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The $10m OMG Fund
- CodeBeater 4y agoThis feels more like a half-baked supermarket marketing campaign than an actual push for innovation. But hey, I'm all for it! It's one of those rare market conditions that allow creative people to bring wacky new ideas to life.
- jb1991 4y agoYou can't do a lot of innovating in this way with only $100K.
- yunohn 4y agoAll their examples appear to cost less than 50k.
- __alexs 4y agoIf a bedroom inside a statue of a potato is innovation I don't want to be innovative.
- DonHopkins 4y ago* Room service by SpudULike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spudulike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spudulike https://spudulikebyjamesmartin.com/ https://spudulikebyjamesmartin.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31832846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31832846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833521
- invalidusernam3 4y agoDepends on the country. Here in Czech Republic that could go a fairly long way to building something interesting
- PickledHotdog 4y ago"Hey guys, there's a lot of talk about the effects of our business on housing across the globe. We need something to divert attention. Any ideas?"
- benjaminwootton 4y agoThey need to sort out the issues with poor service, hosts going dark, properties not as described, cleaning fee rip-offs etc. Hotels are also cheaper nowadays by the time you account for hidden fees. After my last 3 attempts went bad, I'm done with AirBNB.
- heipei 4y agoYup, tried to book through them recently and there were technical glitches which prevented me from doing so. Eventually AirBnB support told me to tell the host to perform various actions to "reset" their availability status, etc. After a lot of fruitless back and forth, I messaged the host via AirBnB and told him that I was going to book his place through Booking.com. As a final insult, AirBnB wouldn't let me send the message because it contained "booking.com", so I ended up saying "the other platform".
- notahacker 4y agoFrankly the other platform seems to often be cheaper when the room's listed on both (there's surprisingly little overlap even in the self catered apartments and spare rooms category) Sure, it has the irritating design patterns telling you that 3 people have looked this room in the last hour to try to encourage you to rush a decision, but manages to be still more honest in displaying the actual amount you pay per night rather than an amount plus 14% fees...
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThis is Kafkesque
- comprev 4y agoThey have a large problem of "hosts" being businesses, and not individual people. I booked an apartment in Dublin with "Johnny", but upon paying for the booking, discovered it was a company called "City Break Apartments Limited" who required a large deposit upon check-in. Nowhere in the advert was any indication the host was a company.
- 4y ago
- DonHopkins 4y agoMore like a 'WTF Fund'.
- xeornet 4y agoIt has become obvious that AirBNB is now targeting the upper-end market in terms of pricing. Their homepage constantly shows ridiculously expensive properties that I have no interest in staying at. (I've been traveling around Europe for 5 months so far purely staying at AirBNBs). None of this "OMG Fund" money will be going to improving the core experience the main cohort of users; it is however broadening their marketing to higher-end properties and higher-paying visitors.
- rofo1 4y ago> (I've been traveling around Europe for 5 months so far purely staying at AirBNBs). Off topic, but any interesting destinations that had reasonable AirBNB's that you want to share? :) I plan to do something similar this year, hopefully.. wondering where to go, though.
- dazc 4y agoNot parent but any decent airbnb in Europe is likely also listed on other platforms. Those that are not, avoid.
- xeornet 4y agoYeah Booking.com is a good go-to also. Compare prices. As for destinations, I have noticed they have all been getting more experience, both due to the weather but also post-lockdowns, everyone is out and about. Central/Eastern Europe is my personal favourite. Krakow, Poland (amazing). Belgrade, Zagreb, Kotor Montenegro.
- l33t2328 4y agoHave you been traveling around Europe for fun? If so, have you been working? If not, how much did you have stayed up before you started? My friends and I are in the early stages of planning a back packing trip.
- swyx 4y agoi mean... the experience is good enough that you're spending 5 months staying in them. dont take that for granted...
- boomboomsubban 4y agoRead the conditions, entering grants airbnb full intellectual property rights to the idea. A pretty big ask when the "reward" is a job running a BnB.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI'm sure you can charge a premium for the instagram crowd if your house is one of the winners though.
- noduerme 4y agoWhat a pathetic world this internet has created
- smallmouth 4y agoCan I put that on a t-shirt?
- noduerme 4y agodefinitely. just send me one.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoOr they can rule your project isn't in a suitable location and have someone else build it elsewhere. If you have a good enough idea to win and the desire to manage it, getting a loan seems like a better choice.
- perlgeek 4y agoAnd here I had hoped that it was a fund for people who had a horrible experience with with an airbnb host or guest, to give them quick and easy compensation.
- netsharc 4y agoThat's the "FFS Fund"...
- throwaway13337 4y agoTheir search now prominently encourages odd stays like this as well. It's puzzling as it seems to be at the expense of other search filtering. They've reduced useful search filters like 'has a desk' and there is no filter for 'not a tent or van' which is increasingly common. Some areas (Hawaii) contain vans as the majority of their listings. But no filters against them. Their direction reminds me of the progress of Netflix to be less searchable and more about content they want to push. I guess it works out in the a/b tests but likely misses the forest for the trees. A tip: use airbnb.com.au instead of .com as you'll get the real full price in the searches as they must comply with Australian law. This works all over the world.
- benjaminwootton 4y agoYou still cannot order by price either. Very frustrating to be beholden to their machine learning algo when you are actually researching a stay. Painful.
- disiplus 4y agothat's so bad that i instantly closed airbnb and opened booking.com
- nowherebeen 4y agoThe % of people looking for interesting places to stay vs those that just want lodging is probably very low. If I was a hotel, I would probably check which area has high demand and simply provide safe, secure, predictable lodging. It makes you wonder how sustainable is Airbnb’s business model at a specific location is over a 10 year period is. I predict that Airbnb’s business model will be hard to sustain over a long period. Hotels will always win in the long run.
- SilverBirch 4y agoOne of the interesting things I heard about Brian Chesky was that at one point he decided he was going to permanently live in Airbnbs. I thought that was really interesting because that Airbnb will be run by a guy who has the experience of being a billionaire using Airbnbs. I wonder if that's had an effect on the company's direction.
- noduerme 4y agoThis just makes me want to puke. My neighbors spent a couple years built a fucking chalet that took up their entire backyard, ruined my small view of the occasional sun in Portland, just so they could fuck off to Europe and Airbnb it for an obscene amount of money. This shouldn't have been allowed, but they got away with it under the Portland code exemptions that are super friendly to covering every inch of your property if you're building "affordable housing". Now we basically live next door to a motel with constant in/out and their hired maids shouting "housekeeping" at 8am. Airbnb can take their $1m and shove it up their asses. I support anything that helps bring down this model of turning neighborhoods into decentralized hotels, up to and including occasional acts of arson which unfortunately, I can't do because it would also burn my house down. One good friend of mine was a member of a Welsh group in the 80s whose name I don't know (but maybe someone on HN does know) who literally burned down the vacation houses of English people. I always think of that every time I'm woken up too early, which is almost every single day. I live in a $500k house and Airbnb has wrecked my daily peace and my neighborhood. Sure if I were smart and also an asshole I'd just put my own place up on Airbnb and fuck off myself. Part of me just believes it would be fucked up to do that to my other neighbors, and part of me doesn't want to accept that as the world we have to live in.
- jjulius 4y agoGenuinely curious, not trying to be confrontational... What steps have you taken to try to prevent yourself from hearing them shout, "Housekeeping," at 8AM and waking up early every day?
- dorchadas 4y agoOP shouldn't have to take steps. They live in a residential neighborhood, and the incentives given by AirBnB have started to ruin it, as they have countless neighborhoods and cities all over the world. AirBnB is a net negative to the world, as it just increases rents and exacerbates housing crises all so tourists can feel like they 'live' in a city at the expense of its actual inhabitants.
- 4y ago
- LegitShady 4y agoI'd rather stay at a best western. A best western executive residency would be even better, and likely cost around the same.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoI like the fact that they hired Cruella De Vil as a jury member.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoYou know what would be "OMG"? Using that $10 Million to house some of the homeless and other people their company displaces. This is it folks, "The Society of the Spectacle" in all its' glory!
- somenewaccount1 4y agoThat could be a suggested solution. A quirky duplex where your stay covers the cost of also housing one homeless person. Who's back yard are we putting this in? (And not /s, I like the idea)
- danielfoster 4y agoAs a shareholder I really think this money is being poorly spent. Airbnb should be cutting costs, not helping people build potato homes.
- fakeslimshady 4y ago
- flappyeagle 4y agoThere’s a lot of unfounded speculation about why AirBnB made its recent decisions. The truth is far simpler (or dumber, depending on your point of view) There were no A/B tests that caused them to take this product direction. There is no quantitative model of any kind that points to this as the revenue maximizing approach. They are trying to differentiate themselves from hotels as much as possible to create long term brand equity. This is the opposite of what many posters are suggesting. It may or may not succeed but it’s not driven by short term thinking as many are claiming here.
- mynameisash 4y agoReading the comments and reflecting on my experiences, I wonder if we might ever see a backlash and a resurgence of couchsurfing - not-for-profit, people wanting to help travelers. I never did couchsurfing, so maybe I have a too uninformed opinion of it, but it seems like a great idea.
- fumeux_fume 4y agoOMG those places looks uncomfortable to stay in for more than an hour.