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AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB
- disillusioned 11y agoWhat a shitty termination notice and a shitty way of handling things from an account that has clearly been one of their better hosts. If you're going to ascribe the "superhost" appellation, you'd think they'd actually give a fuck before algorithmically cancelling the user's account, or maybe work through a warning or validate their concerns or literally ANYTHING before turning things up to 11 and nuking the account from orbit. Even if AirBNB had a perfectly legitimate reason (which, to be clear, would make the author a borderline sociopath to publish like this, but isn't out of the question), the termination notice and the complete lack of transparency is so Kafkaesque and needlessly horrible that this just makes AirBNB look awful. I've considered going the host route, but reading through something like this makes me seriously second guess using them. I understand that it's their platform and they can de facto rule by fiat, but that doesn't mean it's good policy and that potential hosts shouldn't have some sort of communication or chance to rectify an issue or any level of transparency. It's also disappointing when a company effectively has to be shamed into taking anything resembling a human approach to a problem. It's been a week of "we can't tell you anything, sorry" which is bullshit. There's simply no reason for that, and it's disheartening to say the least.
- danielweber 11y agoYou know how the web 2.0 companies have a massive amount of revenue per worker? It's because the normal rough edges of handling customer complaints is shoved out the door, because that didn't really matter, right? "For your convenience your account has been closed. Do not reply to this email."
- Lucadg 11y agoIn the meantime you may upload your apartments in Housetrip, Wimdu, Booking.com, Homeaway and so on. None is as good and smooth as Airbnb but they work. When hopefully Airbnb reopens your account, keep these portals too, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
- vessenes 11y agoThis is a tough read, because someone's livelihood and in some part happiness combine with their AirBnB business, and losing it is painful. The hell of it is that there are many circumstances in which the customer would not be allowed to know why the cancellation. I'm most familiar with Bank Secrecy Act rules; some of which definitely apply to AirBnB. So, for instance, an algorithm flags the house as a likely money laundering location. AirBnB response: notify FinCEN, Thai authorities, turn off customer account without explanation. In the US even telling your employees down the line why the account was canceled might lead to fines and jail time for the compliance folks. I am not making this up, or exaggerating. That's just how it is. Or, perhaps a repeat customer is the target. Same stuff. Or, perhaps the owner is a small time pornographer / drug dealer / etc in Thailand, and Thai authorities notify the bank, which notifies AirBnB's bank.. Of all the employees contacted, only the CTO would know, but even he might be told "flagged, don't ask." And, that will be all. No matter how much he might care that a good customer stay happy and with the company, getting rid of them is infinitely better than being deposed over a BSA violation and information leakage.
- rdancer 11y agoIt's the way they deliver that message that is really messed up. If you need to fire somebody, do it swiftly, and cleanly.
- cjg 11y agoAnti-money laundering regulation was my first guess as to why, but it doesn't really fit because companies are not allowed to do anything to warn customers that they are under investigation. Cancelling their account could certainly tip them off to this and so it seems unlikely that it would comply. Having said that, I don't know what the Thai regulations are. Perhaps this fits better under those.
- hackerboos 11y agoI read a FATF report that stated it was still far to easy to launder money in Thailand's cash economy. Reporting starts at 2 million baht ($56k) http://www.bangkokbank.com/BangkokBank/WebServices/AMLRegulations/Pages/Default.aspx http://www.bangkokbank.com/BangkokBank/WebServices/AMLRegula...
- pm24601 11y ago"Sharing economy" = shareCROPPING economy. (look up "sharecropping" to understand ) But basically, sharecroppers were exposed to all the risk, and the landowner got the initial first dibs on the crops. The landowner often times had complete ability to be completely arbitrary ( like AirBNB is in this case ) You are not running a business if you don't have direct access to your clientele. You are a shareCROPPER. Look it up. Use AirBNB, as a marketing vehicle, not your only income source. Woo hoo, I love these downvotes. Seriously, peeps...give me your hate. And while you are doing that - please tell me which bit of my statement is factually incorrect.
- bagels 11y agoI looked it up. "a tenant farmer especially in the southern United States who is provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges" There are no crops involved in the posted story. Further, AirBNB doesn't own the land so I'm not sure the term even makes sense as a metaphor.
- NamTaf 11y agoThe iPhone logging in all over the US sounds like it's probably the cause. The account may well have been shuttered for being a conduit of fraud or the like and thus the account got canned. It'll be interesting to hear any follow-up to this.
- coverband 11y agoSounds to me like there's fraud activity observed or reported, likely by more than one guest in the same location.
- 1arity 11y agoDoes Airbnb have two factor login ? If so use it.
- venomsnake 11y agoThis definitely sounds like some agency was using/used the home as a safe house.
- rdancer 11y agoAirBnB's ability to handle failure modes is beyond bad. If a host fails to accommodate you, you better have a hotel in mind for a plan B. Their UK customer service phone line drops calls after 300 seconds in the waiting queue. Go and try it: +448435047257 Form replies to e-mails, never enough detail, multiple days' response times. What's the procedure for documenting a host has checked in, or hasn't? That's right, there isn't one. They do everything by hand, and is't a he said/she said, I will take a week to deliberate, and then cut the baby in half kind of deal.
- prawn 11y agoWhen I have had a host screw me over in a major city where finding accommodation in a peak time is incredibly difficult, I've complained to Airbnb very persistently and aggressively, and they've compensated me.
- rdancer 11y agoThat's exactly the point I'm trying to get across: there should be a well-defined business process, reflected in the UI in their app/website, for getting refunds. That there isn't speaks volumes.
- prawn 11y agoTrue of almost every large company until you complain like a bastard. I've been stonewalled by Dell, Airbnb, airlines, etc but eventually won through sheer stubbornness.
- saiko-chriskun 11y agoI recently went through the exact same experience. Absolute shit.
- kriro 11y agoQuick read the AirBnB terms (termination). Seems like they can basically terminate you however/whenever they want. IANAL but that seems rather flimsy. Aren't they essentially an infrastructure provider (website, app, booking etc.) that should have service contracts? That pretty much means you should not and cannot depend on AirBnB as a major source of income. Risk management wise that's just insane. It puts a decent amount of theoretical "extortion power" in their hands. "Oh yeah we see you make X which likely means you heavily depend on this income. Would you kindly agree to these new terms/new rates or be screwed?" Independent of all of this it is horrible style to terminate someone without further notice or reason. Writing this into ToS is a pretty bad sign. It generally seems better to have a policy that defaults to explaining the reason for termination except in special cases (funny money laundering laws etc.). Makes me wonder, is there is any "ToS" ranking site out there? X,Y,Z in ToS are a bad sign, here's why? Kind of like the sites calling out bad UX practices that are meant to trick people into buying extra stuff.
- taneq 11y agoThe problem here is that this sort of termination clause is basically standard practice these days. For instance, Google's TOS just says "Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time": http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ - That's pretty damn scary given that I (and most people I know) have a Gmail account as their primary contact! Everyone just accepts it on the assumption that it's a last-ditch protection against 'bad people', and hopes that in their case if anything goes wrong the company will deal transparently and fairly with them.
- hoodoof 11y agoIt's good to be the king. Google is king of search and can cut you off without reason or explanation. AirBNB is king of home sharing and can cut you off without reason or explanation. Companies that have a virtual monopoly can treat their ecosystem this way because there's no reason not to. If this is the way they treat their very best hosts, can you imagine how rock bottom badly you'll be treated if you're anything less than a stellar superstar.
- dynjo 11y agoImagine if they dealt with their employees in the same way. Your fired, leave. I'm not telling you why. The unicorn paradox: 1. Create a small startup to disrupt the corporations 2. Create a loyal user base 3. Ride the hockey stick on your unicorn 4. Treat your users as a commodity as you scale 5. Become a terms & conditions black box 6. Congratulations, you are a corporation.
- kkapelon 11y ago"So far the emails have been opened and read over 350 times, from multiple places around the world. Who knows who these email addresses really go to." 1)How can you track this in a reliable way? 2)So 350 read this email and did not answer it? Do I read that correctly?
- dewey 11y agoYou could embed a tracking pixel and email clients that don't block remote content will fetch it from the server where you'll see the number it's been accessed.
- lordnacho 11y agoWhat was the point of having someone phone the account holder but not act like a human being? If you're going to hide behind the algo (and hopefully do an investigation and apology) isn't it better not to have any human contact? If you phone someone, the person on the other end tends to expect some humanity (ability to ask questions, commitment to investigate).
- Lucadg 11y agoI don't like to be the "I told you so" guy. But I told you so. I wrote this a couple of years ago: "All Eggs in One Airbnb" http://www.adormo.com/blog/marketing/all-the-eggs-in-one-airbnb-1st-part/ http://www.adormo.com/blog/marketing/all-the-eggs-in-one-air... because I keep meeting hosts who say "I'm fine with just Airbnb". The build a whole business based on a single website, a single failure point. Disclosure: we help hosts be present in several platforms, including Airbnb.
- Reason077 11y agoThis reminds me of a similar story of an Airbnb host in London who's suing Airbnb for cancelling his account. Basically, it comes down to allegations made against him by a guest. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/homeowner-massaged-by-his-airbnb-guest-sues-after-being-kicked-off-the-website-10421149.html http://www.standard.co.uk/news/homeowner-massaged-by-his-air...
- KayEss 11y agoWe've been considering doing the whole AirBnB thing (also in Thailand), but the problem with all of these online services is that you just aren't in any control of your income. I've kept only to business models where I bill directly. This rules out google adsense, Apple and Android paid apps, AirBnB etc. I won't even use anything like PayPal to collect money for me -- there's just far too much risk for capricious loss of the business through factors that you have absolutely no control over. Building a business is hard, it seems utter folly to give another entity this sort of control over what you're doing.
- rebootthesystem 11y agoGoogle "amazon seller account suspension" or "amazon shut down my seller account" if you want to read some horror stories. This type of behavior on the part of internet giants is absolutely wrong.
- walterbell 11y agoApparently even buyer accounts can be terminated, https://onlinestuffblog.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/amazon-the-implosion-is-near-now-customers-are-disposable-just-like-everything-else/ https://onlinestuffblog.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/amazon-the-...
- bambax 11y agoReading that article makes me furious -- of course, there are many things we don't know, and this person may be full of it, and she may have crossed a line (knowingly... or unknowingly), etc. But, even if that's true, not giving reasons why you're kicking users out is infuriating. No due process, no appeal, just a big "fuck you" with no explanation whatsoever. These companies apparently think it's a normal way of dealing with users -- and something they can do with total impunity once they have acquired near-monopoly status. Let's hope for a big backlash some day soon.
- superuser2 11y agoIndeed, Stripe for example built its entire business on people's frustration with similar behavior by Paypal.
- maehwasu 11y agoAirbnb is a short-term rental company, not a f*ing nation state. It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these Kafka-esque scenarios. Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
- RealityVoid 11y agoKafka-esque is the perfect qualifyer for this situation. Absurd things like this make me feel queesy, sort of like vertigo.
- okasaki 11y agoCommercial companies often seem to be more opaque and arbitrary than governments.
- kawsper 11y agoSome of the Stripe cancellation messages are the same. It might be that their bank partners requires this of them. I tried to help a friend figure out why their account was terminated, and it would have been nice if their e-mail said: "Your account was terminated because you violated terms of conditions x,y,z". Could be because they are afraid of lawsuits that they aren't more specific?
- prawn 11y agoOften in these articles, you read through to some sort of detail hidden at the end which reveals why the company actually did cut ties, and the aggrieved party is blind to it or trying to talk around it. In this case, there's nothing. My guesses were assault, theft or maybe some effort to actively sabotage Airbnb by promoting a competitor. But if any of those things happened, they're not detailed or hinted at all. I imagine Airbnb are vague for legal reasons. But it must feel hugely unfair to be in the position of the author and lose a significant portion of your life and livelihood.
- knorby 11y agoThe sense I get is just that they don't cancel successful accounts very often; given the escalations, I have to believe they have some strong reason. It sounds like they will have some host community issues now, but what got me was how they cancelled guests. It sounds like they just used the host cancellation process, but if I found out AirBnB did that masked as the host, I'd go from annoyed at the world to very angry at AirBnB...
- chinathrow 11y ago"I really cannot understand why I am being kicked out of a community I loved, promoted and cared for so passionately." It's not a community - it's people meeting on a commercial platform who's in for the big money. Still, as a previous host and renter, I am disgusted.
- Dylan16807 11y agoI guess most communities aren't communities then.
- pm24601 11y agoYes they are communities. No, AirBNB is not a community. They can't be a community when participation is subject to veto by a single entity/person. Communities are determined by a collective decision, not a unilateral decision. Anyone one talking about the "AirBNB community" is lying to themselves or to the person they are talking to. If AirBNB wanted a community, they would have visible, due process procedures in place that allow for appeals and the community to arbitrate disputes.
- DannyBee 11y ago"They can't be a community when participation is subject to veto by a single entity/person." Says who? This is not any requirement of any commonly accepted definition of community. You certainly can just make crap up and define words however you like, but you can't expect others to go along with you :)
- teh_klev 11y agoIn the olden days they used to be called User Groups - most big tech corps had them, run mostly by the customers. But that's an unfashionable term these days, just like my beige cords and jumpers with elbow patches.
- pm24601 11y agoI am not making crap up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community Community... "who mutually define that relationship (subjectively) as important to their social identity and social practice." http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community : 1. a unified body of individuals: as a : state, commonwealth b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself <the problems of a large community> c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons> e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community> g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community> 2 : society at large 3 a : joint ownership or participation <community of goods> b : common character : likeness <community of interests> c : social activity : fellowship d : a social state or condition Notice that in the dictionary definition of community is that there is lots of references to "group of people", "unified", etc. but no reference that allows for a single entity to determine membership. Therefore people hosting for AirBNB are not part of a community.
- bagels 11y agoNo mention of whether the Paris talk invitation by AirBNB was cancelled. That would be an entertaining forum to raise this topic in.
- chinathrow 11y agoTo the fine folks at AirBnB who for sure are watching this thread: - You fucked up badly in 2011 with that wrecked apartment in SF - You cleaned up nicely eventually, introduced insurance and whatnot Now, you absolutely seriously need to clean this up the proper way. The shitstorm is already brewing.
- airbnbthrowaway 11y agoPerhaps the Thai government asked them to close the account.
- noonespecial 11y agoAn obscure, not fully tested algorithm applies a filter to all users. Maybe it's an internal beta, maybe some integrator that should have considered account history pulled a blank table instead of real values. Whatever. It happened. Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even can know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to happen like that in the first place. Nobody wants the responsibility for dealing with it. So there you have it.
- chinathrow 11y agoIf you have algos in place to flag an account and forget to implement the reason why that algo came to the conclusion, you should seriously rethink your setup.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoThat may not always be possible. For example, if you have a neural network doing the flagging, you might not be able to figure out exactly 'why' a particular account was flagged.
- chinathrow 11y agoWhy did this item get burried?
- Reason077 11y ago<conspiracy>YCombinator is an investor in AirBNB and doesn't like to see negative stories about them</conspiracy>
- tptacek 11y agoNobody who knows dang or follows his comments would think this is true.
- dang 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094289
- luciferous 11y agoThis item was on the front page just a minute ago with 11 points. It grew to 134 but is now all the way on the fourth page. Something is suspicious.
- dang 11y agoNo admin touched this post. It dropped in rank because of user flags and the flamewar detector, which is algorithmic and treats all posts the same way. HN admins don't penalize posts for being anti-YC or anti-YC-startup.
- luciferous 11y agoOk, that's a possible reason. But shouldn't there be some amount of human intervention for false positives? There wasn't a flamewar brewing in this thread.
- dang 11y ago'Flamewar detector' is a catchy name that stuck, but it isn't only about flamewars. It's about damping, on HN, the kind of low-quality, unsubstantive discussions that swell up quickly and would otherwise flood this site the way they do most of the internet. Indignation is a common driver of these. Look at the top comment in this thread, beginning "What a shitty", or the one that, with admirable forthrightness, says "Reading that article makes me furious". Such discussions do often lead to flamewar-like behavior (e.g. the argument about the definition of 'community'), so "flamewar detector" isn't exactly wrong, either. We do look several times a day at the stories that are penalized by this software, because sometimes there are genuine false positives that need rescuing. I wouldn't say that this article and thread rise to that level, though.
- chinathrow 11y agoAppreciate your feedback on why it get burried. A little meta, that an algo said to flag the thread down while the airbnb host in the linked article likely got flagged down by an alogrithm.
- shashwat986 11y agoSo, what's the situation now? Has AirBnB contacted the author? There seems to be no update yet on the blog that I can see.