal structure of a condominium itself is the problem that leads to, well, largely incompetent management.

Obviously I'm not sure landlords are a winning solution for anyone either. But particularly for large structures, I would prefer actual public/government management over a quasi-government entity comprised of self-centered residents.

Given the extremely similar structure in operation (residents are elected to the board, control maintenance fees, etc) and that insurance companies consider them the same for insuring purposes, what makes condos significantly worse than co-ops (which have been around for ~150 years)?

Technically a condo owner has fee simple (i.e. absolute) ownership of the airspace in their unit and tenancy in common (i.e. shared) with the other owners for the walls, floors and common areas.

I guess what you're arguing here is that groups of people shouldn't be able to own real property collectively, which would undermine a lot of the legal infrastructure that underpins business and society today; not just condos.

For example, what if one's parents die and probate leaves the family house to the adult children (who are obviously not married to each other), how would they take title?

The idea I can own my airspace, but be entirely dependent on some other idiots with no qualifications to make key decisions that determine if the floor, walls, and ceiling continue to remain stable and surrounding my property is problematic. Surfside will not be the last large condo to collapse this decade.

The legal structure makes some sense but the accountability is a joke. Structural safety should be handled at a more reputable level.

Also the definitions between your property and the common elements is... unclear in many cases, at best, and somewhat predatory in design at worst.

My HOA is primarily a collective bargaining tool for trash pickup. Over 80% of the annual fee goes to trash service. The cost of the HOA is significantly less than even the most budget-minded trash service.

Do you know how such a minimal scope had been maintained? I'm envisioning either a pretty new HOA or maybe a structure that somehow forbids scope creep.

In my experience, I've seen lots of _old_ HOAs that are similar — only there for utilities that the larger municipality is lacking (like trash, recycling, snow removal, etc). It's the new ones — those that are set up by the developer from the get go that get lambasted and become the stereotype.

Definitely not new- when I purchased the home, my attic had a box with HOA board member documents from the 1980s.

Also, I can’t say I know, other than everyone on the board seems to agree with how it’s ran.

Given the circumstances mentioned in GP's comment, it appears they are living in a condo, and the HOA is constructed to cover the rules for the use and maintenance of jointly-owned portions of the building. This isn't a case of "HOA is mad that next door neighbor used a wrong species of grass for their lawn."

HOAs are the most local form of democratic government that most Americans interact with. They have an elected board, which you can run for if you're a member (owner), and an amendable constitution. In every state that I'm aware of, you have full access to the budget and all meeting minutes. I've even seen recall elections and funded campaigns. Democracy is never perfect, but for any place where I'm living in close quarters to my neighbors (e.g. not in a rural area with 20-acre lots) I'd 1000x rather an HOA than either anarchy or some builder-run "committee."

AirBnB is itself an HOA over a distributed network of properties.

Violate its rules and you're a goner. Don't pay their "taxes", whether literal taxes or AirBnB taxing you by having you pay via your labor in changing your home, curating your listing(s) on AirBnB, writing reviews on AirBnB, being responsive above a percentile set by AirBnB, etc.

All as AirBnB demands. No input from you.

This isn’t recent. Around 2017, the building where I lived had issues with theft. Tenants knew that the (historic) front door was finicky, but AirBnB people didn’t, so they’d effectively leave it open and packages got stolen. There were other issues with AirBnBs, but long story short, everyone agreed they were against HOA rules and had to go. I reached out to support to see if the building could get delisted. They responded…

“The platform does not have the capability to delist a whole community currently but our Friendly Buildings Program does allow you to have complete transparency and control over home-sharing activity in your community. You would be able to set minimums number of guests, blackout dates, amenity restrictions, or even create a waiting list if you want only a small number of homes to have the home-sharing amenity.

We understand in order to be able to control home-sharing, you would have to allow it in some capacity and change your CC&Rs, which is a process. Since our program establishes a partnership between Airbnb and your community, we would love to support in any way possible or even send someone to propose the idea to your board and fellow homeowners in person.”

So in other words, you either work with them or they let things happen anyway.

AirBnB's entire business is predicated on skirting regulation. The problem isn't that they don't care, it's that caring would cost them money and invalidate their business model.

I wanted a term to define companies/apps that solely exist to skirt laws and regulations and then I realized it's the entire whole of "gig economy" companies.

> AirBnB's entire business is predicated on skirting regulation.

From time to time you spot underappreciated comments here. This is one of them

AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, etc - their entire business model is predicated on skirting regulations.

Then people are surprised they don't keep honest negative reviews? Why would a company which is knowingly violating rules care about your negative review?

They make money from hosts putting their places up for rent, not from those renting and if a negative review causes a listing to be removed... Clearly it is far more economical to remove the review instead.

It's not inherently bad. Some regulations are dumb and should be challenged by the market, like Uber and Lyft did to taxi companies and the protectionist regulations that kept them from evolving and improving.

It's less about removing the review or listing and more about looking at the belief system in the business. If a local government says "this space is for permanent residents only" AirBnB would say, "why?" and would rather ignore or fight the regulation than comply (or more likely "take it up with the host, not us").

There are legitimate questions to what terms a government/HOA can force on property owners renting out their residences. From taxation to civil rights and racial equity there's a lot on the table to challenge. That said, companies can be reckless when choosing not deal with the question because it doesn't have an easy answer and grow/scale at ethics' expense.

AirBnB has actually had to deal with this, like removing the ability of hosts to see guest photos before booking because of racial discrimination, and charging the appropriate hospitality taxes on listings to comply with the vast number of of municipalities they operate in.

keep in mind why some of those taxi regulations were created in the first place.

In the not so distance past there was a FLOOD of drivers, few rules and regulations and eventually a "race to the bottom" (too many drivers chasing too few fares).

Then the pendulum of regulation swings TOO FAR in the other direction, creating the "medallion" system where these are worth a small fortune.

A happy medium is where the market self-clears with reasonble regulations to protect both drivers and consumers.

AirBnB is in the same boat. It was a good idea when it was individuals renting out unused rooms for some extra cash. now AirBnB is an unlicensed hotel, where people buy up houses specifically for AirBnB.

There are countless stores of people renting property, and then turning around and putting that on AirBnB.

And strongly agree, some rules are dumb, but the correct approach should be to push for change, not run illegal businesses like AirBnB, Uber, etc.

If i called someone to come get me from "A" and drop me off at "B" how is this "ride sharing" and not a taxi service?

Seems like thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Thesis: too many taxis result in badservice Antithesis: too many restrictions also result in bad service Synthesis: breaking some of the laws results in better service

Now we talk about regulating the gig economy, a horrible thing mostly brought by Uber and airbnb: let's see where it leads us.

The pendulum of regulation will swing too far in the other direction, it ALWAYS does.

Mostly because the government sits around and does nothing until things get really bad, then they institute very strict rules to prevent a repeat.

Had they gotten involved earlier they would have had more flexibility with the regulations.

> reasonable regulations to protect both drivers and consumers.

I would rather regulations exist to protect consumers and communities without respect for the business owners/operators' needs. Businesses don't have an inherent right to exist or be profitable and the choice to protect them is one of pragmatism (eg: national defense, airlines, rail).

I think something got lost in my last reply, I don't think companies should flagrantly break laws and feel that governments should take the gloves off more often to slap them with massive penalties for ignoring them. But it's not black and white.

The entire "gig economy" would be much better named the "scofflaw economy". Far more than technology, a willingness to deliberately ignore laws/rules/regulations/decency is the core competency of AirBNB, Uber, GrubHub and pretty much every other major player in the space.

Why doesn’t the hoa identify the condo owner amd fine then to oblivion?

This is a good point and what I am working on right now

The city ought to be dealing with unlicensed hotels, but of course it won't, since decisions are made by the politically connected landowner class. Airbnb just gives better returns than longterm rentals, and because of that it also increases property values. Landowners won't reduce their income stream, that's for sure.

I reported a neighbour's AirBNB listing (showing 10+ reviews and plenty of pictures) and they had their lease terminated. I couldn't believe it :-)

I'd been finding bags of rubbish in the corridor, or in a recycling bin, and was woken several times by wheely suitcases bump-bump-bumping down the stairs early on a Monday.

Denmark changing the tax laws to require AirBNB to report short-term rental income for tax also helped.

I would think aggressive enforcement and fines by your HOA would lessen that activity.

Check if the listings also violate local planning laws and if so contact your local planning office. In the past our local planning office was reticent to become involved beyond sending a notification of potential violation. These were mostly ignored. My locality a few years ago passed new rules requiring registration of short term rentals and certain requirements to do so including being in compliance with HOA rules. Since then the planning office has become more willing to take actual action.

Those willing to ignore HOA rules are often willing to ignore local tax collection rules so contacting your local tax authority to let them know you suspect someone violating the local tax laws is an option. Even when the planning officials were hesitant to get involved the tax folks were willing.

I have reported realtors which own or have close connections to those owning short term units violating HOA rules to the state licensing board. My experience is that realtors willing to knowingly violate HOA rules have often previously been censured by the licensing board for other issues. This in particular has been amazingly effective at getting units quickly removed and listed for sale. Once the listing is removed I withdraw my complaint and I have never had to follow through to completion.

Luckily once the registration laws went into effect there have only been a couple of people attempting to do short term rentals in my HOA and reporting them locally has ended those attempts.

Call your HOA, not airbnb.

I had something similar happen on Amazon. I bought a pair of winter gloves then got a letter a week later in the mail offering me $30 (twice what I paid) if I left a 5 star reviews. The letter even left a message at the bottom saying not to post a review with a picture of the letter! That annoyed me, so of course I posted a review with a picture of the letter, then Amazon rejected the review since it didn't review the product.

I'm never trusting online reviews anymore. Especially when the companies pull BS like this.

Edit: I just revisited the original email that I got from Amazon. They rejected my review because I left feedback about the seller, so I went to their seller feedback portal and left a message and never got a response. I still feel like this is a dark practice though, a review highlighting the fact the seller is farming 5 star reviews should still be posted, even though it's about the seller and not the product.

believe Amazon is in the right though. Amazon has multiple sellers for the same listing. You can see the different sellers by the purchase box and switch to a different seller.

Sometimes they have multiple sellers for the same listing, and in that case, feedback for any particular seller doesn't belong in a product review. But in some cases, there's only one seller (usually based in China) and the product has very high ratings because they are gaming the system like this, and burying the feedback in the seller reviews does not really give a proper warning to other prospective buyers. I think this is a grey area between "feedback for the seller" and "feedback about the product" but a blanket policy against mentioning seller misbehavior in product reviews is one of the things that allows shady sellers to continue to get away with their games for a long time.

Next time use this simple strategy: Leave a 5 star review, collect the 30$, then change it to a 1 star review.

Ideally Amazon would do something against this, but I think they just don‘t care.

I bought a pair of Doc Martens shoes (the old classic ones) from amazon before discovering doc marteens had its own selling website. I bought a second pair there after 2 weeks not seeing the one I ordered on amazon, the very same model which made Doc Marteens famous around the world.

They both arrived the very same day.

From the seller addresses on the package, I could know which pair were coming from Doc Marteens website and which pair were coming from the amazon seller.

I put the pairs side by side to compare them.

At first sight, you couldn't tell the differences, but once you got close it was very clear there were not the sames : - The laces were thinner on the fake one. - The leather were thinner on the fake one. - The sole were differents, with different markts and scripture. - The logo at the back of the shoes was very badly reproduced.

The amazon seller had recorded an obviously fake address situated in New York city. The front of the address on google map was a store which has nothing to do with shoes or clothing business.

I posted a review telling the shoes were fake and the seller was selling counterfeit products and had posted a fake address.

Amazon informed me 24 hours later they had removed my review because I didn't stitch to only review the shoes.

Any platform that extracts money from X has the incentive to get rid of any negative reviews about X. Reviewers are not the revenue source. That's why AirBnB, Yelp, Glassdoor, etc will get rid of bad reviews for the right price.

Read all bad stuff about AirBnB on reddit, you see where airbnb is heading. People should stop using that platform, whenever you find an alternative.

It's hard to completely trust platforms that can massage reviews in this way, but I think that AirBnB can provide the right incentives and policies to avoid most scammy behavior by bad hosts.

AirBnB needs to immediately get rid of all fees for rentals and enforce that there's just 1 base price charged. The price you see on a listing should be the only price ever possibly charged. Between silly cleaning and toilet paper and checkin and other fees, there's too much of an opportunity for scummy people to try and take advantage of people that are tired and desperate after traveling.

Virtually all of the conflicts, scammy behavior, and confusion would be resolved if there was just 1 base price that was ever charged.

Are there any real alternatives? In my opinion reviews on booking.com seem even stranger...

We used to stay at airbnb places all the time, but no more. The fees have reached a ridiculous level (hint: set your location as Australia, but your currency as USD to see the true cost). The alternative we have switched to is… hotels.

I converted a van to an RV, and now we stay in RV sites. Never going back to AirBNB/VRBO/Hotels! I know, useless for international travel, but within the USA it has become--by far--the most congenial option.

VRBO?

Look at another comment in this thread about VRBO. Same problems exist for VRBO too.

I think that's Vacation Rentals By Owner.

Pick a hotel chain that you are familiar with. No more $100 a day cleaning charges, no more of cleaning utensils, etc.

There was a line from Jeff Bezos, ""One of the early examples of this is customer reviews. Someone wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?' "And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

The incentives are different at different levels of the business. There could be someone with a shorter-term outlook making these decisions, or (more likely imo) it was a very quick misapplication of the policy based on skimming the review. Acting as a first reviewer actually seems like a great application of LLMs, where attention won't flag + they can hopefully be tuned to only focus on the policy-relevant pieces.

> We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions

If those reviews help you decide to buy from someplace other than Amazon... perhaps in short term or narrow circumstances it still helps Amazon (reduced refunds/etc).

That Bezos quote is insightful. For companies that just help people pick which product to buy, steering customers away from bad products will increase satisfaction and repeat business.

Bezos apparently thinks Amazon makes money when they let consumers buy knockoff and fake products, too.

AFAIK, Yelp has not and does not remove negative reviews for the sake of improving a business's score, but they will remove "spam" reviews (like if a celebrity dies at a hospital and their fans leave bad reviews). There certainly have been minor incidents where certain employees have behaved against policy.

Unlike Airbnb, if users lose trust in their reviews, Yelp loses their entire business.

source: I am ex-yelper.

I've read 100s of comments from variety of sources over the years that Yelp is in the business of extortion. It extort money from restaurants by threatening to remove positive reviews and other such tactics.

Yelp is worse than AirBNB.

Those sources seem like hiersay. A recent story I heard was by Loius Rossmann [0] claimed that he found the family member of a Yelp sales rep left a bad review after he turned down a yelp offer.

That just doesn't make sense to me? Like Yelp is telling their sells reps to ask their family to give bad reviews for businesses that don't buy ads?

There might be an argument for Yelp to adjust incentivizes for their sales people to discourage that behavior, but AFAIK they are acting on their own and not because Yelp said to do that.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAAauJlPq0

Here is an example: One Yelp employee had his friend write a negative review for the business that said 'no' to Yelp extortion/tax. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAAauJlPq0

Yeah, this is a perfect example of why Yelp is not instigating this.

Do you really think Yelp is asking their employees leverage their friend's network to leave negative reviews or do you think this sales guy is at risk of losing his job for not converting enough and so he on his own asks a friend to help him keep his job?

If Yelp wanted to extort businesses, they wouldn't need employees to ask their friends. They could just adjust the search ranking to down rank businesses that don't want to pay.

This video doesn't pass the smell test.

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2014/09/ninth-circuit-...

Even though whatever Yelp does is not illegal, it engages in unethical practices: "[R]emoving positive reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp didn’t have to publish those reviews at all. Third, publishing or showcasing negative reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp has the legal right “to post and sequence the reviews.” Finally, the plaintiffs claimed Yelp wrote bogus reviews to punish non-advertisers, but the plaintiffs didn’t provide adequate evidence that Yelp wrote those negative reviews instead of someone else. For example, even if a business couldn’t find records matching the reviewer’s details, that doesn’t mean Yelp falsified that review (compare the Yelp v. Hadeed case, which in a different legal context gave more benefit of the doubt to an aggrieved business with similar claims)."

When AirBnB became public, it wasn't about growth anymore but purely profit. These services were only "good" for the time they had to build positive buzz, now the bill is coming due and they are making as much profit as possible, at the expense of the guest. After all, what is the alternative now they have a monopoly in their niche? "Disruption" my ass... since Airbnb owns no property, the host is their lifeblood and they will always favor the host's reputation in order to make money.

Pump & hype > IPO > eventually dump all the negative externalities on others.

It's the startup dream.

We should aim to do better somehow.

It would be in AirBnb's long term interest to promote accurate reviews to increase trust. If a host is bad and they don't get rid of them it will lose customers.

This feels like such a hard problem to solve; as a company (Airbnb) grows larger and larger this feels inevitable.

I was a very early user of Airbnb and started using it back in 2012, when the platform was still mostly folks renting out extra bedrooms in their homes, and occasionally full house rentals (less commercially-run than nowadays). For a good few years it was always a positive experience, and most of them had a human touch to them (good interactions with hosts, etc.).

A few years later it has gotten commercialized enough that I basically just consider it a commercial short term house rental platform. In the past few years, stories like this post is so common that I'm hesitant to book one unless absolutely needed (can't stay at a hotel at my destination for various reasons, e.g. large group wanting a house, etc.).

What's the future path for this? There's obviously a market need for something like this. Is it a move toward more decentralized small boutique short term rental management companies (maybe geographically dispersed too)? And for platforms like Airbnb to move back to strictly renting out extra rooms in a house you live in?

Heh... I recently made a Booking.com review that started with...

"Reviews were stunning, the location was great, the price was reasonable".

Then, I went on explaining that I landed in front of a closed door, the host was not reachable, Booking.com support was not helpful, so I just drove on through the night and over mountains until I reached home 11 hours later.

After I made the review, Booking.com only kept the first sentence.

Since then, I try ordering directly from hosts or hotel chains.

Bookingdotcom is a great place to find all the available options on one page, that's all.

I had this before when staying in Toronto. We booked an apartment that was walking distance from the downtown nightlife and when we turned up the host wouldn't come to the lobby to let us in. He stopped answering his phone and when the concierge called he told him to tell us to go away.

Booking.com gave us a refund after a 2 hour call and offered us $20. They removed our negative review because "you didn't stay at the property and were refunded".

I am strictly hotels only after the shenanigans from AirBnB and Booking.com.

Airbnb seems to primarily be interested in protecting hosts instead of guests. It's probably much more structural than people realize. I'd really love to know from someone that's deep inside Airbnb why they could allow the service to become such a poor experience for guests(1)? Is it because there's not enough host supply in the system?

(1) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.airbnb.com (1.3/5)

I’ve used Airbnb a few times a year for many years. My anecdotal and speculative belief is that their tools and site hugely favor hosts, but if you have a good history they will make anything right for a guest, and probably just eat the cost themselves to keep both host and guest happy.

For instance, I had a week long stay booked in a “waterfront, two bedroom” in London. I needed the two bedrooms to set up an office that wouldn’t disturb my partner. Arrived at the place, and it was a one bedroom, not waterfront but the building’s communal deck had a water view.

Host was obnoxious about it. Airbnb support couldn’t find me a suitable Airbnb and booked me a two bedroom suite at a VERY nice hotel, worth much much more than I had paid for the rental. I am pretty sure they ate the host’s payout too as the place didn’t re-appear as available.

the hosts entire enterprise was based on fraud and airbnb facilitated it for money

Yep. And a brand new Airbnb customer would probably not have gotten the make good that I did.

I left a bad review once also. The host had it removed. But, in their review of me, they asked why I left a bad review. In the emails received from Airbnb asking for a review, they tell me as a guest that neither party can see the other review until both are submitted. Evidently, this is a lie. Otherwise, how would the host know whether my review was good or bad?

Another issue I have found is that many of the listings on Airbnb are not by the owner, but by some person acting independently as a broker. I have found this in many different countries. This may explain why, when I tried to request a booking, it was not available. The actual property owner had already rented it to someone else. Further, once the broker/host gives the owner the rent, there is no way to get any kind of a refund if there is an issue. The owner has no affiliation with Airbnb. The 'host' no longer has the money. And, Airbnb does not want to pay the expense. So, the guest is left hanging. Maybe they, too, can submit a review that the host will have removed. It's disgusting.

If risking the use of Airbnb, be very careful when a 'host' says a property is not available, but provides a link to a different property. It may have a very different cancellation policy than the original property.

Airbnb claims in their FAQ pages they want to be authentic. But, they seem to be authentic only in the support of their bottom line, even if that requires dishonesty in other areas to achieve.

Because of the combination of different issues, I have decided Airbnb can no longer be trusted. I now prefer to book hotels or apartments through competitor sites. I encourage others to do the same.

> Evidently, this is a lie. Otherwise, how would the host know whether my review was good or bad?

I'm fully open to this possibility, we shouldn't take them at their word, but it may also have been a half truth (they couldn't see your review but they could see their average go down).

We recently had a maddening experience with Airbnb. We booked a long-term rental (~3 months) while our home got worked on, costing $10k+ USD (so Airbnb made a couple thousand bucks?). During our stay, we paid for our OWN cleaners to clean the house every other week and made of a video walkthrough of the house demonstrating its cleanliness. All went well until after we checked out.

The host had been living outside the US for the last couple years, and hadn't seen their house in person for a very long time. They happened to come back after we checked out, and decided to blame all the Wear and Tear from the last couple years on us. Wear and Tear is not something hosts are supposed to be able to charge damage fees for, but they rung us up for a massive damages fee (thousands of USD). We refuted the charge with Airbnb, providing our video evidence which directly countered each of the host's claims.

Airbnb didn't care and made us pay. Even though we've used Airbnb many times, I guess the host was still worth more to Airbnb than us as guests. We left a review describing the experience, and the host countered with their negative review of us. The cherry on top is that we forgot to logout of all our video streaming services from their TV, and the host's last last petty move was to delete all our user profiles from all our services.

If you paid by credit card, sounds like prime opportunity for a chargeback. The credit card company WILL stand on your side.

Can Airbnb make you pay anything after the fact? What if you simply refuse? Surely they would need to sue?

At least you got the money back.

I had an experience where, after arriving in town, the host denied me entry because they thought my negative COVID test result was faked.

That was bad. But what was completely insane was that Airbnb refused to refund my money. They only offered me $200 back on a $500 charge. Ridiculous.

I'm in the process of arbitration right now. Here's the guide: https://fairshake.com/airbnb/arbitrating-with-airbnb/

I think they might have a policy that you can’t review a place that you didn’t stay at.

That policy falls short in instances like this where a guest cannot or will not check in due to issues with the host.

You might also try calling AirBnB again and see if you can convince them to put the review back up.

BTW, $300 cash deposit is absurd. AirBnB already has a security deposit mechanism that the host could use.

They actually requested a review after cancelling this stay due to cash deposit issue. Whole thing is bizarre.

If you actually want to maintain a long-term account, then be (very) careful with both reviews and activity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523056

Woow so if airbnb sees this thread they may ban me ha?

I had a similar experience recently. After the booking was confirmed the host sent us a website to fill out and asked for our credit card number for a deposit.

This sent off a lot of red flags as AirBnB specifically says not to compile with this.

Calling AirBnB was useless. They confirmed that we should not pay the deposit, but it was up the the host to cancel our booking since it was less than 24hours away. AirBnB says as long as the booking is active then we have a right to be there. I share AirBnB's response with the host and they said they would call the cops if we showed up.

Two more calls to AirBnB, including one the morning of the booking and they still needed the host to cancel the booking. And since I "requested" the cancellation the host wasn't charged for cancelling my booking the same day.

After using AirBnB off and on for several years, this left a very sour taste.

I had booked an airbnb in Shanghai. On reaching the destination the host said we had to get police verification. She took us to the police station where the police said we cannot stay with her as she doesn't have the required permits. We were in a country where we didn't know the language and airbnb declined to help us as they didn't have any people on ground or provide alternate accommodation. We got the refund but he spend way more to get alternate accommodation.

I was not allowed to even post a review.

While it sucks AirBnB didn’t do anything to help you, I think anyone who goes to a foreign language, third-world country has a responsibility to research relevant laws and have some kind of backup plan when something like this happens.

Tip for the future: buy a good guidebook (or several). They have listings of hotels with price estimates, whether BnB is a good idea or not, and what the legal requirements are how to handle them when things go wrong.

We did that, not our first rodeo. It was a new system being used in Shanghai, good luck finding credible realtime information about China. The host should have let us know. The tip is obvious to anyone who travels overseas.

AirBnB somehow swung from consistently being better than hotels to always worse. Now I am just back to getting hotels, which is fine I guess, but it was nice while it lasted. I was a big AirBnB booster so it was disappointing to see this journey.

AirBnB service has become awful. We checked in at a place with smoke alarms going off non-stop and a full-blown roach infestation (all dead roaches, but we counted about 10-15 in the kitchen cabinets). Only started uncovering roaches after I tried to disconnect the alarms and a few dried up roaches fell out of the smoke alarm casing. I'm from the city and have lived in apartments with roaches. Not a germaphobe but I know a full-blown infestation when I see one. Needless to say we were pretty pissed. It was like 1AM so we ended up getting a cab to a hotel nearby.

Easy refund right? I had videos AND pictures of the whole thing (multiple kitchen cabinets, about 5-10 roaches on their backs each. smallish 1/2cm german roaches). Submitted it to AirBnB. What happened after was a complete shitshow that I never want to go through again and is the reason I will never use this service.

* Automated customer service kept closing our case because we were traveling and did not respond immediately to their questions in 12-24 hours (got basic questions like CAN YOU PLEASE DESCRIBE THE ISSUE? despite having submitted 10 images of ROACHES). Each time your case closes you get a different representative so we had to re-iterate the same story.

* AirBnB passed responsibility of refunding off to the host, who was playing dumb with us and was basically non-responsive for a week and pretended like nothing was off. They (host) later admitted to the airbnb rep that they did pay for regular pest control services.

* AirBnB told us we were not eligible for a refund because there were not obvious signs that it was a health hazard (such as bed bugs). What? This was extremely puzzling.So if you can't find proof of bed bugs you're SOL?

* Unrelated to the pests, but the host charged us an additional $100 as part of our stay for cleaning fee despite the fact that we left immediately and the only things that were out of place were the kitchen cabinets opened containing dozens of roach carcasses. Try making sense of that.

All in all after some pretty heated exchanges with the reps at airbnb and threats to publish the images online to expose the host they relented and gave me my refund. Will never go through this again with them.

You should have enjoyed the stay and study "The Amazing Social Life" of a roaches colony... And design a model of a colony. I mean it has been made for ants, right ? Here a link : https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/2032?show=fu....

Seriously, one day I left a buddy of mine leave 3 box of stuffs in my appartment because he was moving in another place... 3 months later I saw the very first roach on the open... They were everywhere, hidding in every corners in small groups, even in a f*cking hole punch...

Long story short, I finally get rid of them by buying on the web a kind of pasta in a big seringe with some kind of poison in it which acted at molecular level (or something) and prevented the roaches cells to absorb energy from blood stream. In short, they were dying of starvation even if they were eating. The poison passed also in their shit (because roaches eat their shit to be more discreet), so even their shit became poisonous.

That being said, they would likely not survive a nuclear apocalypse, contrary to the popular belief : https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/would-cockroaches-re...

I booked a place for 30 days, the listing said 100% refundable. So I did it. 2 or 3 weeks before needing it my plans changed and I had to cancel. Airbnb told me that its longer than 28 days so the cancellation policy is up to the host who decided it was non-refundable. This was never relayed in any way during the booking process, not mentioned in the confirmation emails, nothing.

I ended up being able to negotiate a partial refund, but I still lost around $800.

The same place was listed on agoda.com which is fully refundable up to 24 hours prior to checkin and I've always had good experience with agoda support.

I'll never, NEVER, use airbnb again. It's a scam company.

I'm part of the problem not part of the solution and I know it. I spend almost all of my time in AirBnBs and other short term accommodation and I will rarely if ever leave a negative review.

This is for several reasons. Firstly I stay in the places much longer than the average guest, so notice flaws more than someone that is there for a whirlwind visit. Some things are taste based as well.

But also because I understand that often it's a small business and by leaving negative reviews I'm fucking with someones livelihood (this varies from place to place and I'm far more likely to leave a review if it's company owned).

In the few times I have left negative reviews they have to be horrendously bad. Bad to the point that I can't stay (as the OP was).

Given how much I stay in AirBnBs I've also learned to read between the lines. Often you can tell more about the place by what is consistently not mentioned. If people consistently rave about everything it's a good sign. If people give half hearted positive reviews (one nice thing only maybe), that's probably a sign that you're going to want to give a negative review and bite your tongue.

> But also because I understand that often it's a small business and by leaving negative reviews I'm fucking with someones livelihood (this varies from place to place and I'm far more likely to leave a review if it's company owned).

There used to be a time, when people used AirBnB to get some extra money when they did not need their apartment. Not to earn their living. That was one good reason why AirBnB was successful in the beginning.

Now people are making business with the help of AirBnB. And it has brought nothing good. The price of living increases for locals and they can’t own their home. Those small businesses which can afford multiple apartments so that part can be in AirBnB 24/7, do not have problems on making the living. They just want to get richer by doing nothing.

At least here in north Europe, you need hundreds of thousands of investments in euros before you can make your living, and assuming you have loans. If you don’t have, then your living does not depend on it.

> i couldn't check in and went elsewhere.

> But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.

I'm pretty sure your review got removed because you didn't actually check in. I'm actually surprised the system even let you write a review given the circumstances you've outlined.

i wrote the review after receiving an email from airbnb: "You can leave a review for your host even though the trip was cancelled"

I know - I'm saying that you received that request in error.

It's complicated. It seems Airbnb was forced by some customer protection agency (UK iirc), to always offer the possibility to submit a review in the case of last minute cancellations. It's standard practice though that Airbnb considers reviews from guests who did not stay as irrelevant and removable when requested. OP should appeal the removal in their particular case. It's not impossible to reanimate removed reviews. However, generally, what Airbnb did here makes sense (else e.g. host's would suffer from retaliatory reviews when guests show up beyond check-in time and feel entitled). What people forget: by participating in reviews customers are more likely to engage with the product/plattform again (source: influence or pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini).

That seems like the most reasonable explanation. Yes, asking for cash upon arrival is super sketchy, the review was probably fair, but in my experience, getting a negative review removed from a completed Airbnb transaction requires both parties to consent.

My experience, for reference: A couple stayed on our second floor, and left dozens of snotty tissues all around the apartment, put recylables in the trash, and just kind of left the place a mess. No permanent damage, and otherwise, were perfectly fine guests. I gave them five stars for everything but cleanliness, and this man LOST HIS MIND about this new stain on his ratings. Claimed he didn't do anything, reacted poorly when I added pictures to the thread, made excuses, begged for me to change the review (I couldn't!), and eventually accused me of being homophobic (?!?!). Thing is, he lived an Amtrak ride away, and was acting irrational enough that I was worried about further escalation, so eventually I contacted Airbnb and asked them to take my review down.

> but in my experience, getting a negative review removed from a completed Airbnb transaction requires both parties to consent.

This is not accurate. AirBnB has a requirement that reviews be relevant, and they liberally apply this to remove reviews upon one party's request, often complaints about how the host acts are deemed not relevant to the room/house, which is of course absurd.

>> in my experience...

> This is not accurate.

I assure you, I have relayed my experience accurately. Airbnb would not remove my review on behalf of the guest. I had to call them and ask them to remove the review I wrote. I will add, however, that this was over two years ago, and pre-IPO. It would not surprise me if policies have changed to be less consumer-friendly now that they're publicly traded.

My partner was in the same boat with a near slumlord experience in toronto. The pictures on the listing showed a basic but clean place. In person, there was a hole in one of the doors, a floor that was literally disintegrating, a kitchen sink that pulled out of the countertop when you tried to use it, etc.

Her negative review was removed after a complaint by the host, and then the host proceeded to libel her in the review they made with false statements. It took a battle and sending loads of pictures to AirBNB to get them to remove the false review of her and restore the negative review of the place.

Needless to say, I lost of a lot of trust in AirBNB that day. The "air cover" guarantee isn't worth the paper it's printed on. We've gone from 50:50 hotels:airbnb to hotels only, outside of extremely specific cases.

I've had good luck with AirBnB, but did have one similar experience, and there's no chance the place genuinely had reviews as good as were on the site (it was damn near a perfect rating). It was gross, plainly violating fire code (basement-of-a-house "apartment" without a single smoke detector anywhere in it), cluttered with the owner's (?) extra junk, tons of half-finished DIY work everywhere (exposed wires sticking out of open switch boxes and empty ceiling light boxes!), actual no-bullshit graffiti on the ceiling(!?). It looked like a friggin' trap house.

But it had damn near a five-star rating and the reviews were like "great place for my family!" et c. Something shady was going on, both with the host and with AirBnB, to make that happen, I'd say. It was shockingly bad.

It feels like in the last few years all the beloved, life changing formerly-unicorn-startup offerings came crashing down. They are a mashup of dark patterns, unattractive price hikes, user hostile behavior, lies and trash content. Additionally, the early "mutual trust"/"assume good faith"/"organic"/"non professional"/"human" sentiments disappeared, everything is hyperoptimized by greedy capitalists and uncaring AI. This fits the current era of tech layoffs, Russian war madness and high inflation.

Uber, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook come to mind.

Uber and AirBnB were always shady, both services were heavily subsidized by VC money in order to acquire customers. Now that these corporations went public, they stopped with the charade and are aiming at making as much profit as the business they claimed they "disrupted".

Airbnb lets me rent a whole apartment for a couple weeks. Couldn't do that before. And Uber is so much better than the cabs it replaced that there can't really be any comparison. It's not just about price relative to competition.

VRBO and subletting agreements existed long before AirBnB.

My experience trying to use VRBO and HomeAway 10-12 years ago was just awful. There was basically no search or filtering functionality whatsoever, the only option was to scroll through page after page of "L@@K AT THIS OBNOXIOUS, INFO-FREE DESCRIPTION" manually until I found something that met some of my requirements.

I eventually gave up and resorted to going through an agency. For an actual vacation involving a group of people, that wasn't so bad. As a solo traveler wanting economical, shared accomodations, Airbnb was a game changer when it first came onto the scene. Nowadays, not so much, although I do still get lucky sometimes -- I'm writing this from a perfectly acceptable room in a very nice host's home that is costing me $113/night all-in.

While Netflix has their own issues, I don't think I'd put them in the same grouping as [0]Uber, [1]Airbnb, and [2]FB/Meta.

Content that some people dislike is way different than [0]driving taxis out of business, [1]contributing to housing crunch, and [3]driving civil wars/genocide.

Netflix also had a lot of the content that drew people to their service pulled from the platform by content owners wanting to spin up their own streaming services (with mixed results). It's not like they intentionally dropped that content to save money, the licensing agreement ended and wasn't renewed by the IP owner.

There's something uniquely American about taking a brutal cold blooded business, putting a fake friendly facade on it, and holding that facade up for so long

Perfectly put

Is it wrong of me to think that at the root of all of this is the VC funding model?

From their Privacy Policy:

> If you link, connect, or login to the Airbnb Platform with a third party service (e.g. Google, Facebook, WeChat), you direct the service to send us information such as your registration, friends list, and profile information as controlled by that service or as authorized by you via your privacy settings at that service.

> For Members in the United States, to the extent permitted by applicable laws, we may obtain, for example, reports of criminal records, sex offender registrations, and other information about you and/or your background

> To the extent permitted by applicable law, we may receive additional information about you, such as references, demographic data, or information to help detect fraud and safety issues from third party service providers and/or partners, and combine it with information we have about you. For example, we may receive background check results or fraud warnings from identity verification service providers for use in our fraud prevention and risk assessment efforts. We may receive information about you and your activities on and off the Airbnb Platform, or about your experiences and interactions from our partners. We may receive health information, including but not limited to, health information related to contagious diseases.

- Friends list - "Other information about you and your background" - References - Information about you on and off the Platform - Experiences from our partners - Receive health information, including but not limited to,contagious diseases.

As someone whose main income source is from short term rentals, Vrbo provides a much better experience for both hosts and guests. Being able to easily call and talk to a helpful human at Vrbo and have them actually solve a problem is really refreshing.

I spent three months talking to the "helpful" humans at VRBO's tech support, trying to get a refund from a stay that didn't happen due to weather. The host was great and issued the refund immediately, but VRBO wouldn't pass along the funds back to me. They kept alternating between pointing their fingers at the host and pointing their fingers at Expedia (who was involved in the transaction for reasons I still don't understand). When out of options, I took to trashing them all over social media and review sites, and then all of a sudden I got contacted by a part of their customer support org who seem to be able to do things. Finally, out of nowhere the refund quietly showed up on my credit card statement.

Awful experience, and I've sworn them off ever since. Very stereotypical "friendly but can't do anything" human customer support.

That's extremely frustrating. As a host I would very upset if Vrbo held my guest's funds after a refund.

vrbo is also waay more expensive. just looking at barcelona, I can get a place for around $1600+ month minimum. airbnb has places around 1200 and even less if you're willing to stay in a private room.

Vrbo did not provide me with a better experience. I rented a place last Christmas which looked nice going by the pictures in the listing. But when we got there it turned out to be a complete dump. It was so bad we didn’t stay and went straight to a hotel. Of course I contacted both the host and VRBO. The host never responded and the Vrbo representatives just shrugged their shoulders and said it was up to me to work it out with the host. Needless to say that will be the last time I use vrbo, Airbnb or any service like it.

My guess is this exploits an AirBnB loophole that allows a host to remove a review if the guest never stays.

Small technicality, but the review asks you to rate how clean the place is, what condition it’s in, etcetera — you probably wouldn’t have been able to rate those honestly having not stayed.

Some of this rides a thin line in the sense that you made it far enough through the booking to have technically left a review, but wouldn’t have been able to if you had the dispute earlier. In other cases (ones I’ve personally experienced), I’ve had hosts who were jerks and I canceled before ever getting close to the check in time. In that case, you can’t leave a review on AirBnB or Turo. The only punishment to the host is lost revenue and lost opportunity.

At the very least you know the host lost revenue for this. It can be difficult to get a new booking in such short notice.

I hate the fact that hosts are allowed to cancel at the last minute, completely spoiling your holiday. You can't leave a review to warn other users.

It's open to abuse. We've been screwed over by hosts who cancel at the last minute (eg they couldn't find anywhere else to stay). There's literally nothing you can do.

I mostly had positive experiences with Airbnb until I didn't.

I stayed at a horrible place offered by a so-called "superhost". It had super thin walls and a bathroom where the shower flowed into the main room. It was hot with no real window and no way for the air to flow (it was built out of an old garage).

I left a critical review saying all those things.

The host was able to get it removed because the review contained comments about "things the owner couldn't change". This is apparently a well-known trick that hosts share on dedicated forums.

I have learned from that experience that Airbnb reviews can't be trusted and that the "superhost" badge doesn't mean anything (other than the fact that said host is an expert at navigating Airbnb's bureaucracy).

My last experience with AirBNB, it's customer support, and eventually an insurance claim, all went quite horrible. Made me realise how stark a difference there is on the spectrum of customer support by businesses. On one side we have companies like Amazon (with their customer obsession) that would go an extra mile to support their customers, and then on the opposite we have AirBnb like companies.

I would be switching to Booking.com for now and not going to use AirBnb anymore. But from what I am reading here, seems like they aren't that good with their customer care as well?

Calling Airbnb was the right thing to do, I’d probably go the same route here - ask them what is needed to make the feedback acceptable, point out that the host doesn’t disclose the need for a cash deposit in the house rules and you want to warn people. That itself is worthy of discussion - anything not disclosed in house rules tends to get disregarded by Airbnb, and they generally don’t want money changing hands directly because they don’t get their 18%. Otherwise everyone would be listing their properties for $1 and requiring a cash tip on arrival. ;)

Airbnb is expected this year to make changes so prices are more transparent and this plays into that. Things have been trending towards the car rental model where you can rent a car for $1 a day but by the time you add in all the fees it’s closer to $200/day but you don’t find that out until the very last stage of the checkout. Airlines used to do the same thing then ~6 years ago they were forced to disclose everything up front.

I’m planning to list a place on Airbnb soon, am going to bake all the fees into the base price except for unauthorized guests, pets, and smoking - which are only there as a deterrent.

I had a very similar experience with TripAdvisor and a hotel in Vietnam, which claimed my review was false. The really crazy part of this was that my review was positive, 4/5 stars. But they wanted 5 stars and "befriended" me on Instagram to ensure I did that. Even with all this proved and screenshotted, TripAdvisor didn't do much until I went public on social media (thread: https://twitter.com/puntofisso/status/955726203662536704) and some highly visible users piled in.

I can't trust any reviews after this. The major issue is that the review system is flawed. One odd bad review should not affect the overall standing of a business, so even assuming a review was flawed they should leave it on; if they don't, it means that the whole review framework is wrong somehow because statistically gives power where it shouldn't.

Now you know for sure you can't trust AirBNB to make ethical decisions on reviews, so you know for sure you can't use AirBNB without opening yourself to these problems. That something was against their rules but the operator is still a "super host" is further evidence any AirBNB designated statuss is worthless.

So take your money elsewhere.

I wish more people would. Without sharing more public stories like this, there's nothing more some of us can do. My wife used abnb twice: once OK/meh experience, one horrible/abusive. Never again. But that was... 8 years ago. How can I 'take my money elsewhere' when... I'm not giving it to them anyway? I already did "take my money elsewhere" 8 years ago. And I know others who have too, but we're small individual voices that can't be heard over the advertising (and... negative review deletions) of the last decade.

10 years ago (or more) the "hey, we're getting a neat little off-the-beaten path house experience for a great deal!"... probably was a selling point. Today, abnb/vrbo/etc is just a corporatized juggernaut.

What more do you want to do? You don't like it so you don't use it. Sounds like problem solved.

tell people about it, like OP did.

The more people who know the fewer potential victims AirBNB and their hosts have.

> So take your money elsewhere.

The abuse will continue until prospective victims wisen up. There is A LOT of momentum in Airbnb.

I keep getting surprised about how good Airbnb's marketing is.

It has convinced a whole generation of travelers to look for Airbnbs before hotels.

Nowadays, whenever I manage to convince my friends to stay at hotels, they are always taken aback by the concept of cheap hotels and how hassle free the whole experience is.

How did Airbnb accomplish this feat?

That kind of service (AirBnB or otherwise) has a few things going for it:

1) "whole place" rentals are really nice if you're traveling with kids. Like, really nice.

2) It used to often be cheaper to get an apartment or entire house through AirBnB to get any but a bottom-tier hotel (granted, much less true now)

3) It gives you a lot more location flexibility. Ordinary neighborhoods or apartment buildings like a local, maybe walkable to a bunch of cool stuff that's not walkable from where the hotels are in the city, or rural housing sometimes in places where there's not a hotel for many miles.

4) For any kind of getaway where you expect to mostly hang out at/around your accommodations, hotels are so awful I wouldn't consider them an option, short of maybe resorts. Meanwhile you can get a nice AirBnB house on a lake go kayaking right out your backdoor and hang out reading by a wood-burning fireplace and all that. That kind of "the accommodations are the attraction" thing isn't really what hotels are for (again, except, maybe, resorts—but even that's not really the same thing). Granted AirBnB didn't invent this and isn't the only way to get it, but it's one sort of thing for which AirBnB is an option and hotels really aren't.

5) AirBnBs may no longer consistently beat basic hotel rooms on price, but they're still often much cheaper and available in more areas than equivalent apartment-style hotel rooms with kitchenettes and multiple connected rooms and such—these are often limited to long-term hotels, largely near airports and aimed at business travelers, and big expensive suites in fancy hotels in the city center.

Right, if I understand this correctly Airbnb makes sense if you are doing a multi day trip with a large-ish group and want to spend a bunch of your time in/around the property.

What surprises me is that people are conditioned to look for an Airbnb for all travel accommodation, not just the appropriate niches.

Hosts were originally people with spare bedrooms or extra buildings. Now they are “professionals” who consider themselves grindset “investors”. They will squeeze every dollar they can out, and as a result the quality has collapsed while fees and bad experiences have gone up.

I had the same experience with VRBO. My "hosts" decided to come home at midnight and fuck loudly in the room next to me while I was trying to sleep, so I left. VRBO first told me I couldn't get my money back, but that I could leave a negative review if I was unsatisfied. The host denied everything, even though it was pretty obviously coming from inside the house, I even had to walk right past the window where they were moaning and boning, it's like okay, yep. It's not like it's illegal to fuck while you have guests in your home or something, it's just low class. Fucking Los Angeles.

Then when I left the review, I get a message a day later that VRBO took down the message. Cool, last time I ever use your service.

That's odd. Last night I saw a VRBO commercial saying all of their listing were "rent the while house"

I've seen those ads too, and it seems like it's a fairly recent thing? Maybe it was optional before, but now is standard?

Did they do it in the property you rented? If not, what's your problem exactly?

VRBO's shtick -- unlike airbnb -- is that you're not sharing with anyone. Not even the owner. It's their differentiator.

Since he said they were the 'hosts' I assumed so.

> it's just low class.

The “property” I rented was just some of the space of the original house, like 30% of it. There was a door from “my area” to the living room on the other side that was nailed or caulked shut, and the walls were paper thin. They were right next door and I could hear every word of foreplay. It was fucking gross.

Well you rented the space but not the absence of sound in it. That's what sharing appartments means.

You missed the opportunity to video and monetize it on OnlyFans.

I work in commercial real estate, mostly in the apartment industry. I'm about as YIMBY as they come. AirBnBs and short term rentals are terrible for housing costs. STRs incrementally take supply of housing off the market where the owner can received the same or more income by renting at 1/2 or 1/3 the occupancy of a long-term tenant. Some people have mentioned housing was "pre-screwed" or zoning is the issue, but this actually is a big contributing factor to higher costs.

With STRs, an investor can pay a significant amount more than a 2nd home investor, whom that 2nd home investor could pay more than a homeowner.

STRs can be a great investment for someone, but it comes at the expense of housing costs in the area.

I love staying in cool AirBnBs, but it's the reality.

Fortunately, AirBnB launched a new product where they revenue-share with apartment landlords where tenants can Airbnb their apartments out. This is a much less distorting to the market, and even can be good for the housing market if the financial community can rely on this extra income.

If more buildings can pencil (due to high construction costs) because there's now a 10% increase in revenue from Airbnb apartment STRs, and lenders/investors are comfortable with this, then that's a good thing.

I have found that leaving review is generally not worth the effort, nor is reading them. When the system that hosts the reviews is owned by a party that benefits from it, the incentives are skewed so badly that that entire system itself is suspect.

Same thing just happened to me. Had a two-week stay in Costa Rica at a place that advertised itself as a serene and tranquil spot with wildlife. Instead, it was non-stop construction 11 hours a day, 6 days a week. The host knew about it before we arrived. Only found out about it after we got there. Pretty much every appliance in the house broke while we were there. The host was also rude and condescending throughout the process.

We gave a two-star review, and it never appeared on the site. Host is still a super host.

Censoring to protect the income stream.

Same here. Used to be a superhost so I know the rules. I had a period of 24 hours where there was a burglar alarm going off in the apartment and there just couldn’t stop it. Obviously it was very difficult to sleep during the period. I was very careful to say only what happened and not offer any personal opinions.

AirBnB removed the review and would not say what guideline it’s broken so I couldn’t amend the review.

Is there any site that hosts reviews of properties outside of airbnb?

Maybe even something that verifies the trustworthiness of these reviews?

I haven’t checked but it might be against some rules, but if there is a link to it, it seems possible to have reviews/comments on the contents at that link. I guess Airbnb would be mad about this if it was counter to their interest, so there might be some liability for hosting.

They removed all of mine as well. Stayed around 24 places, half had issues, 3-4 were bad issues and left a bad review. AirBnb removed them

This is because there was no written and/or other type of proof, as far as Airbnb is concerned its your word against hers, she could just say something among the lines "guest wanted to cancel and invented scenario where I asked about deposit". Thus it got removed.

When it comes to dealing with Airbnb it's all about what can be provided as a proof.

Airbnb reviews suck. I once had a terrible experience with an issue. I worked with Airbnb to check out early. The host left me a terrible review which was false. Airbnb knows this because the facts were on their support chat with pictures, but Airbnb did not remove the review.

I stopped leaving reviews after that and have been avoiding Airbnb.

Airbnb lost my trust too. I booked a place that ended up being over a noisy bar and they wouldn't refund me. It was impossible to sleep but wasn't mentioned anywhere on the listing which somehow had a top rating. I had to go to a hotel.

I don't even think to use them any more.

The last two times I rented an AirBNB, the actual experience was dramatically worse than the glowing reviews. Now I don't trust the reviews, and I don't use AirBNB any more. I went back to hotels, and I'm happy with that decision.

Yup, and their AirCover “insurance” is useless. I had an injury claim denied for no reason.

Literally no reason, or a reason you didn't find satisfactory?

At this point, AirBnB is too much of a trouble for a weary traveler. No worries of following arcane house rules, doing the dishes and praying to a non existent customer support. Better to stay in a hotel and call it a day.

Airbnb did nothing when my host violated the rules, asked for additional compensation (out of any agreement) and been caught with that. It’s just the worst, but not a unique negative experience with this platform.

This is standard for any online review system. Restaurants, travel experiences, AirBnb, products online etc.

As someone else pointed out, there are exceptions to this, like Steam reviews, but it's a good default assumption.

Because, it is not your review. What happens is that you are asking Airbnb’s permission to post a comment and they give you the right to send comment. Blockchain fixes this.

Is this satire?

I recently stayed at an Airbnb that had non functioning internet. I mentioned this in my review but it was mysteriously edited out in 24 hours.

Guests can work around bad reviews by simply creating a duplicate listing with different photos.

One scammy place I stayed had 3 listing for the same place.

This isn't just an AirBNB problem--lots of other companies like Amazon, Google, Expedia, Booking.com, and others do the same thing.

Time to go back to CouchSurfing?

https://www.couchsurfing.com/

Sure, if you'd rather sleep in a patchouli-drenched living room in an Anarchist House instead of a beach house with a private rooftop deck.

Having done this exact thing via CouchSurfing, I can attest that it's a much more fun experience when you're young, if not a comfortable one.

In france they often add sheets for 30 euros per bed.

Airbnb doesn't treat the hosts great either... They auto set new listings to auto approve...

Post the link to the Airbnb posting if it doesn’t break HN rules. They need to stop this behavior from spreading to other hosts.

This is why hotels exist, so you don't have to deal with random scammers who decided to rent out their house.

So what? Do you really wonder about that? Come on, don't trust reviews.

Name and shame.

This wasn't in Amsterdam?

This post has more hardcore libertarian comments than usual.

PERSON: Then, in the morning, we woke to find huge rats scurrying around the bedroom.

LIBERTARIAN: The contract was for a place to sleep, and here you admit receiving that.

PERSON: And it turned out the owner was running a meth lab in the garage.

LIBERTARIAN: What business is it of yours, how the owner uses their property.

PERSON: When we told the owner we were leaving and would be complaining to Airbnb, they brandished a firearm.

LIBERTARIAN: Your stay was over, and you were trespassing. Castle doctrine.

I don't see any comments remotely like what you're claiming. Libertarian, meet strawman.

I closed everything related to AirBnB 3 years ago, when I booked a room from a Karen who would complain that I would invade her personal space, by passing through the living room, which was the only way to access the entrance door, apparently I was supposed to go in and out less often, like I forced her to rent the room publicly or I was like a unpaying guest.

AirBnB then in its infinite wisdom did nothing to help, they are just a platform that gets your money, without any assistance, solution or due diligence, they just get paid but whenever you need something you are on your own, they can put you in touch with any mentally challenged person, and still they would get no responsibility for that. In general it's just this new economy of disruptors that sucks, just pay with no reliability, hope it will be over soon before it spreads too much to segments that still invest in being reliable, before they understand that apparently it's just a cost and people doesn't mind

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