6 ms·

Mentioned this in another comment, but it blows my mind that the author ends with: > "Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the intern

Mentioned this in another comment, but it blows my mind that the author ends with: > "Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." After an experience like that, I'd spend so much effort warning everyone I know to avoid Airbnb, even with the off chance something like this could happen to them. THIS is exactly why Airbnb doesn't care, the user is so brainwashed into still using the platform even after all that to potentially save a few bucks (which honestly, from what I have seen these days, Airbnb is basically the same cost of a hotel if you buy from any hotel deal site). I just don't understand that logic at all. Fool me once...

joezydeco 7y ago
Even after a >>>month<<< of digging through public records...Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." It's constantly amazing to see how little people value their time when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while.
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  That time got converted into this article for which the author was presumably paid. And I would guess that the author didn’t spend the entire month on only this one thing. But maybe that’s wrong
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while. The math to get an approximate hourly rate from a yearly salary is really easy: Just divide yearly salary by 2000. Thus if you make 100,000 a year, your hourly rate is approximately 50.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  Well you’re not getting paid more when it’s on your free time.
  - moftz 7y ago
    There is an opportunity cost. There are plenty of gig-type jobs that could be performed in your spare time.
    - ipython 7y ago
      I'd rather track down and expose a scam for free than to get paid $5 from TaskRabbit to put someone's IKEA furniture together. Sometimes it's about more than money...
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    But you shouldn't consider your free time to be worthless. I'm not saying go out and drive an Uber every free minute you have, but value the time you aren't working and don't spend it chasing down stupid shit and taking a mental toll on yourself to get back $100.
- michaelt 7y ago
  If everyone knows you can rob or scam me for $50 and I'll hand it over and not go to the cops (because doing so isn't worth my time) there's really no downside to robbing or scamming me. On the other hand, if everyone knows when robbed or scammed I will doggedly pursue every avenue until a much higher price has been extracted from the robbers or scammers, the downside is nonzero.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  It wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that someone who took the time to intentionally study and go into journalism, would have more than a monetary interest in "investigating things." Or that someone who had been personally scammed would have more than a monetary interest in investigating that particular scam. In other words, investigating is probably fun for her, and the added element of revenge/justice only adds more fuel to the fire.
- cogman10 7y ago
  Heh, you know, the funny part is that I'll spend just a little extra on my hotel stays (Meaning, I'm not staying at the Howard Johnson's behind Walmart, even if it is $40 a night). I've never had very few bad experiences as a result. It costs money to run a hotel well. From the front desk to the cleaning staff. If a stay costs you $40 a night, you have to ask yourself "What are they skimping on? Are they not washing the sheets? Vacuuming? Cleaning the showers/toilets?" Sure, there are some economies of scale at play. But by and large, it takes quite a bit of money to make sure things are well maintained. That is what often gets reflected in your hotel bill.
  - dmitrygr 7y ago
    Hotel taxes are usually high. AirBnB at its core is just a way to run a hotel without paying those.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  This person is a journalist and wrote a successful trending news article about it (seriously -- #1 on Twitter right now). You should consider this part of their job, not free time wasted.
4ntonius8lock 7y ago
I've been the victim of a similar scam then the one mentioned in the article. Having said that, I still use the platform. Why? I've traveled a lot and generally on the cheap, and I have run into scammy/terrible hotels. I mean, at one place the hotel owner tried to scam me by claiming I broke something that was clearly broken when we arrived. One time, I had a hotel room with hookers outside, a broken beer bottle under the bed with beer still in it, and a slice of pizza literally still on the floor face down. This last one had good reviews on one platform, terrible reviews on another. My bad airbnb experience made me much more careful about who I stay with and how on the platform. But I haven't given up on it. I've had some amazing airbnb experiences, both renting full houses with friends as well as staying in a room in a house with locals and getting the 'real local experience', I won't leave it. Maybe for people going to high end hotels it won't make sense to airbnb? At least for me, going to cheap hotels and cheap airbnbs, the overall reliability has been not too dissimilar. I do wish they would monitor their platform more.
ummonk 7y ago
I wonder whether there is some sort of penny-wise pound-foolish mentality at work with most AirBnB users that causes them to continue choosing AirBnB to save money over hotels even after being majorly scammed like the people in this article were?
- robocat 7y ago
  For me, AirBnB usually isn't about the cost, but the ability to rent a unique place that is nothing like a hotel or where a hotel is unavailable. Read the rest of the comments here, and there are many others with similar reasons. Also I loath high end hotels - saccharine service with lifeless interiors and a walking dead ambiance.
rdiddly 7y ago
I agree - I found the final "We'll all just keep using AirBnB forever" paragraph (after doing all that work in the opposite direction) kind of infuriating. Are we in the throes of heroin addiction here? Are we married to AirBnB, trapped there come-what-may, for the children's sake? It's like how people are with Facebook, Uber... et al. There are other ways of doing things, people! I dunno, apparently I've built up some cumulative frustration with people.
notJim 7y ago
For many people, AirBnB and hotels don't necessarily provide the same thing, so switching from one to the other is not as easy as you'd think. When I travel, I often approach it like imagining I lived in that city. So often I'll get food and cook it and have some days where I just lounge around. This doesn't really work with most hotels which are absolutely tiny in major cities and don't have working kitchens or living rooms. Even if they do the furniture is so generic, cheap and awful that it kind of breaks me out of the experience. There's no real alternative for the apartment-like living experience AirBnB provides, unfortunately.
lammalamma25 7y ago
Its a reasonable risk/reward calculation. If this is your only 2 week vacation for the year, having a bad experience is a huge cost in time and probably money. If you're traveling regularly and save $X 95% of the time by using airbnb. That occasional bad experience is pretty bad, but more tolerable.

joezydeco 7y ago

Even after a >>>month<<< of digging through public records...Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." It's constantly amazing to see how little people value their time when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while.

dan-robertson 7y ago
That time got converted into this article for which the author was presumably paid. And I would guess that the author didn’t spend the entire month on only this one thing. But maybe that’s wrong
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> Maybe when we're getting yearly salaries we don't compute out the hourly cost but, man, do the math once in a while. The math to get an approximate hourly rate from a yearly salary is really easy: Just divide yearly salary by 2000. Thus if you make 100,000 a year, your hourly rate is approximately 50.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
Well you’re not getting paid more when it’s on your free time.
- moftz 7y ago
  There is an opportunity cost. There are plenty of gig-type jobs that could be performed in your spare time.
  - ipython 7y ago
    I'd rather track down and expose a scam for free than to get paid $5 from TaskRabbit to put someone's IKEA furniture together. Sometimes it's about more than money...
- joezydeco 7y ago
  But you shouldn't consider your free time to be worthless. I'm not saying go out and drive an Uber every free minute you have, but value the time you aren't working and don't spend it chasing down stupid shit and taking a mental toll on yourself to get back $100.
michaelt 7y ago
If everyone knows you can rob or scam me for $50 and I'll hand it over and not go to the cops (because doing so isn't worth my time) there's really no downside to robbing or scamming me. On the other hand, if everyone knows when robbed or scammed I will doggedly pursue every avenue until a much higher price has been extracted from the robbers or scammers, the downside is nonzero.
rdiddly 7y ago
It wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that someone who took the time to intentionally study and go into journalism, would have more than a monetary interest in "investigating things." Or that someone who had been personally scammed would have more than a monetary interest in investigating that particular scam. In other words, investigating is probably fun for her, and the added element of revenge/justice only adds more fuel to the fire.
cogman10 7y ago
Heh, you know, the funny part is that I'll spend just a little extra on my hotel stays (Meaning, I'm not staying at the Howard Johnson's behind Walmart, even if it is $40 a night). I've never had very few bad experiences as a result. It costs money to run a hotel well. From the front desk to the cleaning staff. If a stay costs you $40 a night, you have to ask yourself "What are they skimping on? Are they not washing the sheets? Vacuuming? Cleaning the showers/toilets?" Sure, there are some economies of scale at play. But by and large, it takes quite a bit of money to make sure things are well maintained. That is what often gets reflected in your hotel bill.
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  Hotel taxes are usually high. AirBnB at its core is just a way to run a hotel without paying those.
CydeWeys 7y ago
This person is a journalist and wrote a successful trending news article about it (seriously -- #1 on Twitter right now). You should consider this part of their job, not free time wasted.

4ntonius8lock 7y ago

I've been the victim of a similar scam then the one mentioned in the article. Having said that, I still use the platform. Why? I've traveled a lot and generally on the cheap, and I have run into scammy/terrible hotels. I mean, at one place the hotel owner tried to scam me by claiming I broke something that was clearly broken when we arrived. One time, I had a hotel room with hookers outside, a broken beer bottle under the bed with beer still in it, and a slice of pizza literally still on the floor face down. This last one had good reviews on one platform, terrible reviews on another. My bad airbnb experience made me much more careful about who I stay with and how on the platform. But I haven't given up on it. I've had some amazing airbnb experiences, both renting full houses with friends as well as staying in a room in a house with locals and getting the 'real local experience', I won't leave it. Maybe for people going to high end hotels it won't make sense to airbnb? At least for me, going to cheap hotels and cheap airbnbs, the overall reliability has been not too dissimilar. I do wish they would monitor their platform more.

ummonk 7y ago

I wonder whether there is some sort of penny-wise pound-foolish mentality at work with most AirBnB users that causes them to continue choosing AirBnB to save money over hotels even after being majorly scammed like the people in this article were?

robocat 7y ago
For me, AirBnB usually isn't about the cost, but the ability to rent a unique place that is nothing like a hotel or where a hotel is unavailable. Read the rest of the comments here, and there are many others with similar reasons. Also I loath high end hotels - saccharine service with lifeless interiors and a walking dead ambiance.

rdiddly 7y ago

I agree - I found the final "We'll all just keep using AirBnB forever" paragraph (after doing all that work in the opposite direction) kind of infuriating. Are we in the throes of heroin addiction here? Are we married to AirBnB, trapped there come-what-may, for the children's sake? It's like how people are with Facebook, Uber... et al. There are other ways of doing things, people! I dunno, apparently I've built up some cumulative frustration with people.

notJim 7y ago

For many people, AirBnB and hotels don't necessarily provide the same thing, so switching from one to the other is not as easy as you'd think. When I travel, I often approach it like imagining I lived in that city. So often I'll get food and cook it and have some days where I just lounge around. This doesn't really work with most hotels which are absolutely tiny in major cities and don't have working kitchens or living rooms. Even if they do the furniture is so generic, cheap and awful that it kind of breaks me out of the experience. There's no real alternative for the apartment-like living experience AirBnB provides, unfortunately.

lammalamma25 7y ago

Its a reasonable risk/reward calculation. If this is your only 2 week vacation for the year, having a bad experience is a huge cost in time and probably money. If you're traveling regularly and save $X 95% of the time by using airbnb. That occasional bad experience is pretty bad, but more tolerable.