Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I've had the opposite issue which is as a renter which is out of 6 AirBnB rentals 5 of them had issues, 4 of them the host lied on their listing and several I didn't rent lied on their listings as well but I got smart enough to confirm before.

#1 was "parking on premises". Having a car I wanted a space. One place I show up and "here's the space but it's often blocked so you'll have to park somewhere else". Another I show up. "Host, sorry I'm in Europe and my car is in the space so you'll have to park somewhere else". Have had similar experiences confirming. "It says on your listing parking on premises. Is that true?" "Yes, parking on the street is easy although if here on a weekday you won't have a permit so you'll have to park 3 blocks away". "What part of on premises don't you get???"

And no, the reviews didn't mention it. I assume because others didn't have car or didn't notice they paid for "parking on premises".

Another place claimed WiFi but it turned out he was stealing wifi from a neighbor and it only worked if you sat on their sofa. He said if it didn't work there was free wifi in the lobby of the building.

Yet another said their place was a 1 bedroom, not a studio but it was actually a studio with just a wardrobe separating the bed from the rest. What's the difference? Whether or not there's a door between me and the refrigerator who's noise keeps me awake. I wouldn't have rented the place had the listing been correct.

So, yea, no more AirBnB for me

I haven't used Airbnb, but VRBO.com is rife with false listings, the main issue being incredible properties with great prices, you click to email to confirm, and you then receive a replay saying sorry it's booked, but check out our other properties, always at a much higher price, and they'll even often send you to an external website!

VRBO really has no way of contacting support, and I kind of assume their revenue is derived from listings rather than bookings, otherwise you'd think they'd crack down on this.

The last time I tried to rent a ski cabin with vrbo, it took almost 30 calls to get 3 actually available houses (numbers approximate, it's been 5 years). The experience was complete shit.

There's no rating system in AirBnB? >___>

There is, but the problem is that not every amenity listed is something that all customers would want, thus they won't knock a host for it being incorrect.

For example, I stayed at a place in Germany that said they had a washer and dryer. Indeed there was a washer and I thought it might be one of those all-in-one units (washer and dryer), but it was just a washer. I asked the host about the dryer and she said she didn't have one. I pointed out that she listed one on the AirBnB site under amenities.

The problem here? Language barrier. She thought "dryer" meant hair dryer, which she had. It sorta screwed up my trip because I did a multi-city stay and that was the place I decided to do laundry and forewent laundry facilities and the previous and next places when I planned everything out beforehand.

And as grandparent here alludes to: people have wildly different ideas about what a particular amenity is. "Wifi, but only when you're sitting on the couch" isn't up to snuff for me. It may be that most people who stayed at that place were not in the apartment much and only checked email occasionally. It may be that I need to use the internet for a couple of hours each day to deal with work or some other commitment.

What I've found is that you need to find out which amenities are REALLY important to you for each place you stay and send messages to the people ahead of time to make sure the really important stuff is what you'd expect and not "just true enough that I can probably check this box for the amenity".

I feel like I've had the same issues with hotels in general. Internet is commonly subpar, down, or inaccessible in the room. In some countries it was still common to have wired Internet or maybe wifi only in the lobby (sucks if you only brought an iPad with you).

It's not just cheap hotels either, this is pretty common in well known brands - each country has their own policies on how things should be, so (for example) at a Hilton in London you may get free wifi in your room, in Australia the same for $40 a day, and in Brazil poor wifi only in the lobby.

This is also a cultural barrier, when I lived in germany very few people had electric clothes dryers - most people had electric washers and racks for air drying. For a german it's reasonable to assume dryer meant hair dryer.

Ultimately, because AirBNB and VRBO are p2p you are accepting a certain level of risk in exchange for a rate much cheaper than a name brand hotel. The name brand hotel buys you a level of certainty in the experience you will have.

My example airbnb in Prague - a room advertised as a king size bed, but when we got there it was two twin mattresses pushed together, with a king size sheet laid over both of them.

In my experience hosts have been honest when you ask them direct questions when researching their listing. It just takes time to do this for every listing you are interested in, and there will always be things you don't think of. "Is your bed a single mattress or two mattresses pushed together?" wasn't on my list!

Weird, because Airbnb has a German website. I never posted a place there, but I can imagine that you can select "dryer" from the amenities in German language. Or was this in the description of the place?

What service are you using now?

AirBnB refunds you when they fail to deliver the advertised product... Right?

Or do they just keep your money and tell you find a legal hotel somewhere else next time?

You have to go through a refund process. If they host doesn't agree to the refund, it goes through arbitration which takes a long time and is kind of pain.

They are supposed to find you alternative accommodation, but they didn't for me when my host cancelled <24 hours before I was supposed to arrive, or when my friends were staying in an AirBnb when the host was evicted(!).

They'll refund but that's not much consolation though.

You show up at the place say 6pm, it turns out to be a lie, what do you do? Book a hotel at $$$ a night because it's last minute and it's the only thing available?

I showed up to one place in Santa Monica, it was a cold day in January. I had just driven from Vegas, showed up, 6:30pm. It's raining hard. Check out the place. Windows are broken. Not shattered just they have these blind style windows that rotate and they've rusted so they don't close. There's a 1 inch gap between slats every 5 inches. Both in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Being about 44f outside I wasn't willing to freeze in that apt.

So, I ended up at the LAX Hilton for a week while I tried to find something else.

It's almost as though the regulations on hotel accommodations are well reasoned and appropriate.

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