6 ms·

Airbnb racks up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses -- WSJ

157 points by hkmurakami 7y ago

hkmurakami 7y ago
This is a duplicate of this earlier submission of the WSJ article, which got flagged down from the front page to oblivion by those with a vested interest in not giving the story the attention it deserves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22639181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22639181
- keeganpoppen 7y ago
  well, here i am with another upvote, ready to give it another whirl xD
- parthdesai 7y ago
  I have seen weird things happen with Airbnb articles on HN. They are on front page for a very short period of time and then boom they are gone.
  - seattle_spring 7y ago
    My guess is because every time there's an article on them, the comments ar unrelated complaints about some bad experience they had with Airbnb 3 years ago.
  - dang 7y ago
    There have been a lot of Airbnb threads, often negative, on HN's front page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=airbnb%20comments%3E5&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Perceptions like this are usually sample bias, since we weight the things we notice more heavily, and what we notice is conditioned by our pre-existing opinions.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  WSJ's paywall also has its critics.
- dang 7y ago
  The opposite is the case: we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... In this case, though, we downweighted the story the same way we've downweighted nearly every secondary coronavirus story, for exactly the same reason: otherwise the front page would have consisted of nothing else for the last week or more. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643249
  - hkmurakami 7y ago
    I'm not insinuating that YC moderation is at fault here. Unfortunately, there are plenty of others who'd be incentivized to flag an article in such a coordinated manner.
    - dang 7y ago
      That definitely wasn't the case with that submission. Airbnb threads, by the way, invariably turn into the same generic debate about Airbnb that some people seem to want to have over and over again: "I had a bad experience" vs. "I had a good experience". (Variations: "Airbnb ruined my neighborhood." "They rented the place next door to noisy people." And so on.) Just look at the comments in this thread. HN moderators are trained to downweight such repetition, because it doesn't serve curiosity, which is what this site exists for. For some reason, Airbnb is one of the topics that people (or rather, commenters inclined to post in such threads) seem unable to bring curiosity to.
      - hkmurakami 7y ago
        dang, this just went from front page to #347 in the last 10 minutes. I agree that this thread has a lot of "bad experience / good experience" posts that aren't informative or productive (I'm actually amazed at how much worse this thread is compared to the previous one), but if HN Mods are behind this latest downweighting, then I don't think you've given it enough time to have substantive comments (ex: the fate of longtime employees' options which are going to hit the 10 year expiration) be posted given that it's only been on the front page for a brief amount of time. If Mods aren't responsible for this precipitous drop (which would be my instinct), then that's another problem all together. Anyways, as a fellow mod on a different site, thanks for your team's work. I know it's not easy.
gpu_explorer 7y ago
Not used Airbnb too often because they had a very bad effect in Europe and other places. Really I wonder how they might not make money. It seems very easy to make money in this model. They do not even subsidize like ride share from anything I ever heard about. Why would anyone conceal this story if already it is written in the Wall Street Journal? Is this because it is worse for such a story to appear on Hacker News?
j-conn 7y ago
I had to cancel a ~$3,000 booking, and they made it incredibly easy through the app. The host was also very gracious and understanding in her reply to the optional message I sent with the cancelation. Very impressive customer-centric approach. I’m now much more likely to book with them again in the future.
outside1234 7y ago
AirBnB, given the current situation, is going to fail unless they jettison about 70% of staff.
- e12e 7y ago
  I can't see how Airbnb isn't in a far better position than hotels. They have no fixed expenses proportional to their untapped capacity (free rooms), no cleaning staff or receptionists. Airbnb hosts, are a different matter.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    The superhosts / people who are running whole homes as AirBnB's are probably the worst off here.
  - nikkwong 7y ago
    Being an Airbnb host was already becoming borderline unprofitable in my metropolitan area (Seattle) as they are marketing very heavily here resulting in a glut in short-term rental housing-supply. This drove the nightly rate I could command down, and—before this current crisis, the decision between short-term and long-term tenancy was a matter of debate. Now, without any guests visiting the area in the near future, the decision is a no brainer—I'm moving to long-term tenancy and may never be an Airbnb host again. I am currently a host for rooms in my primary residence as well as for entire houses and am currently looking to turn them both types into long instead of short-term rental situations. I'm suspecting many other hosts are in a similar situation.
- redisman 7y ago
  If the current situation lasts for very long, almost no business can handle that without help. Even online-only services will at some point start to feel the pain from the real world.
jmpman 7y ago
First Airbnb use, I booked a week just outside a national park. While driving, just before I arrived, the host cancelled, leaving me with an option of cancelling my trip, or a $400/night Best Western. Airbnb should have compensated me for that one. I’ll never use them.
- draw_down 7y ago
  If that situation plays out enough times, they won’t be around to boycott.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  All too common.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Was this something that happened recently amid the pandemic?
  - jmpman 7y ago
    No, two summers ago.
    - seattle_spring 7y ago
      Then it's irrelevant to the OP. Just because there's an article about a company doesn't mean the comments need to be filled with random unrelated grievances from years past.
      - jmpman 7y ago
        I think it’s relevant that the company doesn’t have as excellent of a track record as people may think.
- rsgalloway 7y ago
  Airbnb is simply a listing service. If you have a problem, blame the host, not the platform. My advice: book with superhosts or listings with at least 4.5 stars. Maybe you just don't like the idea of vacation rentals in general? If that's the case, go to a hotel instead, but don't advocate taking away this option for everyone else.
henvic 7y ago
Maybe Airbnb lost in the short term, but maybe it pays off in the long run. I had to cancel bookings both on Airbnb and on Hotels.com (which I used to be a gold member; now silver), and the experience on Airbnb was perfect. Meanwhile, I lost some money and time calling Hotels.com (two hours in total). I'll definitely consider Airbnb more often from now on after this great costumer experience.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  Sure thing not-an-airbnb employee at a company that is going down ;-)
  - dang 7y ago
    This breaks the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
- chx 7y ago
  > We are now offering Guests full refunds and Hosts no-charge cancellations for reservations booked on or before March 14th with a check-in date of April 14th or earlier. Well, that's just swell. First of all, this won't be over by April 14th, for example https://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/coronavirus/ https://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/co... "Events at the MCC will be restricted through May 10, 2020." second if you have a longer trip which got cancelled because originally it was scheduled to start before April 14th then all your bookings are toast. I had zero problems cancelling my hotels.com reservation at Dorval though.
alpha_squared 7y ago
I tried to cancel and was rejected because I was one day outside the window of "check-ins between March 14 and April 13" (my check-in was March 13, a Friday). The kicker is that I canceled on March 12, when the policy stated "for check-ins on or after March 13 and before April 1". They changed the policy over the weekend to the new time frame and rejected my request after the weekend. Luckily, the host refunded me what they could, but Airbnb kept the service fees and occupancy taxes. The skeptic in me thinks they changed it to March 14 because they could cut out the people who check into places on Fridays (which I often do and assume others, too).
- ndiscussion 7y ago
  file a chargeback
redisman 7y ago
It was certainly better than the pretty crappy experience I've had canceling with them before. We couldn't stay at our AirBnb because the host had applied some kind of a sealant in their very small place and it was extremely fumey and giving us headaches. After talking to their outsourced support for a while about their absurd requests like "send us a picture of the odor", they decided to keep over $100 for service fees etc. while me and the host both got fleeced. This time it was more of a no questions asked full refund.
lokl 7y ago
No problem cancelling my Airbnb bookings, but I'm slightly concerned about receiving service fees as coupons. The last time I used an Airbnb coupon and then cancelled that reservation, I lost the value of the coupon (even though the cancellation was within the 100% refund period). An extremely minor concern given what's going on, of course.
ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
We have had fantastic guest and host experiences with Airbnb. Our friends were hosting in Wellington when an earthquake struck. Airbnb refunded all bookings and sent them flowers. We had a booking for a concert in Christchurch the weekend of the mosque shooting. Concert was canceled and Airbnb issued a refund. And I’ve just had another refund due to not being able to travel this weekend. 10/10, would use again.
iamleppert 7y ago
Good bye! Can't stand anything that has to do with this lousy company!
nerfhammer 7y ago
Isn't the whole point of AirBnB that they don't have the liabilities of physical hotels?
ProfessorLayton 7y ago
Curious to know what this means to employees looking forward to a big IPO this year. It seems many AirBnB employees' fortunes have very suddenly turned from having a handsome payoff to either having to wait indefinitely, a substantial haircut on that payday, and possibly having a hard time during a recession (along with the rest of us). Crazy times
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  Airbnb is known to be approaching the 10 year deadline on ISOs, which they were hoping to clear through a 2020 IPO. Hopefully they come up with a creative solution with their legal team to ameliorate this.
electriclove 7y ago
VRBO did not step up in the same way. I will never use them again and will look to use Airbnb in the future.

157 points by hkmurakami 7y ago

This is a duplicate of this earlier submission of the WSJ article, which got flagged down from the front page to oblivion by those with a vested interest in not giving the story the attention it deserves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22639181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22639181

keeganpoppen 7y ago
well, here i am with another upvote, ready to give it another whirl xD
parthdesai 7y ago
I have seen weird things happen with Airbnb articles on HN. They are on front page for a very short period of time and then boom they are gone.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  My guess is because every time there's an article on them, the comments ar unrelated complaints about some bad experience they had with Airbnb 3 years ago.
- dang 7y ago
  There have been a lot of Airbnb threads, often negative, on HN's front page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=airbnb%20comments%3E5&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Perceptions like this are usually sample bias, since we weight the things we notice more heavily, and what we notice is conditioned by our pre-existing opinions.
dredmorbius 7y ago
WSJ's paywall also has its critics.
dang 7y ago
The opposite is the case: we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are involved. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... In this case, though, we downweighted the story the same way we've downweighted nearly every secondary coronavirus story, for exactly the same reason: otherwise the front page would have consisted of nothing else for the last week or more. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643249
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  I'm not insinuating that YC moderation is at fault here. Unfortunately, there are plenty of others who'd be incentivized to flag an article in such a coordinated manner.
  - dang 7y ago
    That definitely wasn't the case with that submission. Airbnb threads, by the way, invariably turn into the same generic debate about Airbnb that some people seem to want to have over and over again: "I had a bad experience" vs. "I had a good experience". (Variations: "Airbnb ruined my neighborhood." "They rented the place next door to noisy people." And so on.) Just look at the comments in this thread. HN moderators are trained to downweight such repetition, because it doesn't serve curiosity, which is what this site exists for. For some reason, Airbnb is one of the topics that people (or rather, commenters inclined to post in such threads) seem unable to bring curiosity to.
    - hkmurakami 7y ago
      dang, this just went from front page to #347 in the last 10 minutes. I agree that this thread has a lot of "bad experience / good experience" posts that aren't informative or productive (I'm actually amazed at how much worse this thread is compared to the previous one), but if HN Mods are behind this latest downweighting, then I don't think you've given it enough time to have substantive comments (ex: the fate of longtime employees' options which are going to hit the 10 year expiration) be posted given that it's only been on the front page for a brief amount of time. If Mods aren't responsible for this precipitous drop (which would be my instinct), then that's another problem all together. Anyways, as a fellow mod on a different site, thanks for your team's work. I know it's not easy.

gpu_explorer 7y ago

Not used Airbnb too often because they had a very bad effect in Europe and other places. Really I wonder how they might not make money. It seems very easy to make money in this model. They do not even subsidize like ride share from anything I ever heard about. Why would anyone conceal this story if already it is written in the Wall Street Journal? Is this because it is worse for such a story to appear on Hacker News?

j-conn 7y ago

I had to cancel a ~$3,000 booking, and they made it incredibly easy through the app. The host was also very gracious and understanding in her reply to the optional message I sent with the cancelation. Very impressive customer-centric approach. I’m now much more likely to book with them again in the future.

outside1234 7y ago

AirBnB, given the current situation, is going to fail unless they jettison about 70% of staff.

e12e 7y ago
I can't see how Airbnb isn't in a far better position than hotels. They have no fixed expenses proportional to their untapped capacity (free rooms), no cleaning staff or receptionists. Airbnb hosts, are a different matter.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  The superhosts / people who are running whole homes as AirBnB's are probably the worst off here.
- nikkwong 7y ago
  Being an Airbnb host was already becoming borderline unprofitable in my metropolitan area (Seattle) as they are marketing very heavily here resulting in a glut in short-term rental housing-supply. This drove the nightly rate I could command down, and—before this current crisis, the decision between short-term and long-term tenancy was a matter of debate. Now, without any guests visiting the area in the near future, the decision is a no brainer—I'm moving to long-term tenancy and may never be an Airbnb host again. I am currently a host for rooms in my primary residence as well as for entire houses and am currently looking to turn them both types into long instead of short-term rental situations. I'm suspecting many other hosts are in a similar situation.
redisman 7y ago
If the current situation lasts for very long, almost no business can handle that without help. Even online-only services will at some point start to feel the pain from the real world.

jmpman 7y ago

First Airbnb use, I booked a week just outside a national park. While driving, just before I arrived, the host cancelled, leaving me with an option of cancelling my trip, or a $400/night Best Western. Airbnb should have compensated me for that one. I’ll never use them.

draw_down 7y ago
If that situation plays out enough times, they won’t be around to boycott.
amiga_500 7y ago
All too common.
seattle_spring 7y ago
Was this something that happened recently amid the pandemic?
- jmpman 7y ago
  No, two summers ago.
  - seattle_spring 7y ago
    Then it's irrelevant to the OP. Just because there's an article about a company doesn't mean the comments need to be filled with random unrelated grievances from years past.
    - jmpman 7y ago
      I think it’s relevant that the company doesn’t have as excellent of a track record as people may think.
rsgalloway 7y ago
Airbnb is simply a listing service. If you have a problem, blame the host, not the platform. My advice: book with superhosts or listings with at least 4.5 stars. Maybe you just don't like the idea of vacation rentals in general? If that's the case, go to a hotel instead, but don't advocate taking away this option for everyone else.

henvic 7y ago

Maybe Airbnb lost in the short term, but maybe it pays off in the long run. I had to cancel bookings both on Airbnb and on Hotels.com (which I used to be a gold member; now silver), and the experience on Airbnb was perfect. Meanwhile, I lost some money and time calling Hotels.com (two hours in total). I'll definitely consider Airbnb more often from now on after this great costumer experience.

amiga_500 7y ago
Sure thing not-an-airbnb employee at a company that is going down ;-)
- dang 7y ago
  This breaks the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
chx 7y ago
> We are now offering Guests full refunds and Hosts no-charge cancellations for reservations booked on or before March 14th with a check-in date of April 14th or earlier. Well, that's just swell. First of all, this won't be over by April 14th, for example https://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/coronavirus/ https://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/co... "Events at the MCC will be restricted through May 10, 2020." second if you have a longer trip which got cancelled because originally it was scheduled to start before April 14th then all your bookings are toast. I had zero problems cancelling my hotels.com reservation at Dorval though.

alpha_squared 7y ago

I tried to cancel and was rejected because I was one day outside the window of "check-ins between March 14 and April 13" (my check-in was March 13, a Friday). The kicker is that I canceled on March 12, when the policy stated "for check-ins on or after March 13 and before April 1". They changed the policy over the weekend to the new time frame and rejected my request after the weekend. Luckily, the host refunded me what they could, but Airbnb kept the service fees and occupancy taxes. The skeptic in me thinks they changed it to March 14 because they could cut out the people who check into places on Fridays (which I often do and assume others, too).

ndiscussion 7y ago
file a chargeback

redisman 7y ago

It was certainly better than the pretty crappy experience I've had canceling with them before. We couldn't stay at our AirBnb because the host had applied some kind of a sealant in their very small place and it was extremely fumey and giving us headaches. After talking to their outsourced support for a while about their absurd requests like "send us a picture of the odor", they decided to keep over $100 for service fees etc. while me and the host both got fleeced. This time it was more of a no questions asked full refund.

lokl 7y ago

No problem cancelling my Airbnb bookings, but I'm slightly concerned about receiving service fees as coupons. The last time I used an Airbnb coupon and then cancelled that reservation, I lost the value of the coupon (even though the cancellation was within the 100% refund period). An extremely minor concern given what's going on, of course.

ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago

We have had fantastic guest and host experiences with Airbnb. Our friends were hosting in Wellington when an earthquake struck. Airbnb refunded all bookings and sent them flowers. We had a booking for a concert in Christchurch the weekend of the mosque shooting. Concert was canceled and Airbnb issued a refund. And I’ve just had another refund due to not being able to travel this weekend. 10/10, would use again.

iamleppert 7y ago

Good bye! Can't stand anything that has to do with this lousy company!

nerfhammer 7y ago

Isn't the whole point of AirBnB that they don't have the liabilities of physical hotels?

ProfessorLayton 7y ago

Curious to know what this means to employees looking forward to a big IPO this year. It seems many AirBnB employees' fortunes have very suddenly turned from having a handsome payoff to either having to wait indefinitely, a substantial haircut on that payday, and possibly having a hard time during a recession (along with the rest of us). Crazy times

hkmurakami 7y ago
Airbnb is known to be approaching the 10 year deadline on ISOs, which they were hoping to clear through a 2020 IPO. Hopefully they come up with a creative solution with their legal team to ameliorate this.

electriclove 7y ago

VRBO did not step up in the same way. I will never use them again and will look to use Airbnb in the future.