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My suggestion is in these rare cases, it should be on AirBnB to relocate you. You already paid them plenty in the booking fee, some basic assurance that you wil

by paulgb 7y ago

My suggestion is in these rare cases, it should be on AirBnB to relocate you. You already paid them plenty in the booking fee, some basic assurance that you will have a room to sleep in when you arrive should be part of that. Scammers will scam, but they will at least scam a victim (AirBnB) with the resources and incentives to root out the scam. In the current system, renters are stuck with such information asymmetry that they don't even know if they're being scammed or a pipe really did burst.

jzwinck 7y ago
One of the reasons Airbnb is cheaper than hotels is that fraud and safety costs are passed on to guests and hosts. This is part of the business model. Once you build all the protections people want, you may find yourself at the same prices hotels were charging, and that's not very unicorn.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  Also, like all new unicorn companies, they are doing business in an unregulated market. The wild west won’t last thats why they’re in the make as much money as fast as you can mode.
- paulgb 7y ago
  They're also cheaper than hotels because they allow people to exploit inventory that was otherwise sitting vacant. I agree that it's basically a form of regulatory arbitrage, but I'd argue that adding protections (as they already do for the property owners) is part of their competitive moat.
- briandear 7y ago
  But a lot of people are ok with slightly increased risk for lower prices overall. When you need a sure thing, book a hotel.
thw0rted 7y ago
I've used them maybe 3 times since they launched, but I always assumed that I did have this protection with AirBnB. I have had hosts ask me to avoid booking through the site and arrange payment outside the system, but I hesitated to do that because I figured the AirBnB fee paid for some "peace of mind" that I wasn't going to get shafted. If I wasn't buying that... what was the fee supposed to pay for?

by paulgb 7y ago

jzwinck 7y ago

One of the reasons Airbnb is cheaper than hotels is that fraud and safety costs are passed on to guests and hosts. This is part of the business model. Once you build all the protections people want, you may find yourself at the same prices hotels were charging, and that's not very unicorn.

onemoresoop 7y ago
Also, like all new unicorn companies, they are doing business in an unregulated market. The wild west won’t last thats why they’re in the make as much money as fast as you can mode.
paulgb 7y ago
They're also cheaper than hotels because they allow people to exploit inventory that was otherwise sitting vacant. I agree that it's basically a form of regulatory arbitrage, but I'd argue that adding protections (as they already do for the property owners) is part of their competitive moat.
briandear 7y ago
But a lot of people are ok with slightly increased risk for lower prices overall. When you need a sure thing, book a hotel.

thw0rted 7y ago

I've used them maybe 3 times since they launched, but I always assumed that I did have this protection with AirBnB. I have had hosts ask me to avoid booking through the site and arrange payment outside the system, but I hesitated to do that because I figured the AirBnB fee paid for some "peace of mind" that I wasn't going to get shafted. If I wasn't buying that... what was the fee supposed to pay for?