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Comment by tdees40 | Hacker News Reader

We just rented a place for a month on AirBnb only to find out that the owner kept two cats there (undisclosed); my wife has severe cat allergies. Now we're having to fight tooth and nail to get our money back, and the property owner is saying that her policy is no refunds, period. So yeah, I kinda get why people can cozy up to the idea of regulation.

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You were perfectly willing to take that risk when using the service for whatever advantage you thought it had over a traditional hotel (price, location, whatever).

You lost on that bet. Rather than than trying to decide if you are willing to take that risk next time or to pay a little extra for certainty with a traditional hotel, you want all the option removed to everyone.

This dilemma isn't at unique to hotels, the "cheap with risk versus expensive, reliable name brand" applies to nearly everything. Do you get leaves cleared by some guy off of Craigslist, or spend more for "real" landscape contractor? Do you get your car brakes redone by Joe the Mechanic, or do you pay extra to go to Midas?

Out of curiosity, when you say "undisclosed" did you ask and they told you "no"? I've certainly stayed in any number of regular B&B's that had pets on the premises and I'd be very surprised if all them them explicitly stated the fact on their web site.

We didn't ask, and they didn't mention it. When we did ask (only 2-3 days after we booked it) they made it clear that there was no chance of a refund.

If you booked using a credit card, a chargeback is a potential option. You may be blacklisted from using the service in the future though.

That seems like a very good reason to cozy up to the idea that you should be able to get your money back from a host who misrepresents the property being rented, but not a particularly good reason to cozy up to the idea of arbitrary short-term rental regulation.

Sure. But who's going to enforce that "should"? This is why regulation is popular; it's about recourse.

Regardless of who enforces the rules, my point is that the rule prohibiting the misrepresentation of a business transaction is much more reasonable than the rule prohibiting (or significantly limiting) short-term rentals.

The greater point is that if Airbnb providers were already regulated this type of thing might not be an issue, ie: playing by the same rules hotels do.

That seems rather irrelevant to the issue at hand. That is a contractual dispute. What, are you going to write regulation that people have to disclose their cat ownership in case of allergies?

Yeah, it seems as if the exact same thing could have happened in the case of a fully-licensed B&B. And I'm not sure I'd have acted differently as the owner. If you have special requirements whether it's allergies or access, it's sort of on you to ask. In my experience, cats and dogs are not at all uncommon in B&Bs and other non-traditional-hotel housing.

There are many things a reasonable person would expect of a short term rental. It is unreasonable to expect a contract to enumerate every one of them. For that matter, no cancellation policies create extremely perverse incentives.

I don't believe this problem should be solved with regulation - AirBnB should handle it better internally. For that matter, I would advise you to ask the landlord ahead of time in the future and to only pay with AmEx - they side with their customers the vast majority of the time in the case of charge backs.

> AirBnB should handle it better internally

That IS regulation.

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