23 ms·

Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from AirBnB

632 points by ancarda 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
stratosmacker 8y ago
The last point in the article hits the nail on the head; power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad, but it's that there are quickly becoming no alternatives.
- close04 8y ago
  At some point they will be regulated like utilities. Which they might as well be in the future. In the meantime imagine your electricity provider cutting your power because you gave a bad Yelp review to one of the people individually producing solar power and distributing it through the provider's grid. Or some other similar scenario.
  - beamatronic 8y ago
    It seems like this has some overlap with the recent Supreme Court bakery decision. Do you have a right to get a cake baked? To stay in a hotel? To get electrical service?
    - vccc 8y ago
      The bakery wasn't a monopoly. On the contrary, it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. Also, the court decision was quite vague, tailored to a specific case and left future rulings open.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - FireBeyond 8y ago
        > The bakery wasn't a monopoly. On the contrary, it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. Citation? This is the first I've heard of this. Certainly, of course, there were multiple bakeries in the area, but I've never heard that the bakery was specifically chosen because they knew that it would reject the order, and they'd go to court over it. That's not described in any of the court filings or news articles I've seen.
      - wool_gather 8y ago
        > it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. According to the Denver Post, it was recommended to the couple by the person planning their reception: https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/04/charlie-craig-david-mullins-whats-next/ https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/04/charlie-craig-david-mu...
        timr 8y ago
        FTA: “The only reason that we chose Masterpiece Cakeshop was it was in close proximity to our reception restaurant,” Craig said. “The person helping us plan that had used them in the past.”
    - darpa_escapee 8y ago
      Supreme Court didn't make a decision on whether or not it's legal to refuse service.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    I don't see any clear path for Big Tech to be regulated like utilities. Certainly not in the US. The internet itself is still not even close to being regulated as a utility, decades after it became indispensable for our lives. So Google or Amazon? How would that even work? This is a tough problem, and I don't think it's going to be solved so easily.
    - close04 8y ago
      I think the path is there, we just don't really know how long it takes to get to that point. I gave electricity as an example because at some point is was also just a service provided by a private company to people who had alternatives. So it's perfectly conceivable that in 10-20-50 years such services will be considered utilities. Electric, gas, water, sewage, trash, these all became utilities. The internet itself might also become one. Or some of the services relying on the internet like mail, shopping, accommodation, etc. I expect it will take a while though.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      You’d only need California to do it, due to their economy size and influence. Disclaimer: I am an investor in an Airbnb compliance management startup
  - spraak 8y ago
    > At some point they will be regulated like utilities. Like the internet is? Oh...
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    I hope so, but given the current political climate in the US, I'm not confident.
- cabalamat 8y ago
  > power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad As power becomes more concentrated, abuse of that power gets more likely.
a2tech 8y ago
Why would you ever agree to rent a place where you need to vacate it for 4+ hours every day? The experience with AirBNB sounds all around awful, but I'm honestly baffled why you would go along with such a weird setup.
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  From my understanding Airbnb is much cheaper than alternatives . The sharing economy basically functions on that premise and ignore the local laws.
- amorphid 8y ago
  Cheap price?
  - huhtenberg 8y ago
    Low price. Price can't be cheap, because "cheap" already means "available at low price".
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      It also means "of low quality", so some disambiguation may be required.
- koolba 8y ago
  Same reason someone would be willing to rent a pod with barely enough room for a sleeping bag and shared access to a toilet across the street: price That aside banning people for external reviews is nonsense. What’s next, banning someone for speaking (literally talking) about their negative experience?
  - ibejoeb 8y ago
    Isn't "banning" the user in this case simply declining to provide the service? If I were a house painter and, for whatever arbitrary reason, I decide that I don't really like you, I wouldn't paint your house even if you demanded it. I have the right to not engage you. You don't have the right to compel me to engage. As much as Airbnb made this worse that it had to be, I think the flip-side is much worse. Imagine if by some authority one individual was compelled to buy a good from or perform a service for another individual.
throwaway0718 8y ago
Since the Charlottesville incident, when AirBnB permanently banned an unspecified list of people they identified as Nazis, I've always taken a closer look at ToS and AUP for various cloud services, many of which claim they will permanently and immediately ban you for transmitting or storing things that are "offensive", with no further explanation given. Bans like this are yet another transparent exercise of platforms' power. Where does it stop? Amazon clearly has the technological ability to ban you from Whole Foods if you returned too many items on their website or wrote some bad things about them online; I'm just waiting for the first Medium post about it. Can the phone company ban your number if they don't like who you're talking to? Hell, even my apartment lease lets them terminate it if I "engage in criminal activity", not requiring "criminal charges, arrest, or conviction", but by a "preponderance of the evidence in our judgment".
- kangnkodos 8y ago
  Amazon is currently banning people for making too many returns. https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers-who-make-too-many-returns-1526981401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers... My guess is that they have an algorithm to automatically ban people who abuse the return system. But if you are the unlucky person who gets one defective item after another and returns them, then Amazon bans your account. You are not allowed to buy anything else on Amazon's web site, ever. And it is difficult or impossible to speak to a human to resolve the situation.
- dolguldur 8y ago
  Wow, that's insane. I wonder if that rental contract is even legal.
calyth2018 8y ago
Author learns a lesson as to why we regulated the hospitality industry. Turns out rules are kinda necessary.
- jstanley 8y ago
  Do hotels have a regulation that says they're not allowed to ban customers? Or are you just taking the opportunity to get on your soapbox to complain about AirBnB?
  - shoguning 8y ago
    https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a
    - briandear 8y ago
      The linked law doesn’t apply to this situation. The banned person apparently wasn’t banned due to being a member of a protected class.
      - shoguning 8y ago
        Fair point. I think the idea is that there is a due process, and legal recourse if your rights were infringed. The existence of these laws would make public accommodations at least think twice before denying service. AirBnB is apparently avoiding these laws by putting forced arbitration into its terms of service. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/02/racial-discrimination-suit-against-airbnb-should-be-settled-by-private-arbitration-says-federal-judge/#55c7f8a414b7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/02/racial-...
  - siegecraft 8y ago
    Yes, if you're interested you can look up hospitality law or innkeeper law. Airbnb and others attempt to replicate existing services while sidestepping the regulations in place, which of course makes them cheaper / faster because they don't have to deal with the regulatory burden..
subway 8y ago
Gross behavior on the part of AirBNB. I'm half tempted to post a "ban-me" review of AirBNB's HQ to Google and friends.
orbitingpluto 8y ago
The Black Mirror third* season social media hellscape episode starring Bryce Howard Dallas seems a more apt reference than the Jon Hamm as sexual deviant episode. The smallest breaches of protocol snowballed into her becoming a persona non grata all while trying to please a system that doesn't actually care.
- marksomnian 8y ago
  Season 3, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive [spoilers]
  - orbitingpluto 8y ago
    I stand corrected.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim.
- atomical 8y ago
  I'm sure this isn't the only person affected by this "mistake."
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim. The company should better be shamed into dropping the Kafkaesque policy in their terms of service completely. Anything below means that such terms are actually acceptable.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    Of course. Personally it's the first time I've heard they're using that kind of language. I'm wondering if this is even legal in Europe.
decasia 8y ago
I have no particular opinion about the facts of the specific case in question. But there is something weird about the way customer service is set up these days: 1) Company: Doesn't like dealing with problem users/clients. 2) Company institutes policy saying that they can do whatever they want with no explanation. This makes it more efficient to handle the problem users. 3) Sanctioned users are now more frustrated than before because they aren't even given any explanation of what happened. 4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention). 5) Company: Is happy because there is still an informal workaround for dealing with sufficiently motivated users or weird cases. 6) Users: Are left more powerless and potentially frustrated than when they had more sane tech support channels, but the company doesn't have to care about this. This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target. [edit: formatting, wording.]
- nugget 8y ago
  Imagine a world in which Experian or Equifax would only fix a mistake on your credit report if you had enough followers to embarrass them on social media. This is where appropriate consumer protection laws come into play. The whole idea feels intuitively like a silly overreach to me since I watched Twitter, Airbnb, and these other services grow from nothing and so I take them less seriously, whereas banks and credit bureaus have existed as giants since I was born. On the other hand, one could imagine GDPR adding a rule that users must be provided with a detailed explanation and an appeals process before accounts can be deleted, and it wouldn't seem too burdensome when compared with the rest of the regulation.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    To be fair that actually might be an improvement for those two companies.
  - FussyZeus 8y ago
    People seem to be naturally anti-regulation, failing to see that those regulations don't exist purely upon the whims of bureaucrats, but chiefly to address previous issues brought to the regulator's attention. Sometime in the last century, this idea was implanted by big businesses in the media and therefore the thoughts of the citizenry that regulation is more than anything, just people who couldn't succeed in business bullying people who are, and that shit is so fucking dangerous that it makes me shake. Amazon, AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, none of these companies give a FUCK about you any further than they are legally required to, not one iota further, and we constantly bemoan our politicians over having a "too regulated" business environment.
sdf43543t345 8y ago
How is "we are not obligated to provide an explanation" a valid reason? Of course they need to state why you were banned? Dystopian nonsense. Stop using AirBnB.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  The potential downsides are huge legal costs and the upsides are almost none, so any business is wise to keep their mouth shut unless through lawyers. Same reason why you don't comment on people you don't hire.
  - LarryPage 8y ago
    The same can be said for starting a business in the first place. A business is "wise" to keep its humanity and treat other people with respect.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    And we as consumers care about that why? It's not my concern that providing an actual answer might get them in trouble.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      It's not, I'm just stating why I believe businesses don't always explain their actions.
atomical 8y ago
Airbnb isn't on your side as a guest. That's the reality. I had a situation where the owner was lying in his listing and the person maintaining the house told me Airbnb had warned him, but hadn't followed up to make sure he was in compliance. Imagine driving 2,000 miles only to learn that Airbnb knew about many serious issues plaguing a listing.
- xeetuur 8y ago
  Your story is not unique, sadly. I flew all the way to Hong Kong just to find my Airbnb was full of bed bugs, then had to fight them for 2 weeks to get a (partial) refund. https://www.airbnbhell.com https://www.airbnbhell.com
beamatronic 8y ago
If the situation were reversed, how would you handle it? You run a service that connects two parties, something happens, and there is a dispute. Do you ban one of the parties, or both, or neither? Do you force them to go to arbitration? Does this scale? How much time, energy, and capital is appropriate to expend on this situation?
- dman 8y ago
  Reserve an appropriate amount of profits to make things right for the transactions that do not go as expected. How much to reserve needs to be determined on an ongoing basis based on the split of good / bad transactions. I think AirBnb needs to bite the bullet and do their own insurance or find an insurance company that will give users the same kind of experience that AirBnb gives to its clients.
- nieksand 8y ago
  I would never ban people without telling them why they were banned. That's just moronic. I'd offer banned user contact information that goes directly to a human being which can be used to appeal if the user believes they did not violate said terms and conditions. I'm neutral about how a company handles matters after the appeal--whether it focuses on protecting buyers over sellers. It's totally fine for the decision to be final after said appeal, but the company response had better show that the rep actually bothered to read the appeal message. This doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Your customer service cost scales proportional to number of customers / revenue, which is reasonable. In terms of justifying capital spend... how much are you spending on marketing? Each customer you screw over is canceling a mountain of your outreach efforts via negative NPS.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Customer service costs only scale if the customer is spending enough at your business to offset it. Many people probably don't spend enough to offset this and make more sense to drop as customers than to keep maintaining. And when there are only a handful of sellers in the market anyway, what difference does it make if they have a negative experience to share.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
Not a lawyer here, but wouldn't the author have a case for a libel suit? Especially if he can prove that the host made false statements.
- alexc05 8y ago
  But what are the damages? The calculable damages are likely the cost differences between Airbnb and hotel for the proportion of time you spend in travel. So maybe a few hundred to a few thousand over a few years? I’d think the cost of the lawsuit would really dwarf the value of the lie. Are Airbnb accounts tied to anything truly identifiable or can you make a new account with a new email & different credit card? (I’ve never signed up for Airbnb so don’t know how rigorous they are)
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure most services don't check for duplicate credit cards, both from experience and also it seems like it would leak information to tell someone that some card number is currently in use by that service
  - matte_black 8y ago
    If you win the lawsuit you could force them to pay your legal fees. Even if you don’t make profit, you wound them financially.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
      legal fees are rarely given in court. most of the time, it's because someone sued you and they were being assholes and the judge didn't like it.
cabalamat 8y ago
> is this all part of an ongoing trend, toward something like the Chinese Social Credit Score system, where the consequences of not maintaining a high rating are socially crippling? Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to follow. I expect that Airbnb, Facebook, Google et al will find it highly profitable to maintain and monetise lists of how credit-worthy / reliable / conscientious / conformist people are. Their neural nets' verdict on you will be both opaque and unchallengable. > We’re becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of major tech giants to get through our basic daily routine. Imagine waking up one day and no longer being able to check your Gmail, buy things on Amazon, or book an Uber. Quite. Do anything the new corporate oligarchies don't like, and you're an unperson.
- exolymph 8y ago
  > Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to follow. It's not like "don't talk about what really happened at Tiananmen Square" (or an equivalent message) is explicitly taught.
avaku 8y ago
We recently rented a house at Niagara Falls, which looked nice in pictures, although a few people in reviews mentioned it's kind of old. When we arrived, the shower wasn't working. An hour later police showed up, as someone reported property break in. The following day, in the morning the electric company showed up and turned off electricity, at the request of the previous property manager, who was recently fired, and decided to have a revenge. Finally, when we came back after a day at the falls, there were police notices on the house stating that it's illegal for anyone to occupy the property, as it was being used as illegal vacation rental. We got our stuff and got out to a nearby hotel, which luckily had prices on last minute discount... When I though about raising a complaint with AirBnB for a refund, I've imagined exactly the same situation as happened to the author here. I've also though about all the time I would need to waste to provide the evidence to the AirBnB... In light of this, we settled for an owner's offer to refund us privately over PayPal (including AirBnB fees) in exchange for not leaving a negative feedback. Take whatever you want out of this, but the reason we settled (and didn't provide feedback which could be useful to other people) is precisely because we knew how it is to fight with the giants. Been recently fighting for a compensation from BA for 24 hour delay, and it's seriously not worth the time I had to spend on getting these 600 euro, as the number of hours spent times my salary is higher.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  Yeah, this is a major problem. I can't ever issue a chargeback on an Amazon charge, as doing so would risk thousands of dollars of Kindle books as well as some fairly important stuff in AWS. (And no, a separate AWS account doesn't help. If they can link them both to you, they'll take action against both.)
  - gruez 8y ago
    >as doing so would risk thousands of dollars of Kindle books OT: this is exactly the reason why DRM/"licensed content" only harms legitimate users.
  - ballenf 8y ago
    I had fraudulent Amazon charges once and worked through their support. According to Amazon, someone had added my card to their account and bought stuff. They had already identified the fraud before I called, but hadn't bothered to let me know or initiate a refund (!?). Their final advice was to initiate a chargeback on the Visa card with my bank (this wasn't an Amazon card) and they wouldn't challenge the chargeback. I confirmed 3 times with Amazon support whether this would be counted against me in any way. They assured me, no, it wouldn't. I don't believe them but did the chargeback anyway. So far, so good, but I'm super hesitant to do returns with Amazon anymore. These giants are really doing a good job training their customers to bend over.
hsnewman 8y ago
Perhaps the moral to the story is to create a dummy account on Google to leave negative feedback, so Airbnb can't link it to your account?
reaperducer 8y ago
This sort of thing is why I don't use Airbnb, or similar services. If I want a professional hotel experience, I stay at a hotel. If I wanted a less predictable experience from people playing at running a hotel, I'd stay at one of these amateur hotels. To be sure, there are excellent hotel-grade Airbnb places. But just like there are excellent Uber/Lyft drivers, there are others who are simply cosplaying taxi driver. It's the nature of the "gig economy." And why I avoid it.
- meowface 8y ago
  Not everyone can have that luxury. I've stayed in a dozen or so Airbnbs in the past few years, from low to high end, and didn't have a single bad experience. It's always a lot less expensive than hotels in the same area, and in many cases a higher quality building and room than nearby hotels. Just no room service. There's honestly not much that can go wrong with an Airbnb experience as a guest, unless you're doing some weird spa cycle arrangement like the person in this story did, are gambling on a first-time host, or have some bizarre fluke. If they lie about any of the amenities or anything else in the listing it's simple to bring it up with Airbnb. I've reached the point where I can't find a single reason to actually stay in a hotel anymore, no matter where I'm traveling (internationally or in the US).
  - dorian-graph 8y ago
    Luxury? I travel _a lot_ (been to 45+ countries and travel every couple of weeks for fun) and more often then not, AirBnbs cost more. A lot of my friends travel just as much, if not more, than I do, and we've all slowly moved away from AirBnbs as much as possible. ftr we don't mind AirBnb, and I've had good experiences with them. Also, we're not luxurious travellers, but we do so as cheaply as we can manage. The main reasons (cost aside) are unresponsive hosts, late hosts, and incorrect details. I've never had any 'weird' arrangements either, just normal stays. Hell, people's experiences like this person's are reason enough.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    It's always a lot less expensive than hotels in the same area, and in many cases a higher quality building and room than nearby hotels. Just no room service. That's interesting. Every now and again I'll look at Airbnb, just to see if it's changed much; especially if I'm trying to stay in an area with few choices. Often all I see are spare bedrooms or studio apartments that people are putting online for more than the nearby hotels charge. I even remember seeing listings for couches, not even entire rooms. But I don't remember if that was Airbnb, or another service. But room service, for me, is often a requirement. I'll pay extra for room service because with the way my business trips are scheduled, it's a necessity. Bonus points if it's available 24 hours.
foobandit 8y ago
This seems pretty clear. He had a bad experience but didn't leave a review for the place, and then when the review period expired, he saw that the place had left a bad review for him. Airbnb keeps both users blind to each other's reviews until the review period has expired, because otherwise people will use the threat of leaving a bad review (as retribution) in order to ensure they get reviewed well. But he did an end-run around this and posted reviews on multiple other sites, which makes airbnb's system break down. It sounds like Airbnb just needs a way for people to respond to reviews that are left for them. I'm surprised it doesn't have that already.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  It does... You have 14 days to leave a public response to any review on your profile.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Airbnb has "public" and "private" reviews. "Public reviews" are shown everywhere, "private" is just messaged directly to the host only. You need to write a "public review" to do a "private one" to my knowledge, last time I used it. Whenever I had a bad host relationship, I decided not to pursue it further and leave no review at all. It feels weird that there is no recourse action because you don't know if your host will recripcate posting a good review, a honest terrible review, a fake bad review, or none at all. Your host might know your experience was bad and doesn't know either if you will post what he will post. Airbnb reviews feels like the prisons dileama game theory problem.
coleifer 8y ago
The host complaining that the guest was entitled to a room they had paid for is unbelievably ironic. I guess the irony was lost on Airbnb.
sjclemmy 8y ago
Very Kafkaesque. It’s completely unacceptable to remove a service without explanation.
jrrrr 8y ago
> Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account. Do you really want to behave as badly as legally permitted? That's kind of a low bar.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
I wrote a comment earlier this week about a Google user being locked out of Google. I expanded it into a story, peppering it with less than flattering stories about Google. https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out I haven't read any Kafka, but I'm probably a fan already.
- bonyt 8y ago
  I find myself using the word “kafkaesque” a lot more lately.
- teh_klev 8y ago
  Please don't take this the wrong way, but you might want to reconsider your choice of colours on your bloggy. I found that blueish text on a blue background quite hard to read.
superkuh 8y ago
Sounds like the perfect time to stop using AirBnB. You are not required to do so and they are not required to serve you. I don't see a problem other than you being upset by their rudeness. I only first used AirBnB 2 weeks ago. There's a single one in my town. I've never seen an uber. I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density areas.
- mtarnovan 8y ago
  > I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density areas. Most people live in high population density areas. The USA is 80% urbanized.
dandare 8y ago
They rebranded to Airbnb some time ago, just saying.
mattnewton 8y ago
The whole no-reasons-or-explanation thing particularly looks really bad, as we are free to speculate the worst possible petty reasons for lifetime bans. I can’t imagine the logic behind that - is it some kind of legal liability issue? Really sours me on the brand.
- princekolt 8y ago
  > I can’t imagine the logic behind that Lazy tech companies want to automate everything.
xeetuur 8y ago
I'll just leave this here: https://www.airbnbhell.com https://www.airbnbhell.com Coming from a guest perspective where I've had things go wrong during my stays, Airbnb has been absolutely horrible to deal with. It's literally gambling with your vacation, because if anything goes wrong you can count on Airbnb to take your money and run. Why do we give so much money to what is essentially a middleman that provides almost nothing of value?
cryptonector 8y ago
A few simple regulations would help a lot. First of all, arbitration and civil court access for challenging bans and such. Second, require specific explanations. Third, require content-neutral social media / common carrier policies.
LarryPage 8y ago
I don't know exactly why, but the indignity of this story really gets to me. Does having a desk at a big tech company really strip your humanity to the point where you're OK sending messages like these to another person? How do you treat other human beings with so little respect?
codezero 8y ago
I too was banned for life from AirBnB – I don't really blame them, given the information available, it was fair for them to side with the host, who was their long term customer over myself who was a new user. The apartment I was in had a gas leak while I was gone, the door got kicked in by the fire department and the gas was shut off. The replacement cost $1300+ – and I was out of a room for two nights. I refused to pay the fee for the door – that seems like something insurance should cover. I was not in the room when the gas was on, but I guess there's an off chance I bumped the stove and flipped it on – seems like that should not be possible, but I don't know.
dolguldur 8y ago
I also had an incident where they sided with the host and refused me a refund. That was quite a surprise and the way they handled it had a strong taste of they decide by numbers and then it's a brick wall and they'll just coat it for you but the decision is incontestable. Now I'm weighing the risk and uncertainty and oftentimes it's just not worth it and I'll rather go for a hotel.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Do a cc chargeback if you think you have a real case
billylindeman 8y ago
I got lifebanned from getaround because my ex girlfriend smoked in a car we rented. The penalty in the terms of service was a $250 cleaning fee (which I got charged) but no where did it say you'd be banned (and iirc it _still_ does not say that). I appealed it twice and both times they upheld the ban.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  Good. What a shitty thing to do.
iuguy 8y ago
Benjamin Mako Hill has some really interesting things to say about how AirBnB displaced couchsurfing[1]. We could've had a world where people can stay anywhere in the world for free. Instead we let a bunch of VC-funded bros convince us that adding a gatekeeper to the short term rental market was a good idea. We all need to think carefully about the consequences of our actions online, from building such applications to using them. I refuse to use AirBnB after being stuck out in the middle of nowhere and basically told to go whistle. I'm not the only person where the bad experience has been a result of AirBnB's handling of the situation, but it was us as users that enabled AirBnB to get into it's partial monopoly situation by evangelising so much for it in the early days./ [1] - http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production-libreplanet_keynote-20180326-EDITED-v3.webm#t=199 http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production-libreplane...
- reverend_gonzo 8y ago
  Couchsurfing and AirBnb are not even remotely the same. Hosting on Couchsurfing is a way to meet other travelers and show them around your city, and most importantly, you don't get paid. Hosting on AirBnb is a business. AirBnb is far closer to HomeAway and VRBO. These existed before too, but their usability was terrible and they were prone to scams.
  - joveian 8y ago
    The people running couchsurfing killed it themselves by changing from a non-profit to a VC funded for-profit business after accepting huge amounts of volunteer effort. But yeah, they aren't really the same thing. There is some overlap since it could be difficult to cover every day that you wanted to visit (and there isn't always enough hostel beds available, which are closer to the same idea), but for anyone who really preferred AirBnB it was better for everyone that they not be on couchsurfing.
  - archagon 8y ago
    I like AirBnb because I have to pay, even when I'm sharing the house with other people. I don't want to feel obliged to entertain my host, which IMO is the implicit tradeoff when you're staying somewhere for free.
lechiffre10 8y ago
I've continually voiced my discontent with the way Airbnb treats guests vs hosts. Guests are completely disposable and I even had a personal experience I wrote about on medium as well for a long-term stay. Airbnb is the company that is going the way of too big to fail. As more and more customers complain cities will eventually be forced to regulate and potentially kill this company. It's quite ironic that Brian Chesky,the CEO, tweeted end of June about how wrong the travel ban is in America ( a ban that fails to provide clarity as to why some of the countries are on it) and yet Airbnb feels they are allowed to ban a user without providing any clarity as well.
jancsika 8y ago
> After booking the weekend, we were told that we’d need to vacate the premises from 12–4pm because the room was located in a spa retreat. After booking they told you that? IMO either do the sane thing and cancel or get into whatever horrible interaction you describe in the rest of the blog.
temp987656789 8y ago
Airbnb prioritizes hosts - even violent ones - because that's the bottleneck. We had a scary experience where Airbnb allowed a VERY aggressive host with a documented history of violence to continue. The listing is still active today. I wrote them a long letter with facts which began: > I am sending this to make clear in writing that this listing is extremely unsafe for travelers. > We were harassed, feared for our safety, and left early as a result of drunk management on the property. We filed charges with the Maui Police Department for harassment, and we have since learned that the host John [redacted] is a convicted felon who has had the police out for harassment, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest before and has been ordered by the courts to "obtain and maintain mental health treatment or services, including anger management treatment or services, [or] domestic violence intervention". > He has been in and out of court since at least 2004 and was most recently arrested on [redacted] 2014, barely a week before we arrived. I believe that the situation on this property is extremely unsafe and I cannot keep silent in good conscience, even though the host has threatened me and my family. I detailed the event further for a page or so, and sent Airbnb all the prior police reports. The host was even using a fake wife alias to run the listing. Airbnb's response was to refund us our money in full, but they never pulled the host, nor did they publish our negative review of the location. The only action seems to be that they required him to use his own profile instead of the fake wife's profile. So it's much more than just prioritizing hosts over guests financially, Airbnb also prioritizes keeping a profitable host more than keeping guests safe.
- teachrdan 8y ago
  Name and shame! Is there a site for posting bad experiences with Airbnb hosts, complete with their name and listing address?
  - Stasis5001 8y ago
    I think you may be missing the point -- the one being named and maybe shamed in this post is actually Airbnb.
    - fullshark 8y ago
tmaly 8y ago
It is scary to try to predict what the state of things will be in 10 or 20 years. Are we going to be like the society in the sci-fy series Continuum where corporations literally control everything? Maybe a rating of customer service for online services would be appropriate.
dqpb 8y ago
Looks like the US is creating a social credit system - it's just a distributed one.
mr_spothawk 8y ago
To me, the AirBNB product looks ripe for crypto-disruption.
_bxg1 8y ago
The same story keeps playing out: - A new "marketplace" platform takes off with a idealistic free-market approach. It's different enough from previous companies in the space that it doesn't get regulated, and it denies having any social obligation or responsibility. - As more and more customers and - primarily - vendors come to depend on it, its hands-off approach becomes one of arbitration, and its relationship with both groups becomes exploitative. - We get to start over at square one, re-learning the difficult lessons about consumer and employee protection that we've spent the last century developing. This is going to keep happening until the government gets more agile at regulating nebulous and category-breaking companies. Uber, YouTube, Facebook (with news companies as the vendors), Twitch, AirBnB, etc. Companies that invent new business models and break with preconceptions aren't inherently bad - that's potentially a great thing - but it becomes bad when regulatory laws can't keep up.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pnutjam 8y ago
Ebay did something similar to me,account banned with no reason given. I was selling some old Alix computers and I believe the ban was because I put something in the listing about using them for vpn's to hide or change your location.
hoopism 8y ago
I had a disupute with AirBnB long time ago (You can find it in my history because I posted about it here). They had a "sign up a friend" promotion and I liked the service so much that I recommended it to my parents. They used it and liked it too... but I didn't get my promotional credit. When I emailed them they were adamant the conditions were not met. They then changed the terms in the email to something new... luckily their own website was still active and represented EXACTLY what I had originally stated. I finally got a very patronizing email from support. Won't use AirBnB again. Plenty of other services.
teachrdan 8y ago
A story about Airbnb, bedbugs and a lack of accountability: My now-wife and I used Airbnb in Berlin and the mattress in our otherwise clean apartment was badly infested with bedbugs. I took a video (see below) and posted it to YouTube so that Airbnb would have the evidence needed to make what I assumed would be a quick decision in our favor. Instead, they were completely unhelpful. I was an American traveling in Europe so I didn't have a phone number where I could be reached, which they insisted was the only way they could communicate with me about the issue in real time. They demanded photos of the bedbugs, which I didn't take, because I assumed the video would be more helpful and my wife and I got out of the apartment as quickly as possible. (after frantically checking to make sure our clothes and luggage were bedbug-free) Finally, they took the host's word that there were no bedbugs, besides the obvious conflict of interest on his part to not report the visible bugs and blood stains on his mattress. (below a clean topsheet!) After much complaining on social media and repeated Skype calls from WiFi hotspots they finally agreed to cancel our remaining few nights and pay for a hotel for us instead. This might sound generous, but it came after losing a night to bedbugs and the better part of a day to dealing with their terrible customer service--one full day lost out of a 7 day trip. Like many of the complaints people are describing ITT, the problems that arise with Airbnb can happen in any hotel, too. The difference is that a hotel can quickly make you whole by giving you a new room or, if need be, putting you up in another location across town. With platforms like Airbnb it's simply too easy for them to ignore you and your pesky complaints or, in the case of OP, ban you from their platform forever. While I'm reluctant to call for more regulation, it's hard to see what else could make them treat you fairly, as a customer and a human being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s
pwaai 8y ago
so I took AirBNB for the first time and I was shocked how little vetting process there is. One particular place I had was awful....towels with dried blood spots, pubic hair on blanket....
merinowool 8y ago
It is not mandatory to use such companies and laws already exist in case company has done trouble. Not sure what needs to be regulated here. Company should have freedom to choose who it does business with. If you don't like it you can start your own AirBNB.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  This is a terrible attitude. Deciding that companies should have free reign to do whatever has had disastrous consequences in the past, and today would be no different.
chrischen 8y ago
The bulk of airbnb’s value and valuation comes from enabling people to run illegal or subpar hotels. I travel frequently and occassionally use Airbnb. Only in one instance was my host actually just renting out a spare room. All other occassions it was clearly a business operation turning residential units into hotel rooms.
cool-RR 8y ago
"It all feels very 1984. Or Black Mirror." Really? A private company deciding not to do business with you feels like your basic human rights were taken away? "After emailing AirBnB support and its founders multiple times, I’ve finally given up." I've had a problem in Windows on my computer the other day and emailed Bill Gates, could you believe he had other things to do except respond to my problem?
csomar 8y ago
AirBnB is a shitty company. 1. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels. I've been to 20 cities and I have yet to find an apartment that is cheaper than an equivalent Booking.com. 2. This probably works, however, because it is cheaper to book the same apartment for 3-4 people instead of being a single traveler. 3. This makes the target customers of Airbnb problematic guests (imagine having 3-4 new guests to the apartment everyday). Probably why neighbors are complaining about Airbnb. 4. The prices displayed are way distorted. It is way worse than booking.com. The price on the search function is like half of what you'll actually pay. 5. Pretty much every property is 5 star rated. Pretty much every guest is a nice guest. Really? This cannot possibly be the truth and probably mean that the rating system means crap.
- atombender 8y ago
  > 1. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels. Why wouldn't they be? It's a different product. I like being able to prepare and eat my own food in a full kitchen. I like washing my own clothes and tidying my own bed. An apartment typically has much more space than the equivalent hotel room, with multiple rooms to stay in. I also don't need to interact with any staff, or see much of tourists (nor do I need to be in a crowded downtown area). For me, these are all benefits.
  - Markoff 8y ago
    almost all of those requirements can be met by staying in hoStel
    - atombender 8y ago
      Hostels are generally dormitories where you share minimal bunk-bed rooms with strangers. I've never seen a hostel with its own kitchen, let alone its own bedroom.
      - kaybe 8y ago
        About any good hostel I've seen had a decent community kitchen. Some of them habe private rooms, sometimes even with private bathrooms.
stefek99 8y ago
Banned for life. Sounds familiar: https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverything-9-years-on-twitter-with-no-right-to-appeal https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverythin... Not enough crypto-currency scams. Notified Twitter about one with verified-fucking-account. Instant, irreversible ban, no right to appeal. WOW
qume 8y ago
Similar experience here. After years of evangelizing airbnb I got shit on by them by some low level employee with no way to continue communication, even though their misunderstanding could be explained in a single sentence. Apparently after years of driving customers to their platform, I'm not even worthy of being able to send a note to second line service, or even a single response to first level service after he closed the issue. It will be an interesting calculation to sum up the net benefit my efforts have provided to airbnb vs the damage that will occur due to my now committed lifetime of the opposite. All they needed was an appeal button, everything would have been resolved in minutes. But hey, lets fuck the people we built the business on.
smsm42 8y ago
It's pretty easy to live without AirBnB. While outrageous and rude on general ground, AirBnB behavior here is not too harmful. But what if another company like Google just blacklists you? That could be a lot more trouble, especially if you have Google mail, use Google identity to log in to other sites, etc. And what if it's some cloud company that just blocks you from your data, backups, digital assets, private keys, etc.? Modern tech provides a lot of nice opportunities, but if you stop to think about it it's scary how fragile it is and how much a lone keypress of somebody (alive or even bot) inside the guts of a major company can have impact on your life...
Yizahi 8y ago
So very Google'ish, ban a person for life with zero liability. FUCK. THIS. SHIT. Period.
ap3 8y ago
Instead of a ban why not let the rating amd comment system do the work? Rude hosts and guests will get nicked and after a while a pattern will emerge
grb423 8y ago
All similar statements about accepting “everyone” obviously does not include those with hurtful opinions. Not saying that’s the case with this OP just pointing what “everyone” means now.
ggm 8y ago
I dislike AirBnB on many levels, second-most to Uber: Its a mechanism which marginalizes tenants and maximises profits in property rental to the detriment of neighbours and people just trying to find homes. But this story, of being excluded by the parent company, for un-reversable, un-appealable reasons "because you signed a contract and we don't have to" really is the icing on the cake. The extent of "yea, if google want to make you rue the day" comments also rings true to me. I'm concerned about my exposure of risk:consequence here, not because I think I have done anything to warrant it, but because successfully reversing arbitrary acts in these situations is so fraught. Basically, its a guilty-until-possibly-accepted-but-not-acknowledged-as-innocent-and-no-recompense world.
Scea91 8y ago
I always wanted to try Airbnb, but everytime I searched for accomodation it didn't seem to offer better deals than I could find on booking.com or elsewhere.

632 points by ancarda 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

The last point in the article hits the nail on the head; power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad, but it's that there are quickly becoming no alternatives.

close04 8y ago
At some point they will be regulated like utilities. Which they might as well be in the future. In the meantime imagine your electricity provider cutting your power because you gave a bad Yelp review to one of the people individually producing solar power and distributing it through the provider's grid. Or some other similar scenario.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  It seems like this has some overlap with the recent Supreme Court bakery decision. Do you have a right to get a cake baked? To stay in a hotel? To get electrical service?
  - vccc 8y ago
    The bakery wasn't a monopoly. On the contrary, it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. Also, the court decision was quite vague, tailored to a specific case and left future rulings open.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      > The bakery wasn't a monopoly. On the contrary, it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. Citation? This is the first I've heard of this. Certainly, of course, there were multiple bakeries in the area, but I've never heard that the bakery was specifically chosen because they knew that it would reject the order, and they'd go to court over it. That's not described in any of the court filings or news articles I've seen.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      > it was specifically sought out among many bakeries to make a point. According to the Denver Post, it was recommended to the couple by the person planning their reception: https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/04/charlie-craig-david-mullins-whats-next/ https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/04/charlie-craig-david-mu...
      - timr 8y ago
        FTA: “The only reason that we chose Masterpiece Cakeshop was it was in close proximity to our reception restaurant,” Craig said. “The person helping us plan that had used them in the past.”
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    Supreme Court didn't make a decision on whether or not it's legal to refuse service.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  I don't see any clear path for Big Tech to be regulated like utilities. Certainly not in the US. The internet itself is still not even close to being regulated as a utility, decades after it became indispensable for our lives. So Google or Amazon? How would that even work? This is a tough problem, and I don't think it's going to be solved so easily.
  - close04 8y ago
    I think the path is there, we just don't really know how long it takes to get to that point. I gave electricity as an example because at some point is was also just a service provided by a private company to people who had alternatives. So it's perfectly conceivable that in 10-20-50 years such services will be considered utilities. Electric, gas, water, sewage, trash, these all became utilities. The internet itself might also become one. Or some of the services relying on the internet like mail, shopping, accommodation, etc. I expect it will take a while though.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    You’d only need California to do it, due to their economy size and influence. Disclaimer: I am an investor in an Airbnb compliance management startup
- spraak 8y ago
  > At some point they will be regulated like utilities. Like the internet is? Oh...
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I hope so, but given the current political climate in the US, I'm not confident.
cabalamat 8y ago
> power is being centralized in these large tech giants. It's not so much that they are inherently bad As power becomes more concentrated, abuse of that power gets more likely.

a2tech 8y ago

Why would you ever agree to rent a place where you need to vacate it for 4+ hours every day? The experience with AirBNB sounds all around awful, but I'm honestly baffled why you would go along with such a weird setup.

zitterbewegung 8y ago
From my understanding Airbnb is much cheaper than alternatives . The sharing economy basically functions on that premise and ignore the local laws.
amorphid 8y ago
Cheap price?
- huhtenberg 8y ago
  Low price. Price can't be cheap, because "cheap" already means "available at low price".
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    It also means "of low quality", so some disambiguation may be required.
koolba 8y ago
Same reason someone would be willing to rent a pod with barely enough room for a sleeping bag and shared access to a toilet across the street: price That aside banning people for external reviews is nonsense. What’s next, banning someone for speaking (literally talking) about their negative experience?
- ibejoeb 8y ago
  Isn't "banning" the user in this case simply declining to provide the service? If I were a house painter and, for whatever arbitrary reason, I decide that I don't really like you, I wouldn't paint your house even if you demanded it. I have the right to not engage you. You don't have the right to compel me to engage. As much as Airbnb made this worse that it had to be, I think the flip-side is much worse. Imagine if by some authority one individual was compelled to buy a good from or perform a service for another individual.

throwaway0718 8y ago

Since the Charlottesville incident, when AirBnB permanently banned an unspecified list of people they identified as Nazis, I've always taken a closer look at ToS and AUP for various cloud services, many of which claim they will permanently and immediately ban you for transmitting or storing things that are "offensive", with no further explanation given. Bans like this are yet another transparent exercise of platforms' power. Where does it stop? Amazon clearly has the technological ability to ban you from Whole Foods if you returned too many items on their website or wrote some bad things about them online; I'm just waiting for the first Medium post about it. Can the phone company ban your number if they don't like who you're talking to? Hell, even my apartment lease lets them terminate it if I "engage in criminal activity", not requiring "criminal charges, arrest, or conviction", but by a "preponderance of the evidence in our judgment".

kangnkodos 8y ago
Amazon is currently banning people for making too many returns. https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers-who-make-too-many-returns-1526981401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers... My guess is that they have an algorithm to automatically ban people who abuse the return system. But if you are the unlucky person who gets one defective item after another and returns them, then Amazon bans your account. You are not allowed to buy anything else on Amazon's web site, ever. And it is difficult or impossible to speak to a human to resolve the situation.
dolguldur 8y ago
Wow, that's insane. I wonder if that rental contract is even legal.

calyth2018 8y ago

Author learns a lesson as to why we regulated the hospitality industry. Turns out rules are kinda necessary.

jstanley 8y ago
Do hotels have a regulation that says they're not allowed to ban customers? Or are you just taking the opportunity to get on your soapbox to complain about AirBnB?
- shoguning 8y ago
  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a
  - briandear 8y ago
    The linked law doesn’t apply to this situation. The banned person apparently wasn’t banned due to being a member of a protected class.
    - shoguning 8y ago
      Fair point. I think the idea is that there is a due process, and legal recourse if your rights were infringed. The existence of these laws would make public accommodations at least think twice before denying service. AirBnB is apparently avoiding these laws by putting forced arbitration into its terms of service. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/02/racial-discrimination-suit-against-airbnb-should-be-settled-by-private-arbitration-says-federal-judge/#55c7f8a414b7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/02/racial-...
- siegecraft 8y ago
  Yes, if you're interested you can look up hospitality law or innkeeper law. Airbnb and others attempt to replicate existing services while sidestepping the regulations in place, which of course makes them cheaper / faster because they don't have to deal with the regulatory burden..

subway 8y ago

Gross behavior on the part of AirBNB. I'm half tempted to post a "ban-me" review of AirBNB's HQ to Google and friends.

orbitingpluto 8y ago

The Black Mirror third* season social media hellscape episode starring Bryce Howard Dallas seems a more apt reference than the Jon Hamm as sexual deviant episode. The smallest breaches of protocol snowballed into her becoming a persona non grata all while trying to please a system that doesn't actually care.

marksomnian 8y ago
Season 3, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive [spoilers]
- orbitingpluto 8y ago
  I stand corrected.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim.

atomical 8y ago
I'm sure this isn't the only person affected by this "mistake."
wolfgke 8y ago
> I'm very curious how this story develops. Usually, a tech company ending on the front page of HN for messing up is shamed into fixing the mistake, often quietly and without providing any explanation to the victim. The company should better be shamed into dropping the Kafkaesque policy in their terms of service completely. Anything below means that such terms are actually acceptable.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Of course. Personally it's the first time I've heard they're using that kind of language. I'm wondering if this is even legal in Europe.

decasia 8y ago

I have no particular opinion about the facts of the specific case in question. But there is something weird about the way customer service is set up these days: 1) Company: Doesn't like dealing with problem users/clients. 2) Company institutes policy saying that they can do whatever they want with no explanation. This makes it more efficient to handle the problem users. 3) Sanctioned users are now more frustrated than before because they aren't even given any explanation of what happened. 4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention). 5) Company: Is happy because there is still an informal workaround for dealing with sufficiently motivated users or weird cases. 6) Users: Are left more powerless and potentially frustrated than when they had more sane tech support channels, but the company doesn't have to care about this. This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target. [edit: formatting, wording.]

nugget 8y ago
Imagine a world in which Experian or Equifax would only fix a mistake on your credit report if you had enough followers to embarrass them on social media. This is where appropriate consumer protection laws come into play. The whole idea feels intuitively like a silly overreach to me since I watched Twitter, Airbnb, and these other services grow from nothing and so I take them less seriously, whereas banks and credit bureaus have existed as giants since I was born. On the other hand, one could imagine GDPR adding a rule that users must be provided with a detailed explanation and an appeals process before accounts can be deleted, and it wouldn't seem too burdensome when compared with the rest of the regulation.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  To be fair that actually might be an improvement for those two companies.
- FussyZeus 8y ago
  People seem to be naturally anti-regulation, failing to see that those regulations don't exist purely upon the whims of bureaucrats, but chiefly to address previous issues brought to the regulator's attention. Sometime in the last century, this idea was implanted by big businesses in the media and therefore the thoughts of the citizenry that regulation is more than anything, just people who couldn't succeed in business bullying people who are, and that shit is so fucking dangerous that it makes me shake. Amazon, AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, none of these companies give a FUCK about you any further than they are legally required to, not one iota further, and we constantly bemoan our politicians over having a "too regulated" business environment.

sdf43543t345 8y ago

How is "we are not obligated to provide an explanation" a valid reason? Of course they need to state why you were banned? Dystopian nonsense. Stop using AirBnB.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
The potential downsides are huge legal costs and the upsides are almost none, so any business is wise to keep their mouth shut unless through lawyers. Same reason why you don't comment on people you don't hire.
- LarryPage 8y ago
  The same can be said for starting a business in the first place. A business is "wise" to keep its humanity and treat other people with respect.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  And we as consumers care about that why? It's not my concern that providing an actual answer might get them in trouble.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    It's not, I'm just stating why I believe businesses don't always explain their actions.

atomical 8y ago

Airbnb isn't on your side as a guest. That's the reality. I had a situation where the owner was lying in his listing and the person maintaining the house told me Airbnb had warned him, but hadn't followed up to make sure he was in compliance. Imagine driving 2,000 miles only to learn that Airbnb knew about many serious issues plaguing a listing.

xeetuur 8y ago
Your story is not unique, sadly. I flew all the way to Hong Kong just to find my Airbnb was full of bed bugs, then had to fight them for 2 weeks to get a (partial) refund. https://www.airbnbhell.com https://www.airbnbhell.com

beamatronic 8y ago

If the situation were reversed, how would you handle it? You run a service that connects two parties, something happens, and there is a dispute. Do you ban one of the parties, or both, or neither? Do you force them to go to arbitration? Does this scale? How much time, energy, and capital is appropriate to expend on this situation?

dman 8y ago
Reserve an appropriate amount of profits to make things right for the transactions that do not go as expected. How much to reserve needs to be determined on an ongoing basis based on the split of good / bad transactions. I think AirBnb needs to bite the bullet and do their own insurance or find an insurance company that will give users the same kind of experience that AirBnb gives to its clients.
nieksand 8y ago
I would never ban people without telling them why they were banned. That's just moronic. I'd offer banned user contact information that goes directly to a human being which can be used to appeal if the user believes they did not violate said terms and conditions. I'm neutral about how a company handles matters after the appeal--whether it focuses on protecting buyers over sellers. It's totally fine for the decision to be final after said appeal, but the company response had better show that the rep actually bothered to read the appeal message. This doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Your customer service cost scales proportional to number of customers / revenue, which is reasonable. In terms of justifying capital spend... how much are you spending on marketing? Each customer you screw over is canceling a mountain of your outreach efforts via negative NPS.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Customer service costs only scale if the customer is spending enough at your business to offset it. Many people probably don't spend enough to offset this and make more sense to drop as customers than to keep maintaining. And when there are only a handful of sellers in the market anyway, what difference does it make if they have a negative experience to share.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago

Not a lawyer here, but wouldn't the author have a case for a libel suit? Especially if he can prove that the host made false statements.

alexc05 8y ago
But what are the damages? The calculable damages are likely the cost differences between Airbnb and hotel for the proportion of time you spend in travel. So maybe a few hundred to a few thousand over a few years? I’d think the cost of the lawsuit would really dwarf the value of the lie. Are Airbnb accounts tied to anything truly identifiable or can you make a new account with a new email & different credit card? (I’ve never signed up for Airbnb so don’t know how rigorous they are)
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure most services don't check for duplicate credit cards, both from experience and also it seems like it would leak information to tell someone that some card number is currently in use by that service
- matte_black 8y ago
  If you win the lawsuit you could force them to pay your legal fees. Even if you don’t make profit, you wound them financially.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    legal fees are rarely given in court. most of the time, it's because someone sued you and they were being assholes and the judge didn't like it.

cabalamat 8y ago

> is this all part of an ongoing trend, toward something like the Chinese Social Credit Score system, where the consequences of not maintaining a high rating are socially crippling? Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to follow. I expect that Airbnb, Facebook, Google et al will find it highly profitable to maintain and monetise lists of how credit-worthy / reliable / conscientious / conformist people are. Their neural nets' verdict on you will be both opaque and unchallengable. > We’re becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of major tech giants to get through our basic daily routine. Imagine waking up one day and no longer being able to check your Gmail, buy things on Amazon, or book an Uber. Quite. Do anything the new corporate oligarchies don't like, and you're an unperson.

exolymph 8y ago
> Yes, except that at least with the Chinese social credit system you presumably know what your score is and what rules you are supposed to follow. It's not like "don't talk about what really happened at Tiananmen Square" (or an equivalent message) is explicitly taught.

avaku 8y ago

We recently rented a house at Niagara Falls, which looked nice in pictures, although a few people in reviews mentioned it's kind of old. When we arrived, the shower wasn't working. An hour later police showed up, as someone reported property break in. The following day, in the morning the electric company showed up and turned off electricity, at the request of the previous property manager, who was recently fired, and decided to have a revenge. Finally, when we came back after a day at the falls, there were police notices on the house stating that it's illegal for anyone to occupy the property, as it was being used as illegal vacation rental. We got our stuff and got out to a nearby hotel, which luckily had prices on last minute discount... When I though about raising a complaint with AirBnB for a refund, I've imagined exactly the same situation as happened to the author here. I've also though about all the time I would need to waste to provide the evidence to the AirBnB... In light of this, we settled for an owner's offer to refund us privately over PayPal (including AirBnB fees) in exchange for not leaving a negative feedback. Take whatever you want out of this, but the reason we settled (and didn't provide feedback which could be useful to other people) is precisely because we knew how it is to fight with the giants. Been recently fighting for a compensation from BA for 24 hour delay, and it's seriously not worth the time I had to spend on getting these 600 euro, as the number of hours spent times my salary is higher.

ceejayoz 8y ago
Yeah, this is a major problem. I can't ever issue a chargeback on an Amazon charge, as doing so would risk thousands of dollars of Kindle books as well as some fairly important stuff in AWS. (And no, a separate AWS account doesn't help. If they can link them both to you, they'll take action against both.)
- gruez 8y ago
  >as doing so would risk thousands of dollars of Kindle books OT: this is exactly the reason why DRM/"licensed content" only harms legitimate users.
- ballenf 8y ago
  I had fraudulent Amazon charges once and worked through their support. According to Amazon, someone had added my card to their account and bought stuff. They had already identified the fraud before I called, but hadn't bothered to let me know or initiate a refund (!?). Their final advice was to initiate a chargeback on the Visa card with my bank (this wasn't an Amazon card) and they wouldn't challenge the chargeback. I confirmed 3 times with Amazon support whether this would be counted against me in any way. They assured me, no, it wouldn't. I don't believe them but did the chargeback anyway. So far, so good, but I'm super hesitant to do returns with Amazon anymore. These giants are really doing a good job training their customers to bend over.

hsnewman 8y ago

Perhaps the moral to the story is to create a dummy account on Google to leave negative feedback, so Airbnb can't link it to your account?

reaperducer 8y ago

This sort of thing is why I don't use Airbnb, or similar services. If I want a professional hotel experience, I stay at a hotel. If I wanted a less predictable experience from people playing at running a hotel, I'd stay at one of these amateur hotels. To be sure, there are excellent hotel-grade Airbnb places. But just like there are excellent Uber/Lyft drivers, there are others who are simply cosplaying taxi driver. It's the nature of the "gig economy." And why I avoid it.

meowface 8y ago
Not everyone can have that luxury. I've stayed in a dozen or so Airbnbs in the past few years, from low to high end, and didn't have a single bad experience. It's always a lot less expensive than hotels in the same area, and in many cases a higher quality building and room than nearby hotels. Just no room service. There's honestly not much that can go wrong with an Airbnb experience as a guest, unless you're doing some weird spa cycle arrangement like the person in this story did, are gambling on a first-time host, or have some bizarre fluke. If they lie about any of the amenities or anything else in the listing it's simple to bring it up with Airbnb. I've reached the point where I can't find a single reason to actually stay in a hotel anymore, no matter where I'm traveling (internationally or in the US).
- dorian-graph 8y ago
  Luxury? I travel _a lot_ (been to 45+ countries and travel every couple of weeks for fun) and more often then not, AirBnbs cost more. A lot of my friends travel just as much, if not more, than I do, and we've all slowly moved away from AirBnbs as much as possible. ftr we don't mind AirBnb, and I've had good experiences with them. Also, we're not luxurious travellers, but we do so as cheaply as we can manage. The main reasons (cost aside) are unresponsive hosts, late hosts, and incorrect details. I've never had any 'weird' arrangements either, just normal stays. Hell, people's experiences like this person's are reason enough.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  It's always a lot less expensive than hotels in the same area, and in many cases a higher quality building and room than nearby hotels. Just no room service. That's interesting. Every now and again I'll look at Airbnb, just to see if it's changed much; especially if I'm trying to stay in an area with few choices. Often all I see are spare bedrooms or studio apartments that people are putting online for more than the nearby hotels charge. I even remember seeing listings for couches, not even entire rooms. But I don't remember if that was Airbnb, or another service. But room service, for me, is often a requirement. I'll pay extra for room service because with the way my business trips are scheduled, it's a necessity. Bonus points if it's available 24 hours.

foobandit 8y ago

This seems pretty clear. He had a bad experience but didn't leave a review for the place, and then when the review period expired, he saw that the place had left a bad review for him. Airbnb keeps both users blind to each other's reviews until the review period has expired, because otherwise people will use the threat of leaving a bad review (as retribution) in order to ensure they get reviewed well. But he did an end-run around this and posted reviews on multiple other sites, which makes airbnb's system break down. It sounds like Airbnb just needs a way for people to respond to reviews that are left for them. I'm surprised it doesn't have that already.

seattle_spring 8y ago
It does... You have 14 days to leave a public response to any review on your profile.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Airbnb has "public" and "private" reviews. "Public reviews" are shown everywhere, "private" is just messaged directly to the host only. You need to write a "public review" to do a "private one" to my knowledge, last time I used it. Whenever I had a bad host relationship, I decided not to pursue it further and leave no review at all. It feels weird that there is no recourse action because you don't know if your host will recripcate posting a good review, a honest terrible review, a fake bad review, or none at all. Your host might know your experience was bad and doesn't know either if you will post what he will post. Airbnb reviews feels like the prisons dileama game theory problem.

coleifer 8y ago

The host complaining that the guest was entitled to a room they had paid for is unbelievably ironic. I guess the irony was lost on Airbnb.

sjclemmy 8y ago

Very Kafkaesque. It’s completely unacceptable to remove a service without explanation.

jrrrr 8y ago

> Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account. Do you really want to behave as badly as legally permitted? That's kind of a low bar.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

I wrote a comment earlier this week about a Google user being locked out of Google. I expanded it into a story, peppering it with less than flattering stories about Google. https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out I haven't read any Kafka, but I'm probably a fan already.

bonyt 8y ago
I find myself using the word “kafkaesque” a lot more lately.
teh_klev 8y ago
Please don't take this the wrong way, but you might want to reconsider your choice of colours on your bloggy. I found that blueish text on a blue background quite hard to read.

superkuh 8y ago

Sounds like the perfect time to stop using AirBnB. You are not required to do so and they are not required to serve you. I don't see a problem other than you being upset by their rudeness. I only first used AirBnB 2 weeks ago. There's a single one in my town. I've never seen an uber. I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density areas.

mtarnovan 8y ago
> I think many on hackernews overestimate how many people use or depend on these kind (uber, airbnb, etc) services outside of high population density areas. Most people live in high population density areas. The USA is 80% urbanized.

dandare 8y ago

They rebranded to Airbnb some time ago, just saying.

mattnewton 8y ago

The whole no-reasons-or-explanation thing particularly looks really bad, as we are free to speculate the worst possible petty reasons for lifetime bans. I can’t imagine the logic behind that - is it some kind of legal liability issue? Really sours me on the brand.

princekolt 8y ago
> I can’t imagine the logic behind that Lazy tech companies want to automate everything.

xeetuur 8y ago

I'll just leave this here: https://www.airbnbhell.com https://www.airbnbhell.com Coming from a guest perspective where I've had things go wrong during my stays, Airbnb has been absolutely horrible to deal with. It's literally gambling with your vacation, because if anything goes wrong you can count on Airbnb to take your money and run. Why do we give so much money to what is essentially a middleman that provides almost nothing of value?

cryptonector 8y ago

A few simple regulations would help a lot. First of all, arbitration and civil court access for challenging bans and such. Second, require specific explanations. Third, require content-neutral social media / common carrier policies.

LarryPage 8y ago

I don't know exactly why, but the indignity of this story really gets to me. Does having a desk at a big tech company really strip your humanity to the point where you're OK sending messages like these to another person? How do you treat other human beings with so little respect?

codezero 8y ago

I too was banned for life from AirBnB – I don't really blame them, given the information available, it was fair for them to side with the host, who was their long term customer over myself who was a new user. The apartment I was in had a gas leak while I was gone, the door got kicked in by the fire department and the gas was shut off. The replacement cost $1300+ – and I was out of a room for two nights. I refused to pay the fee for the door – that seems like something insurance should cover. I was not in the room when the gas was on, but I guess there's an off chance I bumped the stove and flipped it on – seems like that should not be possible, but I don't know.

dolguldur 8y ago

I also had an incident where they sided with the host and refused me a refund. That was quite a surprise and the way they handled it had a strong taste of they decide by numbers and then it's a brick wall and they'll just coat it for you but the decision is incontestable. Now I'm weighing the risk and uncertainty and oftentimes it's just not worth it and I'll rather go for a hotel.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Do a cc chargeback if you think you have a real case

billylindeman 8y ago

I got lifebanned from getaround because my ex girlfriend smoked in a car we rented. The penalty in the terms of service was a $250 cleaning fee (which I got charged) but no where did it say you'd be banned (and iirc it _still_ does not say that). I appealed it twice and both times they upheld the ban.

seattle_spring 8y ago
Good. What a shitty thing to do.

iuguy 8y ago

Benjamin Mako Hill has some really interesting things to say about how AirBnB displaced couchsurfing[1]. We could've had a world where people can stay anywhere in the world for free. Instead we let a bunch of VC-funded bros convince us that adding a gatekeeper to the short term rental market was a good idea. We all need to think carefully about the consequences of our actions online, from building such applications to using them. I refuse to use AirBnB after being stuck out in the middle of nowhere and basically told to go whistle. I'm not the only person where the bad experience has been a result of AirBnB's handling of the situation, but it was us as users that enabled AirBnB to get into it's partial monopoly situation by evangelising so much for it in the early days./ [1] - http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production-libreplanet_keynote-20180326-EDITED-v3.webm#t=199 http://media.mako.cc/hill-whither_peer_production-libreplane...

reverend_gonzo 8y ago
Couchsurfing and AirBnb are not even remotely the same. Hosting on Couchsurfing is a way to meet other travelers and show them around your city, and most importantly, you don't get paid. Hosting on AirBnb is a business. AirBnb is far closer to HomeAway and VRBO. These existed before too, but their usability was terrible and they were prone to scams.
- joveian 8y ago
  The people running couchsurfing killed it themselves by changing from a non-profit to a VC funded for-profit business after accepting huge amounts of volunteer effort. But yeah, they aren't really the same thing. There is some overlap since it could be difficult to cover every day that you wanted to visit (and there isn't always enough hostel beds available, which are closer to the same idea), but for anyone who really preferred AirBnB it was better for everyone that they not be on couchsurfing.
- archagon 8y ago
  I like AirBnb because I have to pay, even when I'm sharing the house with other people. I don't want to feel obliged to entertain my host, which IMO is the implicit tradeoff when you're staying somewhere for free.

lechiffre10 8y ago

I've continually voiced my discontent with the way Airbnb treats guests vs hosts. Guests are completely disposable and I even had a personal experience I wrote about on medium as well for a long-term stay. Airbnb is the company that is going the way of too big to fail. As more and more customers complain cities will eventually be forced to regulate and potentially kill this company. It's quite ironic that Brian Chesky,the CEO, tweeted end of June about how wrong the travel ban is in America ( a ban that fails to provide clarity as to why some of the countries are on it) and yet Airbnb feels they are allowed to ban a user without providing any clarity as well.

jancsika 8y ago

> After booking the weekend, we were told that we’d need to vacate the premises from 12–4pm because the room was located in a spa retreat. After booking they told you that? IMO either do the sane thing and cancel or get into whatever horrible interaction you describe in the rest of the blog.

temp987656789 8y ago

Airbnb prioritizes hosts - even violent ones - because that's the bottleneck. We had a scary experience where Airbnb allowed a VERY aggressive host with a documented history of violence to continue. The listing is still active today. I wrote them a long letter with facts which began: > I am sending this to make clear in writing that this listing is extremely unsafe for travelers. > We were harassed, feared for our safety, and left early as a result of drunk management on the property. We filed charges with the Maui Police Department for harassment, and we have since learned that the host John [redacted] is a convicted felon who has had the police out for harassment, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest before and has been ordered by the courts to "obtain and maintain mental health treatment or services, including anger management treatment or services, [or] domestic violence intervention". > He has been in and out of court since at least 2004 and was most recently arrested on [redacted] 2014, barely a week before we arrived. I believe that the situation on this property is extremely unsafe and I cannot keep silent in good conscience, even though the host has threatened me and my family. I detailed the event further for a page or so, and sent Airbnb all the prior police reports. The host was even using a fake wife alias to run the listing. Airbnb's response was to refund us our money in full, but they never pulled the host, nor did they publish our negative review of the location. The only action seems to be that they required him to use his own profile instead of the fake wife's profile. So it's much more than just prioritizing hosts over guests financially, Airbnb also prioritizes keeping a profitable host more than keeping guests safe.

teachrdan 8y ago
Name and shame! Is there a site for posting bad experiences with Airbnb hosts, complete with their name and listing address?
- Stasis5001 8y ago
  I think you may be missing the point -- the one being named and maybe shamed in this post is actually Airbnb.
  - fullshark 8y ago

tmaly 8y ago

It is scary to try to predict what the state of things will be in 10 or 20 years. Are we going to be like the society in the sci-fy series Continuum where corporations literally control everything? Maybe a rating of customer service for online services would be appropriate.

dqpb 8y ago

Looks like the US is creating a social credit system - it's just a distributed one.

mr_spothawk 8y ago

To me, the AirBNB product looks ripe for crypto-disruption.

_bxg1 8y ago

The same story keeps playing out: - A new "marketplace" platform takes off with a idealistic free-market approach. It's different enough from previous companies in the space that it doesn't get regulated, and it denies having any social obligation or responsibility. - As more and more customers and - primarily - vendors come to depend on it, its hands-off approach becomes one of arbitration, and its relationship with both groups becomes exploitative. - We get to start over at square one, re-learning the difficult lessons about consumer and employee protection that we've spent the last century developing. This is going to keep happening until the government gets more agile at regulating nebulous and category-breaking companies. Uber, YouTube, Facebook (with news companies as the vendors), Twitch, AirBnB, etc. Companies that invent new business models and break with preconceptions aren't inherently bad - that's potentially a great thing - but it becomes bad when regulatory laws can't keep up.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pnutjam 8y ago

Ebay did something similar to me,account banned with no reason given. I was selling some old Alix computers and I believe the ban was because I put something in the listing about using them for vpn's to hide or change your location.

hoopism 8y ago

I had a disupute with AirBnB long time ago (You can find it in my history because I posted about it here). They had a "sign up a friend" promotion and I liked the service so much that I recommended it to my parents. They used it and liked it too... but I didn't get my promotional credit. When I emailed them they were adamant the conditions were not met. They then changed the terms in the email to something new... luckily their own website was still active and represented EXACTLY what I had originally stated. I finally got a very patronizing email from support. Won't use AirBnB again. Plenty of other services.

teachrdan 8y ago

A story about Airbnb, bedbugs and a lack of accountability: My now-wife and I used Airbnb in Berlin and the mattress in our otherwise clean apartment was badly infested with bedbugs. I took a video (see below) and posted it to YouTube so that Airbnb would have the evidence needed to make what I assumed would be a quick decision in our favor. Instead, they were completely unhelpful. I was an American traveling in Europe so I didn't have a phone number where I could be reached, which they insisted was the only way they could communicate with me about the issue in real time. They demanded photos of the bedbugs, which I didn't take, because I assumed the video would be more helpful and my wife and I got out of the apartment as quickly as possible. (after frantically checking to make sure our clothes and luggage were bedbug-free) Finally, they took the host's word that there were no bedbugs, besides the obvious conflict of interest on his part to not report the visible bugs and blood stains on his mattress. (below a clean topsheet!) After much complaining on social media and repeated Skype calls from WiFi hotspots they finally agreed to cancel our remaining few nights and pay for a hotel for us instead. This might sound generous, but it came after losing a night to bedbugs and the better part of a day to dealing with their terrible customer service--one full day lost out of a 7 day trip. Like many of the complaints people are describing ITT, the problems that arise with Airbnb can happen in any hotel, too. The difference is that a hotel can quickly make you whole by giving you a new room or, if need be, putting you up in another location across town. With platforms like Airbnb it's simply too easy for them to ignore you and your pesky complaints or, in the case of OP, ban you from their platform forever. While I'm reluctant to call for more regulation, it's hard to see what else could make them treat you fairly, as a customer and a human being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJHScbdp15s

pwaai 8y ago

so I took AirBNB for the first time and I was shocked how little vetting process there is. One particular place I had was awful....towels with dried blood spots, pubic hair on blanket....

merinowool 8y ago

It is not mandatory to use such companies and laws already exist in case company has done trouble. Not sure what needs to be regulated here. Company should have freedom to choose who it does business with. If you don't like it you can start your own AirBNB.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
This is a terrible attitude. Deciding that companies should have free reign to do whatever has had disastrous consequences in the past, and today would be no different.

chrischen 8y ago

The bulk of airbnb’s value and valuation comes from enabling people to run illegal or subpar hotels. I travel frequently and occassionally use Airbnb. Only in one instance was my host actually just renting out a spare room. All other occassions it was clearly a business operation turning residential units into hotel rooms.

cool-RR 8y ago

"It all feels very 1984. Or Black Mirror." Really? A private company deciding not to do business with you feels like your basic human rights were taken away? "After emailing AirBnB support and its founders multiple times, I’ve finally given up." I've had a problem in Windows on my computer the other day and emailed Bill Gates, could you believe he had other things to do except respond to my problem?

csomar 8y ago

AirBnB is a shitty company. 1. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels. I've been to 20 cities and I have yet to find an apartment that is cheaper than an equivalent Booking.com. 2. This probably works, however, because it is cheaper to book the same apartment for 3-4 people instead of being a single traveler. 3. This makes the target customers of Airbnb problematic guests (imagine having 3-4 new guests to the apartment everyday). Probably why neighbors are complaining about Airbnb. 4. The prices displayed are way distorted. It is way worse than booking.com. The price on the search function is like half of what you'll actually pay. 5. Pretty much every property is 5 star rated. Pretty much every guest is a nice guest. Really? This cannot possibly be the truth and probably mean that the rating system means crap.

atombender 8y ago
> 1. Apartments are more expensive than Hotels. Why wouldn't they be? It's a different product. I like being able to prepare and eat my own food in a full kitchen. I like washing my own clothes and tidying my own bed. An apartment typically has much more space than the equivalent hotel room, with multiple rooms to stay in. I also don't need to interact with any staff, or see much of tourists (nor do I need to be in a crowded downtown area). For me, these are all benefits.
- Markoff 8y ago
  almost all of those requirements can be met by staying in hoStel
  - atombender 8y ago
    Hostels are generally dormitories where you share minimal bunk-bed rooms with strangers. I've never seen a hostel with its own kitchen, let alone its own bedroom.
    - kaybe 8y ago
      About any good hostel I've seen had a decent community kitchen. Some of them habe private rooms, sometimes even with private bathrooms.

stefek99 8y ago

Banned for life. Sounds familiar: https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverything-9-years-on-twitter-with-no-right-to-appeal https://steemit.com/twitter/@genesisre/decentralizeeverythin... Not enough crypto-currency scams. Notified Twitter about one with verified-fucking-account. Instant, irreversible ban, no right to appeal. WOW

qume 8y ago

Similar experience here. After years of evangelizing airbnb I got shit on by them by some low level employee with no way to continue communication, even though their misunderstanding could be explained in a single sentence. Apparently after years of driving customers to their platform, I'm not even worthy of being able to send a note to second line service, or even a single response to first level service after he closed the issue. It will be an interesting calculation to sum up the net benefit my efforts have provided to airbnb vs the damage that will occur due to my now committed lifetime of the opposite. All they needed was an appeal button, everything would have been resolved in minutes. But hey, lets fuck the people we built the business on.

smsm42 8y ago

It's pretty easy to live without AirBnB. While outrageous and rude on general ground, AirBnB behavior here is not too harmful. But what if another company like Google just blacklists you? That could be a lot more trouble, especially if you have Google mail, use Google identity to log in to other sites, etc. And what if it's some cloud company that just blocks you from your data, backups, digital assets, private keys, etc.? Modern tech provides a lot of nice opportunities, but if you stop to think about it it's scary how fragile it is and how much a lone keypress of somebody (alive or even bot) inside the guts of a major company can have impact on your life...

Yizahi 8y ago

So very Google'ish, ban a person for life with zero liability. FUCK. THIS. SHIT. Period.

ap3 8y ago

Instead of a ban why not let the rating amd comment system do the work? Rude hosts and guests will get nicked and after a while a pattern will emerge

grb423 8y ago

All similar statements about accepting “everyone” obviously does not include those with hurtful opinions. Not saying that’s the case with this OP just pointing what “everyone” means now.

ggm 8y ago

I dislike AirBnB on many levels, second-most to Uber: Its a mechanism which marginalizes tenants and maximises profits in property rental to the detriment of neighbours and people just trying to find homes. But this story, of being excluded by the parent company, for un-reversable, un-appealable reasons "because you signed a contract and we don't have to" really is the icing on the cake. The extent of "yea, if google want to make you rue the day" comments also rings true to me. I'm concerned about my exposure of risk:consequence here, not because I think I have done anything to warrant it, but because successfully reversing arbitrary acts in these situations is so fraught. Basically, its a guilty-until-possibly-accepted-but-not-acknowledged-as-innocent-and-no-recompense world.

Scea91 8y ago

I always wanted to try Airbnb, but everytime I searched for accomodation it didn't seem to offer better deals than I could find on booking.com or elsewhere.