Airbnb shares fall after probe into unpleasant customer experiences
reuters.com
reuters.com
This is what a world without regulation could be.
The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.
Of course, we don't really have that at all in the US. We have a severely compromised free market.
For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.
It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).
Even China is not foolproof at it; look at how troubled their airliner program has been.
Like by a whole number factor.
Until we can rest assured that 100% of you will treat me better than I deserve, we will have to be on the watch for pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.
That is pretty much the world that the original Star Trek was promising--an evolved human--but we are very far away from that now.
We could also look at it through the lens of Bertrand Russell's four unquenchable desires (acquisitiveness, rivalry, pride, power).
Either way, flawed humanity needs regulations backed by overwhelming power to force us to treat each other right.
Better than a “pure” free market or the Soviet-style, centrally-planned economies.
Though the ecological disaster from short-term thinking really needs to be rethought.
You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.
The government’s job even with “free market capitalism” is to regulate the market to manage both positive and negative externalities.
As for regulations, when regulations fail to keep up with reality, well, guess who wins. If you want to tell your neighbor what she can do with her house, I guess maybe you should've outbid her when it went up for sale.
Forcing airbnb to display and sort by final price is the type of regulation that would help.
this is exactly why companies like airbnb, uber, and the other disruptors try so damn hard to not be lumped in with the exact market they are trying to disrupt. they all know that if they had to play by the same rules, there would be no disrupting. the disruption comes from them being allowed to skirt the rules and play on different playing fields. they'll all scream about corruption in the existing sytem, and some of that might very well be true, they are suggesting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. it is true that some regulations that help protect the consumer will hinder unbridled growth for the disruptor. tough!
The whole reason Ticketmaster is able to do what they're able to do is because when one company becomes large enough, it's no longer a free market.
To be fair, the things those hosts asked me to do weren't anywhere near a full cleaning of the place, but I can see people who are used to doing exactly nothing when leaving a hotel being peeved that they had to do 10% of the cleaning and still pay a cleaning fee for the other 90%.
You know what, the next time I stay at an Airbnb, I’m going to just say I didn’t clean anything but I left an extra $20 on the counter to cover the work I didn’t do. Shouldn’t be a big deal right? That should be more than enough to cover the 15 minutes of labor I was asked to do, at a rate of like $80/hr.
At the Marriott?
It seems like a petty power move type thing, like a way to ensure guests don’t go too crazy or something because you make them feel like they will have to clean things up.
That's the problem. I suspect many amateur hosts have scaled operations to the point that they don't clean between stays and outsource that job to consumers as a shortcut, cost saving measure.
Which is probably a better comparison for the chore lists and cleaning fees than table service.
I haven't really used Airbnb, but it seems pretty ridiculous that people would continue to use them if there are different, annoying to understand conditions attached to each listing.
And then in some sense, a media article criticizing them is the free market.
I'm pretty sure I've been charged by airbnb for a cleaning fee when I never even stayed at the place.
Edit: yep, 40 bucks in cleaning fees without ever entering the place
Paul G couldn't be prouder of any other company ever from YC and it is well understood that not only are rent seeking slumlords and dirty/dangerous places a frequent problem, airbnb actively destroys communities [2],[3].
So this is what maximum startup success looks like folks.
1. https://www.failory.com/pitch-deck/airbnb
2. https://files.epi.org/pdf/157766.pdf
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307554257_Holiday_R...
https://i.imgur.com/tTsrxdF.png
Its working as intended for me. Thank god for airbnb, i 've travelled to so many places i couldn't have even dreamed of.
Outrageous fee like those you quoted happen if you rent in high demand places in peak season. Don't rent a condo in aspen in feb .
It’s annoying that hotels don’t do daily cleanings as often and resort fees only questionably add value but at least I don’t have to pack my bedding, look for cameras hidden inside the bathroom, or worry about somebody just casually entering at night
At typical 3+ star hotels (like, as you mentioned, Marriott) you can request free daily cleanings. They just stopped doing them by default.
Yeah that sounded like a very absurd/weird comparison
> There's the "it's a rental" mentality applied
No it’s not a “it’s a rental mentality” — it’s more like “you’re paying exactly for that service”! Yup, exactly for that.
What you are saying is more (loosely) like — “oh my god, how horrible is it to expect this taxi driver to drive me to my destination just because I am going to pay the fare, if it was my car I would have driven it myself, right?”.
>They just stopped doing them by default.
When you pay for a hotel, they still clean the room when you check out. They just don't necessarily do it by default each night if you're only staying for 1 or 2 nights. They will do it if you specifically request it, but is changing your sheets really necessary if you just slept in the for one night and will be the staying one more night? I don't care if it is the hotel or not paying for the water/electricity to do that laundry, but that just seems extremely wasteful, especially multiplied times the number of guests with the same duration of stay.
what you're going on about is totally different and just flat out being argumentative for arugment's sake. or, you just missed the point.
I don't know why you're targeting this rant at me. I was just telling someone that hotels do a thing that they want them to do. I don't have my hotel cleaned daily.
In their defense, some people pay for hotels specifically for this luxury. You get to pamper yourself for a few nights, which might be meaningful if you're in an otherwise unpleasant place.
As for the rest of your comment, I found it pretty unintelligible. Do you want to use Airbnb or not? Are you for or against washing your own dishes?
No, I've never used airbnb, and won't for multiple reasons.
>Are you for or against washing your own dishes?
assuming you're referring to eating out at a restaurant, so no. otherwise, if i don't do my dishes, who else is going to do them? kind of left that question a bit vague.
You left your comment with the statement that hotels have stopped doing automatic daily room cleaning by default when a guest is staying longer than one night. I don't think this is a negative. I find it very wasteful to have linens and what not cleaned daily. How dirty were you when you got in the bed that they need changing that this is expected. If that's your expectation, is that a normal thing where you change your bedding daily at home? It's that "fuck it, it's a rental" attitude. Unless you had a really bad night and shat/pissed the bed, there's no reason for it.
While now whatever hotel I’m staying at is “home” (nomadding across the US 7 months a year), I felt the same when traveling for business.
For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.
The fun part of their S-curve is over and this is the predictable outcome of switching from growth mode to margin mode.
[0] https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-cracks-down-on-airbnb-aft...
I think airbnbs win in two main cases, group trips and when the option would be a crappy hotel vs. a nice Airbnb.
Otherwise I’ll take a nice hotel every time.
Also, good luck if you need support.
You know what is absolute must have information I need before booking a stay? The exact location or the exact address! And AirBnb by design doesn’t allow that. I don’t know how one can book without knowing that. At places even a variation of 200-300 meters can mean the difference between great and absolutely shitty stay and on AirBnb often you just know it’s somewhere in that 10-50km area!
Then the circus around not being able to easily get contact of host — some try in silly cryptic ways to share their number. All this seems really shady.
On top of that I have to deal with the fact that apparently all AirBnb hosts probably pay for some kick ass photographer that just metamorphoses their places. Yup! And unlike hotels and resorts I can’t verify pictures or reviews and even address and map location at multiple places.
And yeah zero service or help when you need it — neither from the host, nor AirBnb.
And no those are not cheaper at all, even more so if you factor in what it lacks in service.
AirBnb has always felt like something utterly broken, functioning between the cracks of regulations.
Mission Accomplished!
These are opportunities to buy ABNB
that's their claim, anyway.
That doesn't make the report wrong, simply going by a small set of anecdotes here and on previous threads about Airbnb.
I've stayed in 5-star hotels, and Motel 6. I tend to actually prefer the Motel 6. No bother, and the room is there, when it's time to crash. That's really all I care about.
It was no real hardship to load the dishwasher before I left and take the recyling bin to the curb on the day they requested.
The overall result is almost indistinguishable from staying in a hotel, except that you can take your own trash out when you want, there's nobody in the room next door who likes to sleep with Fox News blaring at top volume, you don't run out of towels as quickly, and when you do, you can do your own laundry easily.
Then there's the fact that I can rent an entire house for the price of a hotel room. Coming from a longtime skeptic, I'm now pretty much sold on the AirBnB thing, at least for stays exceeding 3 nights.
Highly doubt that. Airbnb customers are the ones listing properties online, they are having time of their life on the platform. Its the _product_ that has unpleasant experiences.