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>> 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 desc

by 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.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    >HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?
  - modelica 7y ago
    HotelTonight always had awful customer support. They sold me a hotel room during February fashion week in NYC. Some sort of mistake happened with either HT or the hotel, and the room was not available upon my 11pm arrival. Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable. After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city. Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.
- wpietri 7y ago
  One important difference is that hotels get much larger review volumes than a single AirBnB, meaning sites like TripAdvisor can give you a good picture of what the place is really like. Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general. A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Not sure I feel the same way in my experience. I find airbnb photos to be accurate for the actual place I’ll be in, even if they might be leaving some details out. I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up. Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  For one thing, hotels have a robust ecosystem for anonymous reviews and established reputation.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  With a hotel, if you complain and write a harsh review, you don't get penalized yourself. In OP, people complained and got B.S. made up about them, which impacts their future ability to travel. The author didn't even write a review. The incentives are all there to only write the happy stuff for future travelers. You, as that future travel really can't trust the reviews. At least at a hotel, with its more numerous but possibly fake happy reviews, you can look at what the bad ones say, because they won't be incentivized out of existence.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > How is this different from a hotel? It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.
- MrQuincle 7y ago
  Note also that if a host cancels on you at the last moment, you can't give a negative review at all. That would never happen with a hotel.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    This does happen with hotels, in fact a few posts up someone does mention this happening to them. That said, in December my ex wife had an Airbnb cancel just before her trip. She had to find another place in a hurry at twice the price.
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      You can usually leave a negative review for a hotel even if you didn't stay at it. AirBnB doesn't allow it. Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.
  - vinay427 7y ago
    I have seen the automated messages along the lines of "host canceled booking 24h before check-in" on many or even most Airbnb listings. Is this not still a thing? You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.
    - MrQuincle 7y ago
      Yes, that's indeed nowadays happening. In practice if they cancel two days before you arrive and you have fly to another continent to stay somewhere, it still sucks. Add to that for example a fair like CES and no normally priced hotel alternatives, and it's a big issue.
lb1lf 7y ago
> Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points. -I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country, but after using AirBnb 30+ times traveling with wife and three kids in Northern/Central Europe, I’ve only had two issues - once the place we were to stay was double-booked (and we arrived last!); the other it turned out what was described as a ‘bedroom’ in the listing was a storage room with no windows, hot water tank, a few shelves packed with all sorts of junk and barely room for a dirty mattress on the floor. In both cases AirBnb promptly decided I was due a refund, my only minor gripe being it took a couple of weeks before the money was actually refunded.
- bluGill 7y ago
  I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. (good customer service says the replacement will be better, hotels try to reserve their best suites until last just to ensure that they have the better room around just in case). I'm some new city and I want to get my family to sleep...
  - lb1lf 7y ago
    >I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. -Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have no fuss at all - but when a bad experience occurred, AirBnb were better than I had feared with regards to setting things right. The double booking was after a ten-hour drive with kids aged 10, 5 and 3 in the back seat. I didn’t need that. Luckily, the host had friends nearby who shacked us up for the night, so disaster was averted - but this was way out in the Swedish boonies and I envisaged having to drive another couple of hours before finding a hotel.
  - 205guy 7y ago
    To me it sounds as if you are saying "I want the charm\location\social experience of staying with a local resident AND I want the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of the hotel industry AND I don't want to pay for the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of a hotel." As with software, pick two.
weberc2 7y ago
> need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties. I've never had a problem with this, but I also don't bother staying anywhere that doesn't have a 4-star or better average. If you just set your filter at >= 4 stars, then these problems go away, and we also comb through the reviews of our top picks to make sure there's nothing unexpected. Consequently, we've had nothing but good experiences.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  AirBnB doesn't have anonymous reviews and there is extreme social pressure to only give 4 and 5 star review.
- astura 7y ago
  TFA addresses why reviews are inflated and misleading: >Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future. Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review. Choose the latter option, and you could come across as too demanding by other prospective hosts, or, in extreme cases, even receive a retaliatory review.
  - pklem 7y ago
    I don't think this is entirely accurate. What's going on here is that Airbnb has essentially made a pass/fail review system, where 5 stars is pass and anything less is fail. Thus, short of a visit being completely terrible and the host awful, I would feel bad giving anything less than a 5 star review, since it would adversely affect the listing and the host. On one hand, this does encourage hosts (and guests I suppose) to do their best. On the other hand, this eliminates honest reviewing, making reviews either "Best stay ever!!!!!1 (5/5)" or "This place sucks! The host is terrible!(1/5)"
nathancahill 7y ago
Yes. I'm in charge of booking a ski trip for ~15 friends each year, and the amount of reading between the lines I have to do to make sure everyone has a comfortable place to sleep is crazy. Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds. Hotels have it right up front: 2 Queens. Period.
- jonlucc 7y ago
  This isn't foolproof either, though. I booked a hotel for 2 people in Chicago for an anniversary trip. We arrived to find the hotel had 4 very narrow and short bunkbeds. I checked the booking and it makes no mention of this. The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    There are also hotel brands and official indeoendent star ratings.
  - tomaskafka 7y ago
    KingsNQueens. Like AirBnB, but for people who want to know what they're getting :).
- dawnerd 7y ago
  What ridiculous is when you try searching for 'whole homes' and you end up getting 'apartments' which are nothing more than someones basement. Airbnb seems to encourage this too by letting people put whatever tags they want. It's kind of a joke. In addition, hiding the address makes it hard to double check on google street view. Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.
  - athenot 7y ago
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
> 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 Sadly that sounds like mort advertising of everything, so I can't say I'm surprised.
briandear 7y ago
> Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is As does every single hotel ever in existence.

by gesman 7y ago

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.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  >HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?
- modelica 7y ago
  HotelTonight always had awful customer support. They sold me a hotel room during February fashion week in NYC. Some sort of mistake happened with either HT or the hotel, and the room was not available upon my 11pm arrival. Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable. After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city. Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.
wpietri 7y ago
One important difference is that hotels get much larger review volumes than a single AirBnB, meaning sites like TripAdvisor can give you a good picture of what the place is really like. Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general. A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Not sure I feel the same way in my experience. I find airbnb photos to be accurate for the actual place I’ll be in, even if they might be leaving some details out. I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up. Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.
lonelappde 7y ago
For one thing, hotels have a robust ecosystem for anonymous reviews and established reputation.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
With a hotel, if you complain and write a harsh review, you don't get penalized yourself. In OP, people complained and got B.S. made up about them, which impacts their future ability to travel. The author didn't even write a review. The incentives are all there to only write the happy stuff for future travelers. You, as that future travel really can't trust the reviews. At least at a hotel, with its more numerous but possibly fake happy reviews, you can look at what the bad ones say, because they won't be incentivized out of existence.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> How is this different from a hotel? It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.
MrQuincle 7y ago
Note also that if a host cancels on you at the last moment, you can't give a negative review at all. That would never happen with a hotel.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  This does happen with hotels, in fact a few posts up someone does mention this happening to them. That said, in December my ex wife had an Airbnb cancel just before her trip. She had to find another place in a hurry at twice the price.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    You can usually leave a negative review for a hotel even if you didn't stay at it. AirBnB doesn't allow it. Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.
- vinay427 7y ago
  I have seen the automated messages along the lines of "host canceled booking 24h before check-in" on many or even most Airbnb listings. Is this not still a thing? You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.
  - MrQuincle 7y ago
    Yes, that's indeed nowadays happening. In practice if they cancel two days before you arrive and you have fly to another continent to stay somewhere, it still sucks. Add to that for example a fair like CES and no normally priced hotel alternatives, and it's a big issue.

lb1lf 7y ago

> Try to get refund from AirBnb for misprepresentation or deliberate omissions of negative points. -I don’t know whether their policy differs from country to country, but after using AirBnb 30+ times traveling with wife and three kids in Northern/Central Europe, I’ve only had two issues - once the place we were to stay was double-booked (and we arrived last!); the other it turned out what was described as a ‘bedroom’ in the listing was a storage room with no windows, hot water tank, a few shelves packed with all sorts of junk and barely room for a dirty mattress on the floor. In both cases AirBnb promptly decided I was due a refund, my only minor gripe being it took a couple of weeks before the money was actually refunded.

bluGill 7y ago
I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. (good customer service says the replacement will be better, hotels try to reserve their best suites until last just to ensure that they have the better room around just in case). I'm some new city and I want to get my family to sleep...
- lb1lf 7y ago
  >I don't want a refund in either of those cases so much as a place to stay that matches my requirements NOW. -Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have no fuss at all - but when a bad experience occurred, AirBnb were better than I had feared with regards to setting things right. The double booking was after a ten-hour drive with kids aged 10, 5 and 3 in the back seat. I didn’t need that. Luckily, the host had friends nearby who shacked us up for the night, so disaster was averted - but this was way out in the Swedish boonies and I envisaged having to drive another couple of hours before finding a hotel.
- 205guy 7y ago
  To me it sounds as if you are saying "I want the charm\location\social experience of staying with a local resident AND I want the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of the hotel industry AND I don't want to pay for the convenience/professionalism/capital resources of a hotel." As with software, pick two.

weberc2 7y ago

> need to read "between the lines" of misleading representations of properties. I've never had a problem with this, but I also don't bother staying anywhere that doesn't have a 4-star or better average. If you just set your filter at >= 4 stars, then these problems go away, and we also comb through the reviews of our top picks to make sure there's nothing unexpected. Consequently, we've had nothing but good experiences.

lonelappde 7y ago
AirBnB doesn't have anonymous reviews and there is extreme social pressure to only give 4 and 5 star review.
astura 7y ago
TFA addresses why reviews are inflated and misleading: >Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future. Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review. Choose the latter option, and you could come across as too demanding by other prospective hosts, or, in extreme cases, even receive a retaliatory review.
- pklem 7y ago
  I don't think this is entirely accurate. What's going on here is that Airbnb has essentially made a pass/fail review system, where 5 stars is pass and anything less is fail. Thus, short of a visit being completely terrible and the host awful, I would feel bad giving anything less than a 5 star review, since it would adversely affect the listing and the host. On one hand, this does encourage hosts (and guests I suppose) to do their best. On the other hand, this eliminates honest reviewing, making reviews either "Best stay ever!!!!!1 (5/5)" or "This place sucks! The host is terrible!(1/5)"

nathancahill 7y ago

Yes. I'm in charge of booking a ski trip for ~15 friends each year, and the amount of reading between the lines I have to do to make sure everyone has a comfortable place to sleep is crazy. Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds. Hotels have it right up front: 2 Queens. Period.

jonlucc 7y ago
This isn't foolproof either, though. I booked a hotel for 2 people in Chicago for an anniversary trip. We arrived to find the hotel had 4 very narrow and short bunkbeds. I checked the booking and it makes no mention of this. The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  There are also hotel brands and official indeoendent star ratings.
- tomaskafka 7y ago
  KingsNQueens. Like AirBnB, but for people who want to know what they're getting :).
dawnerd 7y ago
What ridiculous is when you try searching for 'whole homes' and you end up getting 'apartments' which are nothing more than someones basement. Airbnb seems to encourage this too by letting people put whatever tags they want. It's kind of a joke. In addition, hiding the address makes it hard to double check on google street view. Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.
- athenot 7y ago

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

> 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 Sadly that sounds like mort advertising of everything, so I can't say I'm surprised.

briandear 7y ago

> Lots of property owners goes to great extends to make property look way better, bigger, nicer than it really is As does every single hotel ever in existence.