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There have been a few threads about AirBnb lately with a lot of people reporting negative experiences so I will add my own $0.02. I have stayed in many AirBnbs.

There have been a few threads about AirBnb lately with a lot of people reporting negative experiences so I will add my own $0.02. I have stayed in many AirBnbs. The reason is, I find it is the only way to have a tolerable family vacation is when everyone has their own sleeping quarters. When we are all piled into one (often overpriced and not so clean) hotel room, it makes for less than ideal sleep and everyone ends up grouchy. Plus when you travel with children, it is really nice to have a kitchen and a way to do laundry. At any rate, my observation for all my AirBnb stays is most of them are quite nice. Many hosts go to great lengths to have their guests have a nice stay. There have been a few crappy experiences, but not many. The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations.

swozey 7y ago
Yeah I've stayed at lot of airbnbs (20-30 a year) and only had good to great experiences. I've met a lot of hosts that I specifically look up when I visit their city again. I've had plenty where they weren't exactly what I expected, like thinking a cabin I was renting was in the woods from the pictures but it was on a gravel driveway with trees in the background, but my trip wasn't ruined or anything. I've unfortunately had reservations cancelled in the 24hr window and had to rush to find something else, or accepted an insta-reservation but never heard back from the host. I've not looked over the fine print, seen airbnbs with pictures of ovens and shown up to microwaves (this is my fault but the pictures don't help). Those are my biggest host issues. I will say though that I dread what you said - analyzing listings. The airbnb.com UX is atrocious. I thought it was pretty sub-par when I'd look at listings just planning trips for myself. But now I try to plan trips with my partner through it and she has her own account, so I share lists and listings within lists. It's awful. I recently went on a 2 week road trip and stayed at different places every day. I'd have to have google maps open to plot distance between airbnbs and parks, I couldn't go back into a listings actual ad to see its details once I confirmed a reservation (I had to search for the listing again and go to it, the reservation details don't show the actual posting), I'd have to keep a separate app open just to keep notes of each listing, I use my todo list, which I then also had to share with my partner separately because there's not really a way to thumbs up/down/leave comments on listings. I'd send her listings and she'd get errors or they'd just never end up on her account. If I add her to a listing I don't think it shows up in her reservations so I still had to send all the info to her, she'd just get an email about it. Does anyone do this sort of stuff on any of the other sites? Vrbo, etc? Is there a really good roadtrip planning app? Are they easier to use in these situations? I honestly don't want to deal with it again it was that frustrating. Also, while I'm here ranting, and as an ex-airbnb host and very avid airbnb user. Please, chill out on your cleaning fees. I cannot believe some of the cleaning fees I find. Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. Nothing turns me off from a place more than putting a reservation together and noticing that my 2-3 day stay will incur $150+ in cleaning fees. I would rather pay a slightly higher daily fee than $45-80/day in "cleaning" when I'm a single person renting your studio just so I can spend 80% of my day hiking outside of your place. I can't remember if I could control this based on the number of guests staying but if you can, please do it.
- wrboyce 7y ago
  Nothing about what you describe sounds like it falls into the "good to great experience" category to me.
  - swozey 7y ago
    My airbnb stockholm syndrome..
  - puranjay 7y ago
    A "great" hotel experience I had recently was when I happened to casually mention to someone in the hotel restaurant that it was my wedding anniversary tomorrow. When I came back from touring through the city the next day, the reception staff gave my wife flowers and wished us a happy anniversary. Then when we entered our room, we found a small cake with anniversary wishes. That kind of attention to detail is what I would classify as a truly "great" experience.
- dboreham 7y ago
  Having a fixed cleaning fee and a per-night charge actually reflects the property owner's costs. They have to pay someone to clean, do laundry, re-stock the crackers and cheap wine. Of course this can be taken too far, but I actually prefer this cost structure because I get a price break if I have a long stay vs an average flat fee per night. Source: I know several Airbnb owners, and the people who clean their properties.
  - laGrenouille 7y ago
    I think the point is less about the existence of the cleaning fee and the fact that the site doesn't include the fee in the mapping UI. It makes it very difficult to compare properties when there are large fee differences that you cannot see until clicking through.
    - abecedarius 7y ago
      I usually search with specific dates for a stay, so it's weird that they don't summarize the listings by total cost instead of the nightly rate leaving out the fixed costs. That'd fix the problem, right? (Of course they could divide that total cost by the night count if they can't let go of normalizing to nightly rate. The point is to not incentivize accounting shenanigans.) Overall I've been happy with airbnb as a traveler, but if they don't step up their game it's going to be like having been happy with the early web, or Amazon reviews in the early days when it was easy to ignore a few fakes. That general problem of evolving predators is hard, but this particular change seems easy.
gesman 7y ago
>> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. In my view this is major. To describe it better - need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties. Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys. Then the list goes on. AirBnb expects and encourages misrepresentation of properties and misleading descriptions to stimulate cash flow. Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.
- dfxm12 7y ago
  How is this different from a hotel? From rentals in general? I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.
  - gesman 7y ago
    "What you pay is what you get" rule applies. Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews. During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week. This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation. But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background. And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.
    - GnarfGnarf 7y ago
      "What you pay is what you get" -- not quite. Tell that to the folks who bought Enron or Worldcom stock. It is more accurate to say "You don't get what you don't pay for".
  - Jd 7y ago
    HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved. Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things. In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms. In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.
jancsika 7y ago
> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. How do you corroborate the information on those properties? The clean, affordable, well-placed hotels I've stayed in had reams of reviews and news articles from various sources to confirm they were indeed clean, affordable, and well-placed. The cost of faking all those sources must be orders of magnitude greater than faking property images/reviews on AirBnB.
- magashna 7y ago
  You roll the dice and hope for the best. There's only so much you can do. Pick 2, cost, comfort, reliability
- mattrp 7y ago
  You use common sense - I have been a host of properties and I would say Airbnb does not go to any lengths to encourage you to misrepresent. In fact they do the opposite - with your listing you are building a contract so they encourage you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible. They also strictly govern guest interactions so you can’t provide a phone number or email address during negotiations to side step the system. Overall I think the people who are saying it’s a scam are amplifying a bad experience to suggest that it represents the whole system. It clearly doesn’t and I say that as having seen how it works both as a host and a user.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    While AirBnB nominally "encourage[s] you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible", in reality, the way it handles feedback and complaint resolution discourages the candid reporting of problems, as was evident in several places in the article. The root cause of this problem is that AirBnB makes no attempt to determine the truth of any complaint. Nor, apparently, is it doing much to identify patterns of abuse.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
mattrp 7y ago
I would second this experience. We travel with our five kids and its sometimes impossible to find a hotel that can accommodate us. That said, I did experience a switcheroo in Chicago similar to the article. However that’s where the similarities end. The place was in the same neighborhood, it was comparable to the listing but the only catch was we were told not say Airbnb to anyone in the building but to say guests of xyz. I felt like a criminal but otherwise the place was very nice and the host was super-responsive even though it was clear he was running multiple properties. Another time in Chicago, the bath tub hardware was broken off when we arrived. My side hustle is house flipping so I fixed it for the owner and they were thankful. I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is the rise of “420 friendly” and the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. That’s just beyond ok. As for 420, I just have an issue that if I’m going to take my kids someplace that I’d want reasonable assurances that it’s clean but with cities like LA where there’s a huge number of 420 listings, I’d rather just pay for adjoining rooms in a hotel than take the chance. As far as being an investor in Airbnb, I think a lot of ink has been dedicated to how Airbnb is going to upend the hospitality industry. It’s clear at the beginning the hotels had no response, but I do see hotels adjusting their brands and as someone who uses both hotels and Airbnb’s I’m increasingly more likely to just stay in a hotel. The exceptions are when we vacation in groups... we visited Toronto this summer with family and it was absolutely awesome to have a giant house on the beach for about half of what we would have spent on hotel rooms if there even had been a hotel in the beaches neighborhood. I see a place for both styles of accommodation but given that Airbnb is likely more of a class of property among many rather than an upending of the entire industry, I think valuation is going to be a real challenge.
- dfxm12 7y ago
  I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is ... the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. Yeah, it's policy that you have to disclose any cameras inside the room in the listing. It's not clear what happens when you do find one though. You spend all day traveling and are in a strange city. On the one hand, you're entitled to get out of there with no penalty, but on the other, it might be hard to find alternate accommodations.
drenvuk 7y ago
With the amount of research you may be nearly just as well off searching craigslist. I'm bitter about my experiences and won't subject myself to abnb any further.
foobiekr 7y ago
If hotels had two bathrooms we’d probably go back to hotels. But instead they have single low-privacy bathrooms.
- kayfox 7y ago
  Book adjoining rooms?
saturdaysaint 7y ago
Funny, having young kids is what has sent me back to hotels (at least for the time being), simply because they are mostly designed with accessibility and some level of child-proofing. Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Cooping the kids up in a grown-up oriented space with fragile table decorations they can't touch can be exhausting.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Letting toddlers run up and down the hallways is a good way to make you the most hated guest in the hotel.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Depends on how many kids, and their ages. Between the ages of ~2-8, they're going to bed much earlier than you, and they won't fall asleep if you're still in the room. Add multiple kids—especially different ages with different bedtime routines—and a single room (or even a suite) can be challenging. We have a favorite AirBnB listing in one town we visit frequently (to see family that doesn't have space to host us) that has some fragile decorations. When we arrive, we do a quick sweep and put them all up high. We're also up-front with the host that we have small children, so they're free to reject our stay if they'd prefer. So far, it's never been an issue.
- iamaelephant 7y ago
  > Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Please, PLEASE don't do this. You don't know what time people are trying to get some sleep in their rooms. Not everyone keeps your schedule.
  - duxup 7y ago
    You can wander around with your toddler without waking folks up.
sailfast 7y ago
Because I have kids (they're smaller, under 7) I can't really risk getting shafted at an AirBnB. Our experiences were so up and down that I rarely look to the site anymore for options. Suite hotels are prevalent, and work great for families, and you can be relatively certain it'll be a fine place to hang your hat for the night. For longer-term rentals, I find it's best to work through local property managers or maybe VRBO, where you're dealing with the person more directly. That said, the destination probably makes a HUGE difference in terms of how you are treated. The fact that AirBnB's rating system is so gamed that you can't trust any reviews, and the fact that their policies for refunds skew towards the property owners and not guests means that my trust in the site is low. I'd probably only risk it again if there are hotels around as backups. That said, I'm also typically looking for cheaper places, so the scam-level density is probably higher.
greggman2 7y ago
I've stayed at 22 airbnb's 11 were fine. 11 had issues most with false advertising in some form or another. One listed the wrong location and if they had listed the correct location I would not have rented even though the room's interior matched. A few claimed to include onsite parking but didn't which of course is very inconvenient. The last one that did that claimed "Easy Street Parking" as AirBnb's blatant lie. I usually had to park a mile way or pay for a $25 a night garage a few blocks away. One claimed wifi but was actually just stealing it from the neighbors and it only worked in a corner of the apartment if lucky. Another who I asked if their heaters worked, because a previous one was cold, said yes but when I got their the heater was as loud as a vacuum cleaner and their wifi had a notices "don't use much as it will run out". This for a place I expected to get work done. AirBnb in Japan is full of listing claiming 2 or 3 bedrooms but that actually only have 1 and this isn't a cultural issue. Look at any J-apartment rental site and there is zero ambiguity about what 1, 2, and 3 bedrooms are. It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund. It's totally within their power to say in so many words "be evil and we'll pull your funding and report you to the authorities". IMO AirBnB is complicit in these issues. There is no punishment for bad listings and often AirBnB doesn't even have the options in their system to list them correctly. They even removed my review that included pictures of proof.
- ilamont 7y ago
  I have a similar rate with AirBnb -- 50% were great, the rest had "issues," which ranged from exaggerated claims ("minutes from downtown") to serious safety problems. Agree that Airbnb's policies (or lack of them) are contributing to the situation -- for instance, no serious punishment for false advertising. But I have a hard time dumping bad policies on YC's plate, or demanding that YC "report you to the authorities" unless criminal activity/negligence is involved.
- harryh 7y ago
  YC owns a tiny tiny piece of AirBnB. They definitely do not have any sort of power over the issues that you bring up.
  - 7y ago
iamsb 7y ago
I really used to like Airbnb, but for the same usage - family vacations. But after couple of bad experiences, where host canceled while we were on the way, I prefer holiday homes which are professionally managed and have better contracts.
pklem 7y ago
The only bad experience I had was a decent looking apartment type room in a house (from the pictures), but it ended up being the moldy basement of the house, and the bedroom didn't have an egress window. It wasn't unbearable, but it wasn't good either. However, you can't go wrong with superhosts. I've never had a bad experience with them.
faster 7y ago
I use a Chrome extension to show the true cost per night on Airbnb. I find the fees variable enough that I want to see the real price as part of my analysis of listings. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-night-co/lijeilcglmadpkbengpkfnkpmcehecfe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n... There might be others, but this one has worked well for me. No affiliation, just a happy user.
- throwaway35784 7y ago
  You have to hack them to get the real price? That seems profoundly wrong to me.
- hispanic 7y ago
  This used to be an issue with Airbnb, but I believe they fixed/changed that a year or two ago. The one line item they leave out of the total price on the search results is "Occupancy taxes and fees", which I can understand.
throwaway35784 7y ago
What does this have to do with the artice? You've had luck with Airbnb. You're just saying oh it's a company fraught with fraud and deception since its inception, but that's fine. My kids get their own room. This company has no moral compass. Why are you advertising for it? Distracting from the reality of the company described in the article? You know it has illegally ruined communities in the name of profit, right?
m00x 7y ago
I also have had great experiences on Airbnb, with only a few less than desirable ones, but the fact that Airbnb isn't refunding these people, and not paying the extra cost for the last-minute accommodations they had to take in is extremely disturbing and makes me completely lose faith in the platform. If Airbnb would take fraud seriously and refund people who have been defrauded on their platform, it would be fine. The fact that they push the risks of fraud to the customer and refuse to pay for reparations is not acceptable.
oh_hello 7y ago
I also have repeatedly used AirBnB in the past to try to make life easier with children. After getting burned repeatedly, I gave up. You can book a place like Embassy Suites for a similar amount of money and have a bit more space than a standard hotel room. It just isn't worth the hassle of researching AirBnB listings and dealing with the fallout from the bad ones to me anymore.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
If you haven't tried recently, a lot of traditional booking sites (like Booking.com) now have a pretty extensive apartment rental catalogue. When I'm going somewhere for more than a couple of days, I'd much rather have an entire apartment. I used to use AirBNB to book a full-fledged apartment. But now I just use Booking.com for everything. It also used to be the case that AirBNB had some really nice places for pretty cheap. I think now that the business is more mature, it's not as easy to find really great discounts. Any more, it seems like the better value is on Booking.com, too!
dreamcompiler 7y ago
Exactly this. For one or two people, Airbnb isn't lot cheaper than hotels. The big win is when the traveling group is more than two people. That gets very expensive at hotels because you usually have to book more than one room.
zwayhowder 7y ago
As a family we do the same, but never in the US, we've been caught in a couple of scams the same as this article, fortunately when we were traveling for business not as a family, but still. AirBnB in Australia, Japan & the UK has never been a problem for me. The USA has a 50% scam rate so far.
vlunkr 7y ago
I'm sure most people have fine experiences, but this is more than just "reporting negative experiences". This is a probably super profitable scam, and I'm sure it's not the only one, since there really aren't performing any sort of checks on hosts or properties.
kmonsen 7y ago
Yeah, if it is me and my wife we go hotel 90% of the time at least now. If it is more family members coming, like my parents or her parents, we will book an airbnb so everyone can get their own room and we can eat together etc.
personlurking 7y ago
>The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. I just spent 7 days (20h total) trying to make one booking. Tons of reading between the lines and analyzing involved, as well as bad or non-responsive potential hosts. To top it off, AirBnb Support the whole time was very poor.
cnst 7y ago
There are hotels with laundry rooms; and many chains have suites that give you an extra room, including doors, or connecting rooms. Very often the price difference isn't that significant. (Given how expensive some Airbnb's are, booking with points or through various deal sites is often much cheaper for a proper hotel rooms, too.)
homakov 7y ago
Speaking of "long analyze" have a look at my script - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420140
hispanic 7y ago
> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. Completely agree. If you don't want to put in the time or effort required to analyze for “assumed”, “missing” , and “bonus” amenities, scrutinize each listing’s description, photos, and guest reviews, and sniff out the nature of each Airbnb and the host’s motivations, I say stay away from Airbnb. More thoughts here - https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-book-airbnbs https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... The more negative comments I read here, the more I think that most people shouldn't use Airbnb. With that being said, I've been happy with Airbnb, warts and all.

swozey 7y ago

Yeah I've stayed at lot of airbnbs (20-30 a year) and only had good to great experiences. I've met a lot of hosts that I specifically look up when I visit their city again. I've had plenty where they weren't exactly what I expected, like thinking a cabin I was renting was in the woods from the pictures but it was on a gravel driveway with trees in the background, but my trip wasn't ruined or anything. I've unfortunately had reservations cancelled in the 24hr window and had to rush to find something else, or accepted an insta-reservation but never heard back from the host. I've not looked over the fine print, seen airbnbs with pictures of ovens and shown up to microwaves (this is my fault but the pictures don't help). Those are my biggest host issues. I will say though that I dread what you said - analyzing listings. The airbnb.com UX is atrocious. I thought it was pretty sub-par when I'd look at listings just planning trips for myself. But now I try to plan trips with my partner through it and she has her own account, so I share lists and listings within lists. It's awful. I recently went on a 2 week road trip and stayed at different places every day. I'd have to have google maps open to plot distance between airbnbs and parks, I couldn't go back into a listings actual ad to see its details once I confirmed a reservation (I had to search for the listing again and go to it, the reservation details don't show the actual posting), I'd have to keep a separate app open just to keep notes of each listing, I use my todo list, which I then also had to share with my partner separately because there's not really a way to thumbs up/down/leave comments on listings. I'd send her listings and she'd get errors or they'd just never end up on her account. If I add her to a listing I don't think it shows up in her reservations so I still had to send all the info to her, she'd just get an email about it. Does anyone do this sort of stuff on any of the other sites? Vrbo, etc? Is there a really good roadtrip planning app? Are they easier to use in these situations? I honestly don't want to deal with it again it was that frustrating. Also, while I'm here ranting, and as an ex-airbnb host and very avid airbnb user. Please, chill out on your cleaning fees. I cannot believe some of the cleaning fees I find. Quit using it as a way to lower the daily cost so that you show up on more searches. Nothing turns me off from a place more than putting a reservation together and noticing that my 2-3 day stay will incur $150+ in cleaning fees. I would rather pay a slightly higher daily fee than $45-80/day in "cleaning" when I'm a single person renting your studio just so I can spend 80% of my day hiking outside of your place. I can't remember if I could control this based on the number of guests staying but if you can, please do it.

wrboyce 7y ago
Nothing about what you describe sounds like it falls into the "good to great experience" category to me.
- swozey 7y ago
  My airbnb stockholm syndrome..
- puranjay 7y ago
  A "great" hotel experience I had recently was when I happened to casually mention to someone in the hotel restaurant that it was my wedding anniversary tomorrow. When I came back from touring through the city the next day, the reception staff gave my wife flowers and wished us a happy anniversary. Then when we entered our room, we found a small cake with anniversary wishes. That kind of attention to detail is what I would classify as a truly "great" experience.
dboreham 7y ago
Having a fixed cleaning fee and a per-night charge actually reflects the property owner's costs. They have to pay someone to clean, do laundry, re-stock the crackers and cheap wine. Of course this can be taken too far, but I actually prefer this cost structure because I get a price break if I have a long stay vs an average flat fee per night. Source: I know several Airbnb owners, and the people who clean their properties.
- laGrenouille 7y ago
  I think the point is less about the existence of the cleaning fee and the fact that the site doesn't include the fee in the mapping UI. It makes it very difficult to compare properties when there are large fee differences that you cannot see until clicking through.
  - abecedarius 7y ago
    I usually search with specific dates for a stay, so it's weird that they don't summarize the listings by total cost instead of the nightly rate leaving out the fixed costs. That'd fix the problem, right? (Of course they could divide that total cost by the night count if they can't let go of normalizing to nightly rate. The point is to not incentivize accounting shenanigans.) Overall I've been happy with airbnb as a traveler, but if they don't step up their game it's going to be like having been happy with the early web, or Amazon reviews in the early days when it was easy to ignore a few fakes. That general problem of evolving predators is hard, but this particular change seems easy.

gesman 7y ago

>> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. In my view this is major. To describe it better - need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties. Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is and to conceal obvious negative points that become apparent even before you are given the keys. Then the list goes on. AirBnb expects and encourages misrepresentation of properties and misleading descriptions to stimulate cash flow. Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points.

dfxm12 7y ago
How is this different from a hotel? From rentals in general? I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.
- gesman 7y ago
  "What you pay is what you get" rule applies. Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews. During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week. This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation. But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background. And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.
  - GnarfGnarf 7y ago
    "What you pay is what you get" -- not quite. Tell that to the folks who bought Enron or Worldcom stock. It is more accurate to say "You don't get what you don't pay for".
- Jd 7y ago
  HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved. Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things. In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms. In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.

jancsika 7y ago

> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. How do you corroborate the information on those properties? The clean, affordable, well-placed hotels I've stayed in had reams of reviews and news articles from various sources to confirm they were indeed clean, affordable, and well-placed. The cost of faking all those sources must be orders of magnitude greater than faking property images/reviews on AirBnB.

magashna 7y ago
You roll the dice and hope for the best. There's only so much you can do. Pick 2, cost, comfort, reliability
mattrp 7y ago
You use common sense - I have been a host of properties and I would say Airbnb does not go to any lengths to encourage you to misrepresent. In fact they do the opposite - with your listing you are building a contract so they encourage you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible. They also strictly govern guest interactions so you can’t provide a phone number or email address during negotiations to side step the system. Overall I think the people who are saying it’s a scam are amplifying a bad experience to suggest that it represents the whole system. It clearly doesn’t and I say that as having seen how it works both as a host and a user.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  While AirBnB nominally "encourage[s] you to be as specific as possible and accurately describe the guest experience and your expectations as much as possible", in reality, the way it handles feedback and complaint resolution discourages the candid reporting of problems, as was evident in several places in the article. The root cause of this problem is that AirBnB makes no attempt to determine the truth of any complaint. Nor, apparently, is it doing much to identify patterns of abuse.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago

mattrp 7y ago

I would second this experience. We travel with our five kids and its sometimes impossible to find a hotel that can accommodate us. That said, I did experience a switcheroo in Chicago similar to the article. However that’s where the similarities end. The place was in the same neighborhood, it was comparable to the listing but the only catch was we were told not say Airbnb to anyone in the building but to say guests of xyz. I felt like a criminal but otherwise the place was very nice and the host was super-responsive even though it was clear he was running multiple properties. Another time in Chicago, the bath tub hardware was broken off when we arrived. My side hustle is house flipping so I fixed it for the owner and they were thankful. I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is the rise of “420 friendly” and the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. That’s just beyond ok. As for 420, I just have an issue that if I’m going to take my kids someplace that I’d want reasonable assurances that it’s clean but with cities like LA where there’s a huge number of 420 listings, I’d rather just pay for adjoining rooms in a hotel than take the chance. As far as being an investor in Airbnb, I think a lot of ink has been dedicated to how Airbnb is going to upend the hospitality industry. It’s clear at the beginning the hotels had no response, but I do see hotels adjusting their brands and as someone who uses both hotels and Airbnb’s I’m increasingly more likely to just stay in a hotel. The exceptions are when we vacation in groups... we visited Toronto this summer with family and it was absolutely awesome to have a giant house on the beach for about half of what we would have spent on hotel rooms if there even had been a hotel in the beaches neighborhood. I see a place for both styles of accommodation but given that Airbnb is likely more of a class of property among many rather than an upending of the entire industry, I think valuation is going to be a real challenge.

dfxm12 7y ago
I would say the part I find most disturbing about what I see on Airbnb is ... the presence of cameras in every room. One place we stayed at had obvious cameras on the outside but then just as I’m about to go to sleep I look up at the ceiling and there’s another one in the chandelier above the bed. Yeah, it's policy that you have to disclose any cameras inside the room in the listing. It's not clear what happens when you do find one though. You spend all day traveling and are in a strange city. On the one hand, you're entitled to get out of there with no penalty, but on the other, it might be hard to find alternate accommodations.

drenvuk 7y ago

With the amount of research you may be nearly just as well off searching craigslist. I'm bitter about my experiences and won't subject myself to abnb any further.

foobiekr 7y ago

If hotels had two bathrooms we’d probably go back to hotels. But instead they have single low-privacy bathrooms.

kayfox 7y ago
Book adjoining rooms?

saturdaysaint 7y ago

Funny, having young kids is what has sent me back to hotels (at least for the time being), simply because they are mostly designed with accessibility and some level of child-proofing. Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Cooping the kids up in a grown-up oriented space with fragile table decorations they can't touch can be exhausting.

ceejayoz 7y ago
> Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Letting toddlers run up and down the hallways is a good way to make you the most hated guest in the hotel.
organsnyder 7y ago
Depends on how many kids, and their ages. Between the ages of ~2-8, they're going to bed much earlier than you, and they won't fall asleep if you're still in the room. Add multiple kids—especially different ages with different bedtime routines—and a single room (or even a suite) can be challenging. We have a favorite AirBnB listing in one town we visit frequently (to see family that doesn't have space to host us) that has some fragile decorations. When we arrive, we do a quick sweep and put them all up high. We're also up-front with the host that we have small children, so they're free to reject our stay if they'd prefer. So far, it's never been an issue.
iamaelephant 7y ago
> Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity. Please, PLEASE don't do this. You don't know what time people are trying to get some sleep in their rooms. Not everyone keeps your schedule.
- duxup 7y ago
  You can wander around with your toddler without waking folks up.

sailfast 7y ago

Because I have kids (they're smaller, under 7) I can't really risk getting shafted at an AirBnB. Our experiences were so up and down that I rarely look to the site anymore for options. Suite hotels are prevalent, and work great for families, and you can be relatively certain it'll be a fine place to hang your hat for the night. For longer-term rentals, I find it's best to work through local property managers or maybe VRBO, where you're dealing with the person more directly. That said, the destination probably makes a HUGE difference in terms of how you are treated. The fact that AirBnB's rating system is so gamed that you can't trust any reviews, and the fact that their policies for refunds skew towards the property owners and not guests means that my trust in the site is low. I'd probably only risk it again if there are hotels around as backups. That said, I'm also typically looking for cheaper places, so the scam-level density is probably higher.

greggman2 7y ago

I've stayed at 22 airbnb's 11 were fine. 11 had issues most with false advertising in some form or another. One listed the wrong location and if they had listed the correct location I would not have rented even though the room's interior matched. A few claimed to include onsite parking but didn't which of course is very inconvenient. The last one that did that claimed "Easy Street Parking" as AirBnb's blatant lie. I usually had to park a mile way or pay for a $25 a night garage a few blocks away. One claimed wifi but was actually just stealing it from the neighbors and it only worked in a corner of the apartment if lucky. Another who I asked if their heaters worked, because a previous one was cold, said yes but when I got their the heater was as loud as a vacuum cleaner and their wifi had a notices "don't use much as it will run out". This for a place I expected to get work done. AirBnb in Japan is full of listing claiming 2 or 3 bedrooms but that actually only have 1 and this isn't a cultural issue. Look at any J-apartment rental site and there is zero ambiguity about what 1, 2, and 3 bedrooms are. It bugs me that YC appears to have absolutely no policy of conduct for the companies they fund. It's totally within their power to say in so many words "be evil and we'll pull your funding and report you to the authorities". IMO AirBnB is complicit in these issues. There is no punishment for bad listings and often AirBnB doesn't even have the options in their system to list them correctly. They even removed my review that included pictures of proof.

ilamont 7y ago
I have a similar rate with AirBnb -- 50% were great, the rest had "issues," which ranged from exaggerated claims ("minutes from downtown") to serious safety problems. Agree that Airbnb's policies (or lack of them) are contributing to the situation -- for instance, no serious punishment for false advertising. But I have a hard time dumping bad policies on YC's plate, or demanding that YC "report you to the authorities" unless criminal activity/negligence is involved.
harryh 7y ago
YC owns a tiny tiny piece of AirBnB. They definitely do not have any sort of power over the issues that you bring up.
- 7y ago

iamsb 7y ago

I really used to like Airbnb, but for the same usage - family vacations. But after couple of bad experiences, where host canceled while we were on the way, I prefer holiday homes which are professionally managed and have better contracts.

pklem 7y ago

The only bad experience I had was a decent looking apartment type room in a house (from the pictures), but it ended up being the moldy basement of the house, and the bedroom didn't have an egress window. It wasn't unbearable, but it wasn't good either. However, you can't go wrong with superhosts. I've never had a bad experience with them.

faster 7y ago

I use a Chrome extension to show the true cost per night on Airbnb. I find the fees variable enough that I want to see the real price as part of my analysis of listings. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-night-co/lijeilcglmadpkbengpkfnkpmcehecfe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n... There might be others, but this one has worked well for me. No affiliation, just a happy user.

throwaway35784 7y ago
You have to hack them to get the real price? That seems profoundly wrong to me.
hispanic 7y ago
This used to be an issue with Airbnb, but I believe they fixed/changed that a year or two ago. The one line item they leave out of the total price on the search results is "Occupancy taxes and fees", which I can understand.

throwaway35784 7y ago

What does this have to do with the artice? You've had luck with Airbnb. You're just saying oh it's a company fraught with fraud and deception since its inception, but that's fine. My kids get their own room. This company has no moral compass. Why are you advertising for it? Distracting from the reality of the company described in the article? You know it has illegally ruined communities in the name of profit, right?

m00x 7y ago

I also have had great experiences on Airbnb, with only a few less than desirable ones, but the fact that Airbnb isn't refunding these people, and not paying the extra cost for the last-minute accommodations they had to take in is extremely disturbing and makes me completely lose faith in the platform. If Airbnb would take fraud seriously and refund people who have been defrauded on their platform, it would be fine. The fact that they push the risks of fraud to the customer and refuse to pay for reparations is not acceptable.

oh_hello 7y ago

I also have repeatedly used AirBnB in the past to try to make life easier with children. After getting burned repeatedly, I gave up. You can book a place like Embassy Suites for a similar amount of money and have a bit more space than a standard hotel room. It just isn't worth the hassle of researching AirBnB listings and dealing with the fallout from the bad ones to me anymore.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

If you haven't tried recently, a lot of traditional booking sites (like Booking.com) now have a pretty extensive apartment rental catalogue. When I'm going somewhere for more than a couple of days, I'd much rather have an entire apartment. I used to use AirBNB to book a full-fledged apartment. But now I just use Booking.com for everything. It also used to be the case that AirBNB had some really nice places for pretty cheap. I think now that the business is more mature, it's not as easy to find really great discounts. Any more, it seems like the better value is on Booking.com, too!

dreamcompiler 7y ago

Exactly this. For one or two people, Airbnb isn't lot cheaper than hotels. The big win is when the traveling group is more than two people. That gets very expensive at hotels because you usually have to book more than one room.

zwayhowder 7y ago

As a family we do the same, but never in the US, we've been caught in a couple of scams the same as this article, fortunately when we were traveling for business not as a family, but still. AirBnB in Australia, Japan & the UK has never been a problem for me. The USA has a 50% scam rate so far.

vlunkr 7y ago

I'm sure most people have fine experiences, but this is more than just "reporting negative experiences". This is a probably super profitable scam, and I'm sure it's not the only one, since there really aren't performing any sort of checks on hosts or properties.

kmonsen 7y ago

Yeah, if it is me and my wife we go hotel 90% of the time at least now. If it is more family members coming, like my parents or her parents, we will book an airbnb so everyone can get their own room and we can eat together etc.

personlurking 7y ago

>The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. I just spent 7 days (20h total) trying to make one booking. Tons of reading between the lines and analyzing involved, as well as bad or non-responsive potential hosts. To top it off, AirBnb Support the whole time was very poor.

cnst 7y ago

There are hotels with laundry rooms; and many chains have suites that give you an extra room, including doors, or connecting rooms. Very often the price difference isn't that significant. (Given how expensive some Airbnb's are, booking with points or through various deal sites is often much cheaper for a proper hotel rooms, too.)

homakov 7y ago

Speaking of "long analyze" have a look at my script - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420140

hispanic 7y ago

> The main downside for me concerning AirBnb is it takes a long time to analyze the listings to find quality accommodations. Completely agree. If you don't want to put in the time or effort required to analyze for “assumed”, “missing” , and “bonus” amenities, scrutinize each listing’s description, photos, and guest reviews, and sniff out the nature of each Airbnb and the host’s motivations, I say stay away from Airbnb. More thoughts here - https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-book-airbnbs https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... The more negative comments I read here, the more I think that most people shouldn't use Airbnb. With that being said, I've been happy with Airbnb, warts and all.