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Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away

173 points by bbharman 5y ago

ttyprintk 5y ago
Seems to me that a remote safety division is simply cheaper than contracting on-call security. They’ve been settling lawsuits when something happens beyond their control.
miked85 5y ago
I guess I am in the minority, but I have never understood this business. You would have to pay me to stay in someone else's house vs a hotel.
- switch007 5y ago
  Many hotels, to me, resemble offices (in the UK cities at least). They're in buildings with glass fronts, no opening windows, because they want to offer A/C but want to save money^H^H^H^H^H^H^ "the planet". With A/C I get a sore throat, with it off, I suffocate. In my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open. I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself. And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk"). So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.
- dannyw 5y ago
  I prefer Airbnbs over hotels because it's more fun, and it's nice to have all the amenities in a home. Proper kitchens with pantries, washing machines, backyards or balconies, etc. Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  It’s really a nice option when traveling with a large family. If you’re spread across four or five hotel rooms, you really spend much less time together than in a large house with a big common space. Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    The pre-AirBnB version is called an Apartment Hotel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel
  - noobermin 5y ago
    For some reason it isn't common in the US but elsewhere you can rent a flat specifically for this purpose usually with less ammenities like you'd expect from a hotel and hence not as expensive.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Or a group of friends. Pre-AirBnB, multiple times a group of us rented a house for a long weekend. Much nicer than being in a bunch of hotel rooms. AirBnB didn't pioneer vacation rentals but it did make it take off.
  - acheron 5y ago
    But that has nothing to do with Airbnb. People have been doing vacation rentals for decades.
    - pitaj 5y ago
      ... and AirBnB provides a streamlined experience connecting customers with owners.
      - dorchadas 5y ago
        And they've also helped completely destroy housing for locals in plenty of locations in the process as owners over-leverage themselves to buy up more and more property since they can rent it on AirBnB for more than they can rent it to locals.
- bognition 5y ago
  Theres a bunch of reasons. If you have a group of people or a family the experience of having a place of your own in a real neighborhood is way better than being in a vanilla hotel.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Me and my family have used Airbnb a bunch of times in various countries, and every time has been a great experience. Biggest issues with hotels are lack of space, privacy and noise. I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season. One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- francisofascii 5y ago
  So you would never stay in a beach house, lake house, or mountain lodge? Also in urban environments, the locations of private houses are sometimes much better: near parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, etc.
  - acheron 5y ago
    I remember doing house rental vacations with my family in something like 1987. Why do so many people seem to think Airbnb invented this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Airbnb provides more ratings, a standardized format for listings which makes it easier to review and compare them, and an easier online booking process that does a great job at handling currency conversion and different payment options.
    - weeblewobble 5y ago
      who said AirBnB invented house rentals? OP said they would never stay in someone else's house on vacation.
- cainxinth 5y ago
  Have you tried it? Prices have shot up, but back in the day, you could get a whole small house with a kitchen, laundry room, and multiple bedrooms, nicely appointed and clean for less than a three or four star hotel room. It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  It's less true now than it was a few years ago, but it's often a cheaper option.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I was always skeptical but once I started travelling with kids it became clear to me the giant holes in the hotel business model that AirBnB has disrupted. Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.
  - leesalminen 5y ago
    We’re also starting to find that out now that we have kids ;). There’s also just odd situations that don’t fit into the hotel model. Right now, I need a place to stay in Denver for 8 weeks with my wife, child, mother-in-law, and 2 dogs. We’re staying with my MIL for her knee replacement surgery recuperation. So, there can’t be any stairs, has to have a walk in shower, must have a kitchen and have 3 bedrooms. Impossible to find a hotel like this. We found a suitable AirBNB in about an hour.
  - z0ltan 5y ago
    Sounds like an American problem.
- hiidrew 5y ago
  I enjoy it when traveling alone, I usually look for hosts that are more open to interacting with their guests. Have met loads of interesting people through the app, some I still talk to occasionally.
- noobermin 5y ago
  After doing airbnbs I since have usually decided to stay in hotels when I travel because I just like the reliability in having things provided as well as other things like location, services, etc. Airbnb is always a hit or miss honestly, despite the cheaper price.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  There are some extremely nice places available on AirBnb, far nicer than most hotels I've been to.
- gquiniou 5y ago
  Very often is not someone's house but a property that has been bought, renovated and furnished specifically to be rented on Airbnb.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    Which means another property off the long-term rental market in the area, further contributing to housing crises worldwide.
- makecheck 5y ago
  There’s really no other way to get an experience like a private pool away from home, for example. The surroundings can often be much more peaceful too, e.g. a house may be in a quiet street and not in the middle of downtown.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  Hotels are the sanitized way to visit a place, which is fine for a lot of folks. But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    > I want to live as the locals, You do this in AirBnB by actively harming the locals. You do realize this right? Every AirBnB in a 'local' area is one less house for the actual locals to live in. It's becoming a huge problem in many cities in the world.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/LOSqD https://archive.md/LOSqD
bko 5y ago
The article mentions a rape in an Airbnb in New York. The suspect had keys, presumably picked up from a lax key exchange in a nearby bodega. The cops were called and Airbnb was notified. Airbnb payed for a hotel, offered to fly the victim's mother out, paid for their return flight, and paid $7 million to the victim. The perp was caught by police shortly after the incident. Part of the payout was that she couldn't talk about the incident and potentially implicate Airbnb. The alternative would be no payment and immediately drag this out in court very publicly. If I were the victim I would definitely prefer the option above or at least prefer to have that as an option. These kinds of things are incredibly rare and I'm glad we didn't have a news-cycle obsessing over something like this.
- dannyw 5y ago
  The article mentions a RAPE at knife point, not a robbery. "By the time she realized she wasn’t alone, the blade of a kitchen knife was pointing down at her. The stranger grabbed her, shoved her onto a bed, and raped her. Drunken revelers were wandering the streets outside, but the woman was too scared to scream." There is a HUGE difference...
  - bko 5y ago
    Sorry, I missed that. I'll edit my comment. The perpetrator was caught and presumably prosecuted. Again, what alternative chain of events would you have preferred?
    - okprod 5y ago
      That Airbnb take responsibility for its service offering end-to-end, in this case the key exchange. From the article it's obvious the company has no ethics and has tried to cover up shoddy/lax business practices from the beginning, so another alternative that could have helped is Airbnb being liable for damages in the millions/billions until they learn their lesson, or fold if they don't. Oh, it might also have been helpful to not wait two years to hear about this, but as we all know, those who use NDAs are always the best of people/organizations.
api 5y ago
Don’t hotels do this? That being said while I have never had an AirBnB nightmare. I have had some lulz. If I were female I would hesitate to use one if I were traveling alone.
victorbstan 5y ago
I literally thought they were working on something to “make nightmares go away”.
okprod 5y ago
If Airbnb actually cared they would have invested in their operations already; Chesky giving "a promise to verify the photographs, amenities, cleanliness, and safety of all the listings on Airbnb", which the article notes is underway, is ridiculous -- Shouldn't this be a bare minimum of this type of business before they start operating? Basically what the "safety team" does is how Logan Roy from the show Succession works -- do whatever you want, skirt ethics and laws, and then pay money and have people sign NDAs.
- dannyw 5y ago
  There's bigger issues IMO, based on the article: * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest. * Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in. * Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs. I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources. It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    > * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest. The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      AirBnB should just implement its own social scoring system. Apply it to everyone so they already have data for future hosts and guests. /s but I kinda want to see such a tech and head-explosions of the announcement.
jviotti 5y ago
While this is indeed a terrible thing, I fail to see a strong correlation to the fact that the attacker entered the building due to the keys being at the counter. That is a possible reason along a million more, such as the fact that the attacker could force the door's lock, get someone else from the building (an accomplice?) to give him illegal access. Pointing the blame at Airbnb therefore feels odd. Things like these can also happen (and they do, probably even more often) at your own place, and would you sue your landlord if so? Whether these things are more probable to happen at Airbnb is also a very hard thing to prove. IMO your own place might be riskier as an attacker can study your routine over time, which opens up more security holes. These type of attacks are probably outside anyone's control and I don't think the Airbnb places have an implicit responsibility to ensure a higher level of security than you have at your own place (it can be a Airbnb luxe feature, though?)
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  "They caught him and emptied his backpack, pulling out three incriminating items: a knife, one of the woman’s earrings, and a set of keys to the apartment."
tyingq 5y ago
s/Nightmares/Lawsuits and bad PR They aren't spending money out of some altruistic intention.
cad1 5y ago
Tomorrow's headline: "AirBnB Partners with Citizen App: Will Offer gig Security in All AirBnB Rentals" for additional fee
catern 5y ago
One minor point: >[...] difficult to draw useful conclusions about the correlation between the short-term rental industry and crime. Academic researchers say [...] limitations have frustrated their efforts to study the link. Only about a half-dozen scholarly studies have been carried out on the subject, and their findings are contradictory. Contradictory findings are a positive and useful result: They're evidence that there isn't in fact a link, that the two are uncorrelated. This is some tragic ignorance of statistics on the part of the journalist...
Taylor_OD 5y ago
I've used Airbnb a lot. I've had really incredibly bad experiences with customer support and hosts. I've had a few good experiences. Overall I wish there was a better way to do 1-2 month rentals in the USA. Airbnb is a total coin toss on if the 1-2 months will be great or a nightmare.
Mizza 5y ago
Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_. I've found myself just using hotels now, there's less hassle - but probably less good stories to tell.
- ok_coo 5y ago
  I don't know if there's a special tax in place in Chicago, but AirBnbs have been almost double the price of hotels recently. Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.
  - Mizza 5y ago
    My guess it's that the VC subsidies have come to an end and it's time to pay the piper.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I don't use Uber much and haven't used them at all for probably a couple of years now. But I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal stories about pricing shooting through the roof. Business travelers mostly won't care. However, anyone who was depending on the subsidized prices for day to day usage may have to make significant adjustments.
    - uberdru 5y ago
      Yes, also the market is saturated and they are desperate to show revenue growth. I think many companies of AirB&B's generation are in the same bind.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    As a Chi resident, Uber/Lyft is super expensive because lack of drivers due to COVID and carjackings. A couple months ago people would call Uber/Lyft just to jack the car and it scared a lot of drivers away.
WhompingWindows 5y ago
Why doesn't AirBNB just vertically integrate to make some of these issues go away? They could have AirBnB locks, which only open via the app after payment and approval for the guest is received. For cleaning, they could hire out cleaning to the hosts or even the guests for a discount, or they could acquire someone like TaskRabbit or an Uber-for-cleaning type app. To me, it seems they're taking the easy way out by not doing much about the issues and letting hosts deal with it.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  One Fine Stay did this in London, NY, Paris, maybe a few other cities. Locks, cleaning, laundry, even an iPhone with local maps and unlimited data (big deal in 2015). I think they found it hard to make money on, even though they were targeting the high end ($$$-$$$$ per night).
- aliyfarah 5y ago
  I think around half the properties are owner occupied, it wouldn’t make sense to have locks in your own house just because you’re hosting a guest.
1024core 5y ago
AirBnB will always take the side of hosts; their business model depends on cornering the market on hosts. Where there are hosts, there will be guests, or so they think. This is why they remove reviews which are negative. I stayed at an AirBnB in Hawaii once, which was filthy. In the middle of the night I decided to just leave, and I told the AirBnB CSR that I couldn't stay there. They agreed and refunded me that day's cost. But they wouldn't let me leave a review, claiming that since I had not stayed, I couldn't leave one. If only I had read a negative review before booking, I would not have booked it. And recently, I tried to book a place to get away into the boonies for a bit. I noticed that none of the reviews of that place were more recent than May 2020. I put in a request, and never heard back from the host. How rude! Once again, if they had some reviews in there about hosts, I wouldn't have wasted my time.
Jyaif 5y ago
I'm never using Airbnb again after they deleted my review for mentioning bed bugs because it was "irrelevant information".
yardie 5y ago
I've been an early user of AirBnb since they first introduced themselves on this site. And prior to that I was a couchsurfing host, and occasional guest. I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events the price goes up the closer the date arrives. A host that cancels on you can cost you hundreds of dollars in higher charges. I've never had a hotel cancel my reservation to upcharge me down the line. A memorable one was where we booked a Airbnb for my family. The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. Since it was a small town there were few places to go except a small, 1-star hotel [0] under partial renovation. One of the things I found was even with its billions in valuation they didn't have anything in place for these delivery problems. When Airbnb ran out of Airbnbs they couldn't fix that. When Hyatt runs out of rooms they send you to Hilton. [0] they have 2-stars now! post renovation
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
  Were the pets not declared on the listing? If they were, then why did you book it anyway?
- jobigoud 5y ago
  > The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. What else could have happened? If you have special needs you should send a small message to the host prior to booking to confirm it's compatible.
canada_dry 5y ago
Checkout https://airbnbhell.com https://airbnbhell.com for a litany of horror stories from hosts and guests. I found the site after my own bad experience: bait-n-switch in Hong Kong ("executive suite" was really a nasty cockroach infested mess). Airbnb was utterly useless. I still occasionally use airbnb, but am much more cautious and revert back to using a hotel if anything about airbnb's offerings look off.
anupmm 5y ago
We traveled to Japan for 3 weeks and used Airbnb exclusively. 2 out of the 4 places we visited were sub par. While the images and the reviews made us believe that we were getting an awesome place, reality was starkly different. In one of the places we left in the middle of the night with a 1 year old in tow! The bugs, general cleanliness of the place, lack of AC got to us. Airbnb CSR was not cooperative at all saying, despite me juggling between international calls/messages and we lost the full fee for 3 days. Because we didn't give the host a chance to fix the issue, a situation we thought couldn't be fixed. Mind you we spent ~$5K with Airbnb on that trip alone. Though I live in the Bay Area and have friends working at the company, I was done. I will stick to hotels unless Airbnb develops better mechanisms to handle these situations or builds consumer friendliness into its ethos.
akdor1154 5y ago
Interesting use of history manipulation on that site - back button takes me first to their landing page of stories before letting me go back to HN. Ideologically it's a bit annoying, but I'm more than a little impressed at 1) the idea (think less of HN and more of sites like this struggling with Facebook/Reddit/Google), and 2) the relatively unobtrusive implementation of it.
bingidingi 5y ago
This is horrifying. I know we feel like there's nothing we can do and this type of thing is old news, or maybe a risk no matter where you are... but I can't do business with a company that reacts this way.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I would expect most operators to call the police and hire lawyers to ensure that their liability stays at 0, and not much else. AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    >Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
  - blagie 5y ago
    I'd take millions of dollars over unencumbered free speech! That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident. The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      I think the 4 incidents a day is an exaggeration, but each "incident" is also not a rape or murder. Most are going to be for stuff like "the toilet overflowed" or "the power went out". $1k is not at all unreasonable for most "routine" emergencies.
chaostheory 5y ago
These scenarios were why a lot of investors missed out of AirBnB. It was a matter of when and not if. The only big surprise to almost everyone was how long it took for this to happen. The rate of occurrence was also surprising. It was low enough that AirBnB could keep up.
rdxm 5y ago
i'm shocked, shocked to find out there's gambling going on in this establishment....
Havoc 5y ago
This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  Rapes, robberies, burglaries and lots of other bad things happen at Hotel chains too. They just have a structured management and PR department to do a better job of keeping it under wraps.
  - sidlls 5y ago
    It's a matter of frequency, opportunity, and deterrence. Do you have statistics to compare, or are you just making conjecture? It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      The problem is that there are no statistics whatsoever in this thread.
- forgotmysn 5y ago
  i would tend to agree, but depends on scale. It's often easier and cheaper to house 10-15 people at an Airbnb than it is at a brand-name hotel.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Also airbnb usually includes a kitchen. Eating out everynight gets both old and expensive.
asciimov 5y ago
After living next to a house that was on AirBnb for 3 years (rented at least 4 days a week), I want nothing more than the complete outlaw of the company and these types of rentals.
- drstewart 5y ago
  I lived next to a bad neighbor once, I want nothing more than the complete outlaw of home ownership.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    You're being downvoted, but in all seriousness, I've lived next to someone who was a nightmare for years. I wish there had been a rotating cast of folks who came through, at least that would have given me a break from her. Crappy neighbors can exist in many different forms, whether they live there full time or their renters do. I see lots of shit raised regarding bad AirBnB neighbors, but I think they're just an easily identifiable target - there is no big company to blame if you just have a plain shitty neighbor.
- version_five 5y ago
  I lived next to an Air BNB for two years and never had a single issue (and I'm a fussy, generally antisocial, very light sleeper). I dont think either of our experiences really suggest anything, other than people need to be responsible for their property. If an owner is letting something happen that disturbs those around his property, he should be held accountable. No need to outlaw general concepts.
wuddadid 5y ago
TLDR: ??
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
> If hosts could be compelled to use digital keypads and change the code after each stay, a situation like that might be avoided in the future. As someone who's family has run a couple rental properties, I can not imagine trusting a high tragic rental that doesn't use a keypad entry. You would have to be negligent and perhaps criminally/grossly negligent to rent a vacation rental without changing the locks and/or code. Many states require changing locks after every long-term renter... short term rentals have an even greater need to rotate the lock. At a minimum the code should be rotated a few times a year and only if you at least get door unlock alerts. If you aren't likely to notice suspicious unlock/entry times then you need to rotate every time. And this is for a remote, secluded rental. For a high traffic unit in a major city, you should assume that renters are going to stay longer than they paid, enter early, cleaner will skip a scheduled cleaning, etc. The only way to run a decent/safe vacation rental is to use unique codes for every visitor and verify entries e.g. cleaners entered and left at X & Y times, etc.
- tootie 5y ago
  Anyone using an apartment as an Airbnb (as so many in NYC do) won't have the authority to change the lock type on their door without approval from building management.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    One way around this is to use a lock that can send a signal through the door to unlock it, without requiring an exterior keypad.
  - HeavenFox 5y ago
    If you have a management company chances are they don’t allow you to Airbnb your apartment in the first place
    - mtlynch 5y ago
      That's the parent poster's point.
  - 5y ago
buildbot 5y ago
This is actually quite a bit more positive towards Airbnb than I would expected. Anecdotally, I’ve had friends with plenty of bad Airbnb experiences, though nothing even close to the level of sexual assault. In all of those cases, Airbnb was extremely reticent towards providing any kind of help.
mancerayder 5y ago
The censoring of negative reviews and the ease with which hosts can do this is a major turnoff for me. I've used AirBNB for years with superb results, but then a few years ago I started (in major European capitals) getting completely crappy apartments whose flaws (like being a studio and not a one bedroom, like having a toilet in a top floor Paris apartment needing stuff pushed down with a brush, like construction, etc.) Then I understood. I went back to look at reviews and saw most of my reviews weren't there anymore. I was looking for one in particular, which was somewhat negative about location, and of course that was gone (the listing was still there with 5 stars). But others, too. I spent a bit of time reading online about this, and came across Reddit forum messages in the AirBNB sub where hosts tell each other tips on how to remove reviews (there are a ton of messages on the topic). Then the other week Bloomberg wrote an article complaining about the same thing (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb-took-down-my-negative-review-why https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb...). The horror stories in the linked article above are of course a bigger problem. But a company that censors reviews on a peer to peer system (it's not Walmart or Amazon selling goods) is worse. And it's not just peer to peer, it's where you fly thousands of miles to lay your head and bring your family.

173 points by bbharman 5y ago

Seems to me that a remote safety division is simply cheaper than contracting on-call security. They’ve been settling lawsuits when something happens beyond their control.

miked85 5y ago

I guess I am in the minority, but I have never understood this business. You would have to pay me to stay in someone else's house vs a hotel.

switch007 5y ago
Many hotels, to me, resemble offices (in the UK cities at least). They're in buildings with glass fronts, no opening windows, because they want to offer A/C but want to save money^H^H^H^H^H^H^ "the planet". With A/C I get a sore throat, with it off, I suffocate. In my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open. I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself. And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk"). So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.
dannyw 5y ago
I prefer Airbnbs over hotels because it's more fun, and it's nice to have all the amenities in a home. Proper kitchens with pantries, washing machines, backyards or balconies, etc. Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.
dcolkitt 5y ago
It’s really a nice option when traveling with a large family. If you’re spread across four or five hotel rooms, you really spend much less time together than in a large house with a big common space. Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  The pre-AirBnB version is called an Apartment Hotel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel
- noobermin 5y ago
  For some reason it isn't common in the US but elsewhere you can rent a flat specifically for this purpose usually with less ammenities like you'd expect from a hotel and hence not as expensive.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Or a group of friends. Pre-AirBnB, multiple times a group of us rented a house for a long weekend. Much nicer than being in a bunch of hotel rooms. AirBnB didn't pioneer vacation rentals but it did make it take off.
- acheron 5y ago
  But that has nothing to do with Airbnb. People have been doing vacation rentals for decades.
  - pitaj 5y ago
    ... and AirBnB provides a streamlined experience connecting customers with owners.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      And they've also helped completely destroy housing for locals in plenty of locations in the process as owners over-leverage themselves to buy up more and more property since they can rent it on AirBnB for more than they can rent it to locals.
bognition 5y ago
Theres a bunch of reasons. If you have a group of people or a family the experience of having a place of your own in a real neighborhood is way better than being in a vanilla hotel.
GordonS 5y ago
Me and my family have used Airbnb a bunch of times in various countries, and every time has been a great experience. Biggest issues with hotels are lack of space, privacy and noise. I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season. One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
francisofascii 5y ago
So you would never stay in a beach house, lake house, or mountain lodge? Also in urban environments, the locations of private houses are sometimes much better: near parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, etc.
- acheron 5y ago
  I remember doing house rental vacations with my family in something like 1987. Why do so many people seem to think Airbnb invented this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Airbnb provides more ratings, a standardized format for listings which makes it easier to review and compare them, and an easier online booking process that does a great job at handling currency conversion and different payment options.
  - weeblewobble 5y ago
    who said AirBnB invented house rentals? OP said they would never stay in someone else's house on vacation.
cainxinth 5y ago
Have you tried it? Prices have shot up, but back in the day, you could get a whole small house with a kitchen, laundry room, and multiple bedrooms, nicely appointed and clean for less than a three or four star hotel room. It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.
Brendinooo 5y ago
It's less true now than it was a few years ago, but it's often a cheaper option.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I was always skeptical but once I started travelling with kids it became clear to me the giant holes in the hotel business model that AirBnB has disrupted. Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  We’re also starting to find that out now that we have kids ;). There’s also just odd situations that don’t fit into the hotel model. Right now, I need a place to stay in Denver for 8 weeks with my wife, child, mother-in-law, and 2 dogs. We’re staying with my MIL for her knee replacement surgery recuperation. So, there can’t be any stairs, has to have a walk in shower, must have a kitchen and have 3 bedrooms. Impossible to find a hotel like this. We found a suitable AirBNB in about an hour.
- z0ltan 5y ago
  Sounds like an American problem.
hiidrew 5y ago
I enjoy it when traveling alone, I usually look for hosts that are more open to interacting with their guests. Have met loads of interesting people through the app, some I still talk to occasionally.
noobermin 5y ago
After doing airbnbs I since have usually decided to stay in hotels when I travel because I just like the reliability in having things provided as well as other things like location, services, etc. Airbnb is always a hit or miss honestly, despite the cheaper price.
lifeformed 5y ago
There are some extremely nice places available on AirBnb, far nicer than most hotels I've been to.
gquiniou 5y ago
Very often is not someone's house but a property that has been bought, renovated and furnished specifically to be rented on Airbnb.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  Which means another property off the long-term rental market in the area, further contributing to housing crises worldwide.
makecheck 5y ago
There’s really no other way to get an experience like a private pool away from home, for example. The surroundings can often be much more peaceful too, e.g. a house may be in a quiet street and not in the middle of downtown.
jnwatson 5y ago
Hotels are the sanitized way to visit a place, which is fine for a lot of folks. But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  > I want to live as the locals, You do this in AirBnB by actively harming the locals. You do realize this right? Every AirBnB in a 'local' area is one less house for the actual locals to live in. It's becoming a huge problem in many cities in the world.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/LOSqD https://archive.md/LOSqD

bko 5y ago

The article mentions a rape in an Airbnb in New York. The suspect had keys, presumably picked up from a lax key exchange in a nearby bodega. The cops were called and Airbnb was notified. Airbnb payed for a hotel, offered to fly the victim's mother out, paid for their return flight, and paid $7 million to the victim. The perp was caught by police shortly after the incident. Part of the payout was that she couldn't talk about the incident and potentially implicate Airbnb. The alternative would be no payment and immediately drag this out in court very publicly. If I were the victim I would definitely prefer the option above or at least prefer to have that as an option. These kinds of things are incredibly rare and I'm glad we didn't have a news-cycle obsessing over something like this.

dannyw 5y ago
The article mentions a RAPE at knife point, not a robbery. "By the time she realized she wasn’t alone, the blade of a kitchen knife was pointing down at her. The stranger grabbed her, shoved her onto a bed, and raped her. Drunken revelers were wandering the streets outside, but the woman was too scared to scream." There is a HUGE difference...
- bko 5y ago
  Sorry, I missed that. I'll edit my comment. The perpetrator was caught and presumably prosecuted. Again, what alternative chain of events would you have preferred?
  - okprod 5y ago
    That Airbnb take responsibility for its service offering end-to-end, in this case the key exchange. From the article it's obvious the company has no ethics and has tried to cover up shoddy/lax business practices from the beginning, so another alternative that could have helped is Airbnb being liable for damages in the millions/billions until they learn their lesson, or fold if they don't. Oh, it might also have been helpful to not wait two years to hear about this, but as we all know, those who use NDAs are always the best of people/organizations.

api 5y ago

Don’t hotels do this? That being said while I have never had an AirBnB nightmare. I have had some lulz. If I were female I would hesitate to use one if I were traveling alone.

victorbstan 5y ago

I literally thought they were working on something to “make nightmares go away”.

okprod 5y ago

If Airbnb actually cared they would have invested in their operations already; Chesky giving "a promise to verify the photographs, amenities, cleanliness, and safety of all the listings on Airbnb", which the article notes is underway, is ridiculous -- Shouldn't this be a bare minimum of this type of business before they start operating? Basically what the "safety team" does is how Logan Roy from the show Succession works -- do whatever you want, skirt ethics and laws, and then pay money and have people sign NDAs.

dannyw 5y ago
There's bigger issues IMO, based on the article: * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest. * Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in. * Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs. I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources. It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  > * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest. The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    AirBnB should just implement its own social scoring system. Apply it to everyone so they already have data for future hosts and guests. /s but I kinda want to see such a tech and head-explosions of the announcement.

jviotti 5y ago

While this is indeed a terrible thing, I fail to see a strong correlation to the fact that the attacker entered the building due to the keys being at the counter. That is a possible reason along a million more, such as the fact that the attacker could force the door's lock, get someone else from the building (an accomplice?) to give him illegal access. Pointing the blame at Airbnb therefore feels odd. Things like these can also happen (and they do, probably even more often) at your own place, and would you sue your landlord if so? Whether these things are more probable to happen at Airbnb is also a very hard thing to prove. IMO your own place might be riskier as an attacker can study your routine over time, which opens up more security holes. These type of attacks are probably outside anyone's control and I don't think the Airbnb places have an implicit responsibility to ensure a higher level of security than you have at your own place (it can be a Airbnb luxe feature, though?)

Brendinooo 5y ago
"They caught him and emptied his backpack, pulling out three incriminating items: a knife, one of the woman’s earrings, and a set of keys to the apartment."

tyingq 5y ago

s/Nightmares/Lawsuits and bad PR They aren't spending money out of some altruistic intention.

cad1 5y ago

Tomorrow's headline: "AirBnB Partners with Citizen App: Will Offer gig Security in All AirBnB Rentals" for additional fee

catern 5y ago

One minor point: >[...] difficult to draw useful conclusions about the correlation between the short-term rental industry and crime. Academic researchers say [...] limitations have frustrated their efforts to study the link. Only about a half-dozen scholarly studies have been carried out on the subject, and their findings are contradictory. Contradictory findings are a positive and useful result: They're evidence that there isn't in fact a link, that the two are uncorrelated. This is some tragic ignorance of statistics on the part of the journalist...

Taylor_OD 5y ago

I've used Airbnb a lot. I've had really incredibly bad experiences with customer support and hosts. I've had a few good experiences. Overall I wish there was a better way to do 1-2 month rentals in the USA. Airbnb is a total coin toss on if the 1-2 months will be great or a nightmare.

Mizza 5y ago

Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_. I've found myself just using hotels now, there's less hassle - but probably less good stories to tell.

ok_coo 5y ago
I don't know if there's a special tax in place in Chicago, but AirBnbs have been almost double the price of hotels recently. Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.
- Mizza 5y ago
  My guess it's that the VC subsidies have come to an end and it's time to pay the piper.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I don't use Uber much and haven't used them at all for probably a couple of years now. But I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal stories about pricing shooting through the roof. Business travelers mostly won't care. However, anyone who was depending on the subsidized prices for day to day usage may have to make significant adjustments.
  - uberdru 5y ago
    Yes, also the market is saturated and they are desperate to show revenue growth. I think many companies of AirB&B's generation are in the same bind.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  As a Chi resident, Uber/Lyft is super expensive because lack of drivers due to COVID and carjackings. A couple months ago people would call Uber/Lyft just to jack the car and it scared a lot of drivers away.

WhompingWindows 5y ago

Why doesn't AirBNB just vertically integrate to make some of these issues go away? They could have AirBnB locks, which only open via the app after payment and approval for the guest is received. For cleaning, they could hire out cleaning to the hosts or even the guests for a discount, or they could acquire someone like TaskRabbit or an Uber-for-cleaning type app. To me, it seems they're taking the easy way out by not doing much about the issues and letting hosts deal with it.

danpalmer 5y ago
One Fine Stay did this in London, NY, Paris, maybe a few other cities. Locks, cleaning, laundry, even an iPhone with local maps and unlimited data (big deal in 2015). I think they found it hard to make money on, even though they were targeting the high end ($$$-$$$$ per night).
aliyfarah 5y ago
I think around half the properties are owner occupied, it wouldn’t make sense to have locks in your own house just because you’re hosting a guest.

1024core 5y ago

AirBnB will always take the side of hosts; their business model depends on cornering the market on hosts. Where there are hosts, there will be guests, or so they think. This is why they remove reviews which are negative. I stayed at an AirBnB in Hawaii once, which was filthy. In the middle of the night I decided to just leave, and I told the AirBnB CSR that I couldn't stay there. They agreed and refunded me that day's cost. But they wouldn't let me leave a review, claiming that since I had not stayed, I couldn't leave one. If only I had read a negative review before booking, I would not have booked it. And recently, I tried to book a place to get away into the boonies for a bit. I noticed that none of the reviews of that place were more recent than May 2020. I put in a request, and never heard back from the host. How rude! Once again, if they had some reviews in there about hosts, I wouldn't have wasted my time.

Jyaif 5y ago

I'm never using Airbnb again after they deleted my review for mentioning bed bugs because it was "irrelevant information".

yardie 5y ago

I've been an early user of AirBnb since they first introduced themselves on this site. And prior to that I was a couchsurfing host, and occasional guest. I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events the price goes up the closer the date arrives. A host that cancels on you can cost you hundreds of dollars in higher charges. I've never had a hotel cancel my reservation to upcharge me down the line. A memorable one was where we booked a Airbnb for my family. The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. Since it was a small town there were few places to go except a small, 1-star hotel [0] under partial renovation. One of the things I found was even with its billions in valuation they didn't have anything in place for these delivery problems. When Airbnb ran out of Airbnbs they couldn't fix that. When Hyatt runs out of rooms they send you to Hilton. [0] they have 2-stars now! post renovation

ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
Were the pets not declared on the listing? If they were, then why did you book it anyway?
jobigoud 5y ago
> The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. What else could have happened? If you have special needs you should send a small message to the host prior to booking to confirm it's compatible.

canada_dry 5y ago

Checkout https://airbnbhell.com https://airbnbhell.com for a litany of horror stories from hosts and guests. I found the site after my own bad experience: bait-n-switch in Hong Kong ("executive suite" was really a nasty cockroach infested mess). Airbnb was utterly useless. I still occasionally use airbnb, but am much more cautious and revert back to using a hotel if anything about airbnb's offerings look off.

anupmm 5y ago

We traveled to Japan for 3 weeks and used Airbnb exclusively. 2 out of the 4 places we visited were sub par. While the images and the reviews made us believe that we were getting an awesome place, reality was starkly different. In one of the places we left in the middle of the night with a 1 year old in tow! The bugs, general cleanliness of the place, lack of AC got to us. Airbnb CSR was not cooperative at all saying, despite me juggling between international calls/messages and we lost the full fee for 3 days. Because we didn't give the host a chance to fix the issue, a situation we thought couldn't be fixed. Mind you we spent ~$5K with Airbnb on that trip alone. Though I live in the Bay Area and have friends working at the company, I was done. I will stick to hotels unless Airbnb develops better mechanisms to handle these situations or builds consumer friendliness into its ethos.

akdor1154 5y ago

Interesting use of history manipulation on that site - back button takes me first to their landing page of stories before letting me go back to HN. Ideologically it's a bit annoying, but I'm more than a little impressed at 1) the idea (think less of HN and more of sites like this struggling with Facebook/Reddit/Google), and 2) the relatively unobtrusive implementation of it.

bingidingi 5y ago

This is horrifying. I know we feel like there's nothing we can do and this type of thing is old news, or maybe a risk no matter where you are... but I can't do business with a company that reacts this way.

bpodgursky 5y ago
Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I would expect most operators to call the police and hire lawyers to ensure that their liability stays at 0, and not much else. AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
- rhizome 5y ago
  >Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
- blagie 5y ago
  I'd take millions of dollars over unencumbered free speech! That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident. The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    I think the 4 incidents a day is an exaggeration, but each "incident" is also not a rape or murder. Most are going to be for stuff like "the toilet overflowed" or "the power went out". $1k is not at all unreasonable for most "routine" emergencies.

chaostheory 5y ago

These scenarios were why a lot of investors missed out of AirBnB. It was a matter of when and not if. The only big surprise to almost everyone was how long it took for this to happen. The rate of occurrence was also surprising. It was low enough that AirBnB could keep up.

rdxm 5y ago

i'm shocked, shocked to find out there's gambling going on in this establishment....

Havoc 5y ago

This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart

shiftpgdn 5y ago
Rapes, robberies, burglaries and lots of other bad things happen at Hotel chains too. They just have a structured management and PR department to do a better job of keeping it under wraps.
- sidlls 5y ago
  It's a matter of frequency, opportunity, and deterrence. Do you have statistics to compare, or are you just making conjecture? It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The problem is that there are no statistics whatsoever in this thread.
forgotmysn 5y ago
i would tend to agree, but depends on scale. It's often easier and cheaper to house 10-15 people at an Airbnb than it is at a brand-name hotel.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Also airbnb usually includes a kitchen. Eating out everynight gets both old and expensive.

asciimov 5y ago

After living next to a house that was on AirBnb for 3 years (rented at least 4 days a week), I want nothing more than the complete outlaw of the company and these types of rentals.

drstewart 5y ago
I lived next to a bad neighbor once, I want nothing more than the complete outlaw of home ownership.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  You're being downvoted, but in all seriousness, I've lived next to someone who was a nightmare for years. I wish there had been a rotating cast of folks who came through, at least that would have given me a break from her. Crappy neighbors can exist in many different forms, whether they live there full time or their renters do. I see lots of shit raised regarding bad AirBnB neighbors, but I think they're just an easily identifiable target - there is no big company to blame if you just have a plain shitty neighbor.
version_five 5y ago
I lived next to an Air BNB for two years and never had a single issue (and I'm a fussy, generally antisocial, very light sleeper). I dont think either of our experiences really suggest anything, other than people need to be responsible for their property. If an owner is letting something happen that disturbs those around his property, he should be held accountable. No need to outlaw general concepts.

wuddadid 5y ago

TLDR: ??

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

> If hosts could be compelled to use digital keypads and change the code after each stay, a situation like that might be avoided in the future. As someone who's family has run a couple rental properties, I can not imagine trusting a high tragic rental that doesn't use a keypad entry. You would have to be negligent and perhaps criminally/grossly negligent to rent a vacation rental without changing the locks and/or code. Many states require changing locks after every long-term renter... short term rentals have an even greater need to rotate the lock. At a minimum the code should be rotated a few times a year and only if you at least get door unlock alerts. If you aren't likely to notice suspicious unlock/entry times then you need to rotate every time. And this is for a remote, secluded rental. For a high traffic unit in a major city, you should assume that renters are going to stay longer than they paid, enter early, cleaner will skip a scheduled cleaning, etc. The only way to run a decent/safe vacation rental is to use unique codes for every visitor and verify entries e.g. cleaners entered and left at X & Y times, etc.

tootie 5y ago
Anyone using an apartment as an Airbnb (as so many in NYC do) won't have the authority to change the lock type on their door without approval from building management.
- xwdv 5y ago
  One way around this is to use a lock that can send a signal through the door to unlock it, without requiring an exterior keypad.
- HeavenFox 5y ago
  If you have a management company chances are they don’t allow you to Airbnb your apartment in the first place
  - mtlynch 5y ago
    That's the parent poster's point.
- 5y ago

buildbot 5y ago

This is actually quite a bit more positive towards Airbnb than I would expected. Anecdotally, I’ve had friends with plenty of bad Airbnb experiences, though nothing even close to the level of sexual assault. In all of those cases, Airbnb was extremely reticent towards providing any kind of help.

mancerayder 5y ago

The censoring of negative reviews and the ease with which hosts can do this is a major turnoff for me. I've used AirBNB for years with superb results, but then a few years ago I started (in major European capitals) getting completely crappy apartments whose flaws (like being a studio and not a one bedroom, like having a toilet in a top floor Paris apartment needing stuff pushed down with a brush, like construction, etc.) Then I understood. I went back to look at reviews and saw most of my reviews weren't there anymore. I was looking for one in particular, which was somewhat negative about location, and of course that was gone (the listing was still there with 5 stars). But others, too. I spent a bit of time reading online about this, and came across Reddit forum messages in the AirBNB sub where hosts tell each other tips on how to remove reviews (there are a ton of messages on the topic). Then the other week Bloomberg wrote an article complaining about the same thing (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb-took-down-my-negative-review-why https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-26/airbnb...). The horror stories in the linked article above are of course a bigger problem. But a company that censors reviews on a peer to peer system (it's not Walmart or Amazon selling goods) is worse. And it's not just peer to peer, it's where you fly thousands of miles to lay your head and bring your family.