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Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

• dazc 4y ago
  The host's 'dating site style' profile image is a red flag from the outset, stock image or not. The only practical tip I can offer regards airbnb is to rent places that are also featured on other well known sites, since this does reduce the risk a little.
  • jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago
    That's your issue with the whole story, the host did not analyze the profile picture for "red flags"? From this and the many other stories about AirBnB and its "support", best advice seems to be to immediately close your account, request your data to be deleted and never use any of its "services" again.
  • soco 4y ago
    If it's such a red flag, then maybe maybe AirBnB could have culled it from the start. I mean if listing quality was of concern.
• dsego 4y ago
  > The toilet was in a constant state of flowing. Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.
  • Huh1337 4y ago
    It's pretty common to encounter a toilet where that part which closes the water flow is broken. No amount of whacking is going to help.
    • rypskar 4y ago
      Might be a case of different meaning attributed to a word, whacking don't help, but jiggling often works when the gasket as starting to go bad (I promise I will buy a new gasket any time soon, but right now gently jiggling temporary solves the problem)
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hardware2win 4y ago
    >Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Does it make her opinion less important?
  • coffeeblack 4y ago
    Not sure what “common European household” you live in, but that is commonly not a problem over here.
    • dsego 4y ago
      Had issues with several geberit and other cisterns, all started leaking after some time.
      • coffeeblack 4y ago
        Lime deposits?
        • porbelm 4y ago
          Poor quality floaters, the mechanism gets stuck. Quick fix. But a common problem? Nah.
        • dsego 4y ago
          Sometimes it's lime deposits.
  • JadoJodo 4y ago
    > Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. In the case where the terms of the living arrangement are “you can stay here 30 days for free, but you’ll need to take care of any issues you come upon yourself.”, this would be an appropriate response. In this case, as mentioned in the article, they are “you can stay here for 30 days for $3,000”. Totally different story.
    • dsego 4y ago
      Sure, and as a potential home buyer in croatia, I have my qualms with airbnb and wealthy young western tourists causing every dump to be rented out and driving up real-estate prices. I just think that writing about a leaking flush tank like it's some kind of emergency doesn't make the case against airbnb hosts stronger.
      • djray 4y ago
        You really should read the full article before commenting. The apartment was in breach of several local laws (for example, no working fire extinguisher or first aid kit, inadequate signage, non-working lock), and the electrical wiring was faulty, causing 2 people to be shocked. The lighting circuit had totally failed by the time the OP wrote the article. It certainly wasn't someone moaning about a minor issue, and it's not too much to ask for a $3000-per-month rental to be excellent quality and not...you know, try to kill you.
  • kennend3 4y ago
    You seem like you would be the perfect AirBnB customer. Things don't work as expected, and you simply pay up? Not sure about you, but if I was staying at a place for a length of time i would expect things like the toilet work properly. As someone paying for a place to stay, "filing a bucket with water" to flush the toilet isn't something i should be doing. Toilets are not expensive and easy to replace, it sounds like this one should have been replaced some time ago.
• weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Funny, I saw the writer's picture first thing and thought hmm that looks pretty fake then later it turns out it is cropped from that same stock photo as "Peter"
  • tallanvor 4y ago
    The account was clearly created just to share this issue, so using the other face from the picture is meant to help emphasize the false pick in the AirBnB posting.
    • weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      Yep I think we all got that
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  I'm surprised that the medium account posting this has a profile picture cropped from the exact same stock photo that the supposed villain cropped his profile picture from.
• switch007 4y ago
  Why would the author set their Medium profile pic to a crop of the same picture the fake host used? I’m so confused
  • dfee 4y ago
    Whoosh.
• cameronh90 4y ago
  The glory days of Airbnb are over. It's been flooded with dodgy hosts, and the customer support has failed to keep up. Hotels have improved their service and the prices aren't that different any more. If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
  • throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Disagree on the > cost component - the stated nightly rates may be lower than AirBNB, but with all costs AirBNB is generally uncompetive You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
• plantain 4y ago
  Pretty par for the course with airbnb support. Twice now I've had reservations cancelled hours before arrival with airbnb absolutely useless at finding an alternative. One time I was able to get some meagre compensation (the difference in price, even though it was inferior accomodation), the other time - nada, nothing. I'm back to hotels again, with airbnb as a very last resort
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Play with snakes, get bitten. AirBnb started out as a company that basically fostered and encouraged illegal, unregulated short term rentals. Many of the hosts were breaking various ordnances and bylaws to rent you their home. There is also a huge societal cost in terms of increases rents and reduced permanent housing supply because of AirBnb. So if those type of people at that company screw you over, don’t be surprised.
  • ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    I think that's part of the point of this article: a warning to others who haven't heard yet that AirBnB = scum.
  • dorchadas 4y ago
    Started out? I believe they still are in a lot of places.
• hidelooktropic 4y ago
  When I alerted AirBNB about a safety issue, they responded that they had completed their investigation (which apparently did not involve talking to me) and said the hosts were "elite" and basically took their side. AirBNB is not safe. https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexual-assault-claims-yearly-report-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexua... https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sexual-assault-allegations-out-of-public-eye/ https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sex...
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Thanks for posting these. Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.
  • data-ottawa 4y ago
    The last one I went to we walked in and contacted support as they didn’t have the accommodations they promised, and it took AirBnB support four days to get back to us. We waited several hours for a response before just booking a hotel. I was shocked how bad their support was.
  • dbttdft 4y ago
    Nothing written here makes me feel unsafe about taking my daughter and wife to an Air BNB. Just what on earth is this non-sequitur, "ergo company unsafe" [10 billion upvotes]. There is nothing here even explaining how this is any worse than hotels. Yes, sleeping in some random person's house is inherently less safe than hotels (slightly) but we already knew that. So then what actual tangible point am I missing here? What do you even expect the company to do about it? This entire post and its context just seems like a Simpsons episode where Homer yells at the mayor and demands that it stop raining. I haven't have and don't plan to ever use Air BNB, by the way.
• onetokeoverthe 4y ago
• sschueller 4y ago
  If only there was some regulation for such services that would require some sort of standard. You know some sort of licensing by the state. /s This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    It seems to work better with Lyft et al., probably because there's a larger supply of "normal people who are interested in driving", better economics around renting the asset (vehicle), and the driver (aka host) having to be physically present in the vehicle. The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get. Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
    • profstasiak 4y ago
      a lot of rape cases in Uber and Bolt in Warsaw Poland. Safe for men to drive unsafe for women.
      • therealdrag0 4y ago
        Is that different than a normal taxi? If anything a lot of people find ride shares more safe because you have a digital record of the drivers identity which historically wasn’t the case with taxis.
  • vertis 4y ago
    Artificially lowering prices? You mean basic supply and demand? The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant. AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays. As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly. False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP). More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook. Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  We need a new AirBnB, what it promised to be initially. A club for ordinary (or extraordinary) people to find/share a room rather than an indistry-scale business platform.
  • plantain 4y ago
    For a short period of time, couchsurfing.com was that magical place.
  • ehnto 4y ago
    The trouble is that everyone is on the net now, so it will just get corrupted immediately by people trying to commercialize the space. I think house-swapping gets around this by doing away with any possible financial gain, but this precludes you have a house of your own you're willing to have people live in while you're in their home.
• mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they possibly can. They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews. The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for. How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show. Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
  • astrostl 4y ago
    Interesting take. I'll be thinking about that. I wonder how much aggressive and active curation and validation might improve things.
  • fareed79 4y ago
    basically, author expects calibrated minimal services, good support, and a minimal standard of quality. This is what you call a classic hotel/lodge. I fully agree with you, and those living close to these miserable BnB businesses surely would agree as well. This "model" is rotting city centers and popular places. AirBnB will never care about that poor lady. AirBnB will know how to make her anger disappear into the zero-star reviews statistics - it is much more important to keep a large density of cheap appts in the center of Lisbon.
    • stewx 4y ago
      There's no good reason AirBnb could not offer proper support. Showing contempt for your customers like this is a choice.
• EZ-E 4y ago
  I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees as they probably feel the pressure from an environment with increasing interest rates - without improving the service more than before. Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, but I wonder that in front of the increasing fees for a decreasing added value, the pendulum will swing back and customers will revert back to direct contact with the service providers instead of using middlemen apps. The old way.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    > I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees They're running out of magic investor money and the reality is starting to hit them > Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, Of course, they were totally unregulated, regulation caught up in most countries (airbnb taxes/time limits, better status for uber drivers, &c.). They were only profitable because they were abusing the people working for them
  • ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    Personally, the pendulum already swang on food apps. I found it way too expensive and promoted too much personal laziness. I dont mind paying for a real service, but these apps have also encouraged tipping culture, which was already going crazy. Now everyone wants a tip. Just charge me the real cost, pay them a real wage, and if no wants to pay for it, then society doesn't want it.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      In some cases they even stole tips. Given that the precedent of no significant legal consequences for such theft has already been set, I no longer trust the tipping feature even if I otherwise would've been fine with tipping.
      • Firmwarrior 4y ago
        Yeah, it's infuriating Until I gave up on rideshare apps, I was carrying around a pile of cash and pre-tipping drivers 20% in cash up front in order to get decent service. Fortunately I discovered a decent local airport ride business that offers car seats and no attitude. It's barely more expensive than Lyft and works really well.
• olabyne 4y ago
  In case like this, you must also report the case to the city housing department. European capitals are trying to regulate airbnbs, with mentions of fake ID and electrical hazards, I'm pretty sure Lisbon city will react more quickly than Airbnb
  • klabb3 4y ago
    Airbnb is largely incentivized not to report at all, at least in the short term (Q3 earnings call coming up, we need everyone in the support staff to "improve" their numbers). Airbnb is clearly in the money-extraction phase of the VC-funded b2c cycle, it's not like we haven't seen this before. This turd is usually served with a side of "acquiring every potential competitor", so that the con can go on for as long as possible. I've been decreasingly satisfied with airbnb (no horror stories). I think I've done roughly a 50-50 split between them and hotels, depending on the area. It's not exactly hard to switch back to hotels either, airbnb which now has premium prices really only makes sense if the service is premium too. Peace of mind is a huge factor for vacations.
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  When I try to find a place to stay on Airbnb it looks like the prices are higher than what I can find on hotels.com or booking.com. And the web site is useless. There is no option to sort by price, the filters for maximum price don't work. It's going to have to be cheaper than a hotel or B&B to make it worth taking the risk and I'll have to be able to find it without scrolling all the way through the site. So far I haven't found a compelling reason to try it regardless of the horror stories.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Booking.com replaced AirBnB for our travel needs in basically all cases. Only exception when booking.com doesn't show any available results, in which case AirBnB is a potential backup, not that this was actually necessary in the last 2 years or so before Covid, during covid and ever since.
  • 2rsf 4y ago
    The pictures changes as your family grows, needing two or three hotel rooms or only special family rooms makes Airbnb more affordable. Unless something has changed in the last months I always found a direct hotel order cheaper and easier than booking/hotels dot com, not to mention fake rates, irrelevant reviews or non existing rooms.
    • siquick 4y ago
      You can book apartments and homes on Booking
      • soco 4y ago
        Booking.com is only slightly safer than AirBnB though.
        • emptyfile 4y ago
          The comment said that booking.com is cheaper, not safer. Which it is, which is why on my trip to London in a month I rented over booking and not AirBnB. Why would I choose a more expensive service with zero additional benefits? Because their app is more cool?
• democracy 4y ago
  for me airbnb is the last resort if nothing else is available...
  • aembleton 4y ago
    For me its the first resort if I'm staying for more than a few days.
• brabel 4y ago
  I hope the OP is well and managed to find better accomodation. If it was me, I would bit the bullet and just write off the place and check into the nearest hotel as soon as possible. But regarding fake hosts: I think this is standard practice on BnB. Nobody wants to expose their real names on Bnb and be subject to abuse by unhappy guests... unfortunately that's the reality of it. From the host's point of view, I can understand that... the host shouldn't matter anyway in most cases, right? Most people who own these places don't look cool and young as in the fake pics you'll see in most listings! But guess what: those cool pics do seem to make the place a bit more attractive to guests, so the incentive to use fake pics is strong (not sure if that's illegal though). I stayed in a few wonderful places in California through BnB, but clearly, the listings were all under fake people (I think some even go to the effort to pay a real person to pretend they are the owner, as I googled one of them and she seemed like a real person... though I 100% doubt a young artist lady own a 3-storey townhouse in a good, quite central area of San Francisco). My sister is about to list her apartment on Bnb and she's going to pay a company specialising in this to do all the cleaning, customer support etc... They take a 20% cut I believe... but it's probably worth it. Not sure she'll allow her real profile to be used for the listing, but I suspect that as long as it's not illegal, she should use some kind of AI-created profile or something.
  • soco 4y ago
    I had a similar (bad) adventure on Booking.com - dirt, crawlies, so I packed and went somewhere else. Booking.com didn't do anything about refunding "oh we contacted the host and he said nah" so I called the credit card company who refunded me the transaction. Lesson learned. From then on I check Booking.com for locations then compare the offers on hotel sites and lo, often they're cheaper when booked directly. And renting directly from people, that's left to you folks more adventurous than me.
    • tluyben2 4y ago
      This is the reason we stick to the same hotel chains we know that are good whenever we can; cannot really go wrong with higher tier french chains (not only in France; we used them in India, China, Thailand as well). We often find that all in all the prices are not so different from airbnbs but with a lot more risk; so when you think about it, a E1200 airbnb for a month (which is hard to find in lisbon, by the way) vs a E1500 hotel, I would always pick the hotel; daily cleaning, breakfast included (usually so much I don't need anything further) and easy to cancel, extend or completely just get my money back or get relocated (especially when using the same chain like Accor). I had awful experiences with booking.com and very good experiences with hotels.com. More than once, they rebooked us in far nicer and more expensive hotels after complaining. I found our favourite hotel that way; our booked hotel was overbooked and pretty crappy; the staff was nasty about it; one call and we got put up in a hotel 5x the price for the same number of days (2 weeks) instead swiftly and at their cost. More or less in the middle of a paradise.
• gryzzly 4y ago
  Yeah I have come to realize that you are on your own and be ready for any emergency. Airbnb will not help in a timely manner. Worse, they will make you re-explain the situation while you are in stress of urgency. Same goes for booking.com these days- no support response until after the problem.
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    Why would booking.com be any different? It's the same business model with the same economics and incentives.
    • gryzzly 4y ago
      because it used to have excellent support similar to amazon’s - call or message them and they will contact the hotel themselves and resolve issues. they even managed to waive cancellation fees for our family when we screwed it up ourselves and had non-cancellable reservation. so it wasnt a comparison of airbnb and booking, but current booking.com and the way it used to be
• SnowHill9902 4y ago
  She goes to fix the fuses wet from having a shower and possibly barefoot?
  • ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
    Although that seems foolhardy, there should be no chance of electricity flowing through the reset button/switch if regulations are followed (which is obviously why there are regulations around domestic electricity wiring).
• miav 4y ago
  Quite surprised by the amount of pitchforks here. I certainly don't think of AirBNB as a failure and I doubt most others would. Is there a problem with scams? Totally. But that's hardly exclusive to AirBNB, wherever there's a market, digital or physical, there will be scammers. This was the case for all of human history and it's on you to vet your stuff. I've used AirBNB for long and short term stays, in Europe and in the US. Each time I stayed in a delightful places that was a genuine passion project for the hosts. Those places would not exist without AirBNB and similar services. If you're on a tight budget and just need a place to stay at for a bit, it's obviously easier to go with a Marriott. But if you're willing to spend some time on searching the best place to complement your trip, AirBNB can get you the best experience.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    The problem is that Airbnb is the scammer here. They've intentionally misleading customers thinking they will be protected against scams of this type while in reality they are not.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • scarface74 4y ago
    You know where I have never gotten scammed? A hotel. I would stay in a cheapish hotel before staying in an AirBnb.
  • uri4 4y ago
    Problem is not scam itself, but how airbnb handles it. If customer with 10 years old history, reports problem, it should by treated seriously. Not stole with "more proof needed" tactics. If hotel chain electricuted people in shower, it would get fined and closed pronto.
• CalRobert 4y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of airbnb but I don't know of a great alternative for their services. When my family and I travel we want something that is a home, designed for kids, with spaces to cook, hang out, and near or in town (but not surrounded by loud drunks) so we can do things without driving. Ideally in a situation where a screaming baby isn't going to annoy too many other people. Hotels are miserable at this, and when I try to find places like this on a site like booking.com I find... the same places I find on airbnb. Perhaps part of the problem is cities forcing hotels to be in locations that suit them, and not the people travelling. I've stayed in many absolutely wonderful homes on airbnb and as a travelling family it's vastly superior to staying in a hotel. We're staying in one in Utrecht for New Years'; I can't wait. The author's points are valid (if you have little kids, there's a great Shaun The Sheep episode about a converted sheep barn that comes to mind reading this article) but I can't think of anything remotely as good as airbnb for travelling families, except for airbnb clones like vrbo. _mostly_ miserable. There are some exceptions. They're usually very expensive.
  • cjrp 4y ago
    At the pricier end of the market, there are sites like Oliver's Travels. Fewer properties, higher prices, but better customer support.
• jgilias 4y ago
  If you still want/need to use AirBnB for cheaper travel, renting a room instead of a whole apartment is actually better. Then the host is an actual host and the reviews are more meaningful. I’ve gotten to know some pretty cool people that way. It’s a trade-off of course, as the set of potential issues is different.
  • soco 4y ago
    But won't you get a room in an apartment shared with other guests then?
    • NateEag 4y ago
      Where do you think the savings come from? If you aren't willing to accept some kind of reduction from hotel accommodations, you aren't willing to save money.
      • soco 4y ago
        It's one thing renting a room in the host's own living apartment (like the old couchsurfing) and another renting a room in a shared rented-out apartment. The latter one might be plagued way more by the mentioned fake reviews.
        • codexjourneys 4y ago
          This - I wish they had categories for "host lives here too" and "this is a boarding house." You can usually figure it out by scrutinizing the reviews, but I'd like to see it overtly stated.
        • NateEag 4y ago
          Ahhh, I see your point. I misunderstood you. Thanks for explaining!
    • jgilias 4y ago
      I’ve never had this happen, it was always at host’s place. Granted, that was some years ago, maybe things have changed!
• pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  A bunch of remarks: Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb. Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier. Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable. It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
  • ivankelly 4y ago
    > Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
    • pteraspidomorph 4y ago
• JCM9 4y ago
  This is the problem with the business model of these gig-economy or P2P marketplace concepts with “independent contractors” providing service. They get initial traction with a high focus on consistency and quality, but the model doesn’t scale and eventually the customer experience starts to degrade. I stopped using Uber for similar reasons. It was great for a while, but now it’s total random people turning up in beat up cars with rampant last minute cancelations and other problems. I’ve gone back to plain old taxis in most cases which are better now. Will be interesting to see how this all plays out long term and if these companies can control quality at scale or if this whole mode of trying to play middle-person just fizzles out over time and we return to more traditional approaches that weren’t necessarily terribly broken in the first place.
• steveBK123 4y ago
  This stuff is incredibly common in short term rental market. You are scraping the bottom of the barrel on landlord scruples. There was a recent fire in a summer vacation town popular with NYers. The town requires summer short term rental landlords to get a permit & inspection. The landlord did not get one. The landlord also had sketchy kitchen wiring that was probably some sort of DIY and not up to code. The landlord had removed batteries and hardwiring from 3 smoke detectors. These are the kind of things the inspector would have found immediately. A family visiting from out of state lost 2 of their 3 children in this fire. Apps like AirBnB create the facade of officialness on what are instead very sketchy markets. Family probably thought they were doing the right thing going through an app and the landlord must be verified and more "legit". Being from out of state they wouldn't know the intricacies of local town permit&inspection requirements and how to check if the landlord has one, etc. Likewise in my condo in NYC, we had one particular owner who was trying to use their unit as an Airbnb. Regardless of the local laws which were tightening up at the time, our condo expressly forbid short term rentals, and had language around minimum length of stay and lease approval requirements. It only stopped when we started fining them $1000 per incident. Stuff like this matters because you buy a condo to live in it and don't expect the unit on the other side of your bedroom wall to essentially be a hotel room with new neighbors every 3 days, staying up all hours (vacation, yay), dragging suitcases in&out at odd hours multiple times per week.. forever. The building itself takes on a lot more wear & tear, and they put a burden on staff as they think the building porter&doorman are there for them like a hotel concierge and front desk.
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    That is horrible. Let's just call it what it is: Airbnb are professional liars who use disgusting legal tactics like forced arbitration to sweep things under the carpet--all to make quarterly numbers.
  • tallanvor 4y ago
    I'm on the board of the Norwegian equivalent of a condo association, and I wish we could fine an owner every time we got complaints from other residents! Unfortunately the laws still have loopholes that make it very hard for us to hold him accountable as long as he claims to actually be living there. --In Norway you have to have a primary residence registered, and you're allowed to rent out spare rooms in your primary residence, even on short-term sites. We'd basically have to spend a lot of money to have a 3rd party come knocking on the door every night for several months to prove whether or not he's really living there so that we can take proper action.
• joyeuse6701 4y ago
  Yep. Had an Airbnb setup this week in Atlanta, looked good, responsive host. We arrived, looked clean and decorated well enough, but had 4 glade plugins for a 500sqft place… seemed excessive like their might be a bad smell hidden. Sat down on a chaise which collapsed because of a leg attached by gum. Found a cockroach under said chaise. Reported it and the owner said it was treated the other day, so it should be fine. Sat down on the couch, which also collapsed, one leg was missing and was held up by a coffee mug. The bed frame had cinder blocks and children’s notebooks supporting it, (stubbed my toe on the cinder block). Bathroom fixtures were loose, sink basins were not properly seated to their countertops, inviting mold. In the morning I found 3 more cockroaches roaming around the otherwise clean looking kitchen. I named one of them Gregor. Airbnb gave us a refund for the nights unspent and we’ve spent the rest of the time at a brand name hotel. More expensive, but more options for recourse if things go south. If not for the cockroaches it would have been bearable, but the combination of issues left too many doubts as to the safety of the place. My wife and I could not find rest there. Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place, but the quality control truly is a gamble. These days, I increasingly prefer the consistency of a hotel bed. I will say this, the thermostat was better at the Airbnb than the hotel. No auto feature in the hotel.
  • ehecatl42 4y ago
    > I named one of them Gregor. Not everyday you come across random Kafka references!
  • SwiftyBug 4y ago
    > Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel. Of course this does not apply to exotic Airbnbs.
    • mewse-hn 4y ago
      > I really don't get this. The promise of AirBnB used to be you could get a spare room / apartment in a place where the locals actually lived, rather than the hotel & convention center district that's 2 blocks from the airport
• mavu 4y ago
  > AirBnB might seem like they care, they might seem like they have processes and teams in place to take care of you but they do not. I am always surprised that people are surprised by this. This is what those companies do. AirBnB, Uber, deliveroo, twitter, whatever. It's what they mean when they talk about "disrupt the market". Offer a service with the bare minimum of humans (underpaid as much as possible). No concern for communities they "disrupt", or their customers, or taxes. They are the company equivalent of vermin infesting society.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    > I am always surprised that people are surprised by this In general, people assume good faith and law-abiding behavior, partly because when regular people don't abide by the law (even inadvertently), it catches up with them fairly quickly. The surprising bit is that when companies break the law, there are no consequences. What Airbnb is doing here is effectively fraud, they've misled the customer into thinking they were covered by an insurance policy or some sort of money-back guarantee, but are not honoring their part of the bargain.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  Credit card chargebacks (or lawsuits if you have the money & resources) are the way to go - that's the only thing Silicon Valley scum understands.
• scarface74 4y ago
  My wife and I decided to do the whole digital nomad thing earlier this year, flying around the US. At first we thought about doing AirBnbs because that’s what people do. We booked our first AirBnB and stayed for three weeks. While it was everything the host promised, we weren’t misled at all and it was nice enough. We realized we would like hotels better… - consistency: we could just go on the Hilton or Hyatt app and we wouldn’t have to worry about what we were going to get. We knew what to expect from a Homewood Suites, Embassy Suites, Home2Suites or Hyatt Place. Even if the hotel ended up having issues, we knew there were easy remedies - everything from getting another room or changing hotels easier. Besides, we are changing cities on Sundays and I need to be set up to work by Monday morning and don’t need any complications. And no secret codes. We get to the hotel. We do a digital check in from the app and our phones open the door. We check out digitally and just leave. - gym access: we have two rooms in our house dedicated to exercise. We have a studio for floor exercises and another room with cardio equipment. We wanted to be able to go downstairs to a gym. - no hidden fees: we know exactly what we are going to be paying up front. - no expectation to have the place spotless when we leave. Staying in a hotel is purely transactional. No reviewing the host. No worrying about reputation. - loyalty points: between the loyalty points that come from the hotel and the cobranded credit cards, you can easily get 15%-25% back in points you can redeem for future stays. - housekeeping - enough said.
• pharmakom 4y ago
  The real crime of Airbnb is the added pressure on residential housing stock in globally desirable cities. This story is pretty awful, mind.
  • dorchadas 4y ago
    Yep. This is a huge issue often overlooked by the AirBnB apologists. Long term lets in Dublin, experiencing a huge housing crisis, doubled during the pandemic as a lot of AirBnB hosts fled back to the long-term market. Sadly I believe they're likely all back to AirBnB now.
• dirtyv 4y ago
  I'm not sure how serious to take this article. It's the author's only post and while they complain about the use of a fake profile picture, they literally use another person from the same stock photo they claim the landlord used.
  • kuschkufan 4y ago
    Keep that in mind when you are renting a condo from her. Oh wait, she isn't offering anything to sell/lease on there? She just wants to report on this anonymously? Hmm
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  I think I've basically realized that I should simply not rent AirBnB, too many horror stories, including from people I know personally. It's hard to resist though, it's just nicer to have an apartment than a hotel room. I guess I'll probably keep using it for times when it if it fails it doesn't ruin my life (not a month overseas).
• circlefavshape 4y ago
  FWIW I stayed with my wife and 2 teenagers in airbnbs this summer in Norway, Germany, Czechia and Italy and they were all great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • fruit2020 4y ago
    Same here, also europe, been doing airbnb and similar websites (before airbnb was popular) for more than 10 years and it’s been nothing but good. Went to a hotel this summer because prices were too high, kids complained how small it is. Besides airbnb, next is agro tourism, which is also great. Having breakfast at the hotel is nice though
• _moof 4y ago
  Tangential but it's not a good idea to turn a breaker back on until someone has figured out why it flipped and fixed the problem. (The problem is usually that you tried to run the vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, and an electric kettle all at once on the same circuit, but apparently that wasn't the issue in this case.) Circuir breakers are there to prevent fires, and they flip for a reason.
• hfbff 4y ago
  I've used Airbnb ~30 times in multiple countries and have never had issues. Some places have been dirtier than I expected (nothing horrible though), some were much smaller than the pictures suggested, but the for the vast majority of cases it has been a good experience. When the experience wasn't good, I rated and commented accordingly, so the host got their rating lowered and maybe did something about it. I also met some of the owners, which was a nice experience. For work I had to travel for 1, 2, 3 weeks at a time and it wouldn't have made sense in economic terms to get a hotel, so I'm glad airbnb existed. New hosts might be an issue, but hosts with good reputation are, in my experience, not a problem. I can see the problem where whole neighborhoods get used for airbnb, driving costs up for residents. I imagine that's a tiny minority of cities...where jt makes sense to enforce laws to avoid this. For the rest of the cities? In my opinion airbnb is a net benefit: if creates a product that didn't exist before and allows buyers and sellers to benefit from this transaction. For me at least (and the people I know which is, admittedly, a non random sample) it has been a good experience. I'm sure in most places it's riskier than hotels. Yes, there's a trade-off.
  • Genghis_9000 4y ago
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    Same. I also find that for the same price range Airbnbs tend to be much more homey and clean with newer remodels. the majority of hotels I’ve stayed at as an adult have left me thinking “wow I’m paying 200$ for THIS?!” Due to limited space or lots of scuff marks and stains from daily wear and often being decades old. Airbnbs tend to be kept “Pinterest fresh” and have a kitchen and living room that are a game changer for comfort. Also they help you actually see a neighborhood with local culture instead of just a downtown or a business district.
• davibu 4y ago
  I found the Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/53946710 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/53946710 (or https://archive.ph/2fO1l https://archive.ph/2fO1l)
• omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  Oh my, oh my, how the tune has changed on hn and social media on this and uber. Whereever people sense they can make a buck or save a buck, laws amd regulations be damned. I have never swayed an inch off my view. I knew first hand how this affects housing prices and wear, I live in a severly affected area and pay the price for it, literally. Same for uber. Neither is cheaper than the previous thing, hotel offers better bang fpr the buck, uber has surges and exploits the drivers and isnt even cheaper. Nope, I dont qanna hear about these drivers wouldnt have a job at all without uber. Lol. Just because some tech bros with sexist issues can make an app and a service without customer service does not mean jack shit. Airheadbnb is being declared cosa non grata in more and more places, uber is literally outlawed in half of europe. Theres your business, kalashnick and the other pajasos. If I had my own country or my way, I would send these clowns to prison no questions asked, to, you know, disrupt them a bit. Do not come have a shit in my place. I am all for the strictest and heavy handed regulation on these matters. Hotels expensive? Well, then stay at home or go to a motel or some cheaper destination. If its too expensive, your kin has no business being there, mate. Taxi too expensive? Get a car, use public transport. Walk. Screw uber and the consumers of it. I have sympathy for the drivers waiting in the dark on italian airports, but not uber, its a zero sum game to increase prices later on or to have a self driving fleet which then somehow makes this non viable business model good? Hell no, this is a deliberate scheme to burn through investor money. Airbnb and Uber are the scum of the earth, its a shame the population let them get away with this stuff for a while. People are inherently and helplessly stupid on some things. In hindsight, its always easy to play the innocent one with a halo hovering over the head. I wonder where the fierce hn defenders of these models are today.
  • jfzoid 4y ago
    > Just because some tech bros with sexist issues can make an app and a service without customer service does not mean jack shit. this is an ad hominem attack and not helpful -- Kalanick's personal problems are separate from Uber's product and services
    • omgomgomgomg 4y ago
      It was not just him, it was on a wide scale, he was dismissed because it all hapoenednon his watch, unless I am grossly mistaken.Guy is not fit to run a business, if he is not in jail for breaching laws with his products, then somebody should be sent to the slammer for sexaul assault, wouldnt you agree this is crossing the last and final taboos in society and law? Sexual misconduct is punishable by prison in the us. I opine that this is morally worse than running a brothel, the women do not sign up for the sex part and the salary is worse than a strippers. If these men are desperate for sex, they should be looking for it elsewhere. Top management of banks and such at least have the courtesy to simply pay for an escort not associated in any way with the business. Most of them even simply live a solid family life. You will be hard pressed to find such misconduct in the classic instututions.
• ncrmro 4y ago
  They decided to ban me over a small misdemeanor weed charge from my younger days (6+ years ago). For reference I have great reviews both staying and hosting in the US. This was after an my first international booking when they ask for passport pic. They let me know after I was in my room and told me I had to GTFO and where absolutely no help at all. Been using booking.com, locations can be hit more miss still. The nice apartment I’m at now in Mexico City shower hardly works for instance. Also it’s pretty much a meme now that hotels are about the same cost after fees and usually much better service.
• threemux 4y ago
  As bad as this person's experience was, Airbnb fills a niche for me that I haven't seen anyone else compete in: larger (ideally detached) accommodations in non-vacation destinations. I have young children and having separate bedrooms is great when we're visiting family for example.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  When going somewhere for a long stay, always rent a hotel room for 3 days, and use that time to rent a long term accomodation that you can see with your own eyes.
• Timja 4y ago
  The problem with AirBnB is the rating system. I have booked many dozens of apartments on AirBnB and my approach these days is: 1: Never book an apartment with less than 50 ratings 2: Never book an apartment with an average rating of less than 4.8 stars The problem is that AirBnB has set up their system so that even complete garbage apartments have average ratings of over 4.5 stars. Because of that, people still book those for normal prices. If AirBnB would normalize the ratings (median rating = 2.5 stars), there would be an upward pressure on the hosts to improve the quality of their services. But the way it is, there are only few good apartments on AirBnB. Over the last years, I have only been to two apartments via AirBnB which I would consider "good". And both had over 50 ratings and the average rating was 5 stars.
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    Airbnb also makes it difficult to rate someone poorly without being rated poorly yourself. You get almost no recourse if you do get a bad review.
    • alistairSH 4y ago
      I thought the ratings were done blindly? If not, that's terrible and obviously leads to problems.
  • dazc 4y ago
    > 1: Never book an apartment with less than 50 ratings The only good experience I've had was with a place that had zero reviews. I got to the point where i figured the review system was so unreliable and unfit for purpose that I would just take a chance and it worked. I found a lot of those place with multiple good reviews were mainly from people who had stayed two nights and as part of a group where a cheap place to sleep was their number one criteria. Mostly everyone else is just doing the ebay thing where I give you a good review and you give me one back since there is zero incentive to give an honest assessment that your next host will read and consider you a trouble maker.
  • alistairSH 4y ago
    Looking back at places I've stayed... all have ratings over 4.8 (average above 4.9), all have 100+ ratings, 75% are "SuperHost". None were high priced (relative to other Airbnb in that area), mostly middle or high-middle price. All were as-depicted in the listing, with the worst being "adequate lodging, fantastic location" (steps from Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy - apartments was spacious and clean, but dated). Others were above expectations (newly remodeled crofters cottage near Stornoway, UK). Based on my experience, either I'm staying in very different locations (typically not big cities, Florence being the exception) or shopping at very different price-points than many of the horror stories.
• netfl0 4y ago
  Get a hotel next time like an adult.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    For a whole month‽
    • netfl0 4y ago
      https://www.marriott.com/travel-experience/extended-stay-hotels/ https://www.marriott.com/travel-experience/extended-stay-hot... Seeing prices around 3K depending on a city, so yea.
      • aembleton 4y ago
        I wasn't thinking of the price but the comfort. You wouldn't have a kitchen so would have to eat out all of the time. I like eating out every now and then but not for more than a few days in a row. Certainly not for a month.
• p0pcult 4y ago
• fortran77 4y ago
  This is why I won't do AirBnb any more. Even with a relatively honest host, they are simply not equipped to handle an issue the way a hotel can. Hotels have engineers on duty or on call to fix a bad toilet, broken lock, or electrical problem and/or swap you to another room (or even another hotel!) if there's something wrong with your room. If there's a problem with the room you rent from an AirBnb host, there's nothing they can do.
• jadamczyk 4y ago
  My Airbnb in Portugal experience was almost identical to the one in the article. After some time it happened it got me almost laughing at this point. Fortunately for me I was able to be enough of a pain in the ass to get a full refund from airbnb and a coupon that made the monthly stay discount apply to less than a monthly stay. I had to spend more money in the end anyway. After this I try to avoid airbnb as much as possible.
• sg47 4y ago
  My recent experience I rarely write bad reviews but this place deserves one. Here's a list of things that didn't go well for us. 1. Unit is advertised as having a pool but there's a disclaimer hidden somewhere that amenities are not accessible to guests. Had multiple emails back and forth to understand that it's closed only after labor day weekend. 2. Unit has a kitchen but we were told that it doesn't have pots and pans. Again, a lot of back and forth. We packed a lot of utensils since we have some food allergies and can't eat restaurant food. In the end it turned out to have all the essential kitchen utensils. Wasted a lot of our time and caused unnecessary stress. 3. Unit does not have an air conditioner and it clearly states that there's no air conditioner. What was not mentioned is that the unit traps a lot of heat and is essentially unlivable at night. Our first night there, we couldn't sleep till 4am due to the heat. The fans were useless. 4. That night we discovered that the upstairs toilet was broken. We had to go downstairs every time we needed to use the bathroom that night. I tried to fix it in the morning but it was futile. 5. In the morning, I went to use the gas stove and saw a note that a lighter was needed to use the stove. Sadly, there was no lighter to be found in the unit. When I called the host, they said they'd reimburse the lighter which wasn't very helpful. I had to make a 30+ minute trip back to town to get a lighter. I missed my meal schedule which wasn't great. Someone had left a lighter outside the door when I was gone but forgot to tell us or knock the door. 6. Someone came to take a look at the toilet and said it was broken and that they needed a maintenance person to fix it. No maintenance person came that day. They reached out to me once to ask about a good time to fix the toilet but I wasn't at the unit and the place does not have cellphone signal. Out of the blue, the maintenance person sends me a text "+1 ( (Phone number hidden by Airbnb) : Go ahead give me more tickets I’m on a roll fixing everything lol Sorry wrong person Me: No problem. Looks like the toilet isn't still fixed" 7. The place continued to be unlivable at night. We did not get any sleep on all 3 nights. Woke up sleepy and dehydrated all 3 mornings. 8. For all this inconvenience caused, the response from the host was pathetic.
  • kennend3 4y ago
    > 2. Unit has a kitchen but we were told that it doesn't have pots and pans. Again, a lot of back and forth. We packed a lot of utensils since we have some food allergies and can't eat restaurant food. In the end it turned out to have all the essential kitchen utensils. I've got a friend who has used AirBnB and has been burned by this every single time. She comes with her daughters and wants to do a bit of cooking buts not a single pot or pan to be found? Once she came and borrowed my pans which wasn't convenient and not really why she was paying AirBnB fees. After being burned multiple times, she just stays with me. It isn't as convenient as i live further away from where she wants to be, but at least i have a working kitchen. I don't get why people advertise they have a kitchen, yet remove all the tools needed to use it? Just seems like a real dick move.
• ptero 4y ago
  Hotels are not without failure, too. I stayed in both the hotels and AirBnbs often (as a rough guess ~75 hotel stays and 30 airbnb stays) and saw hotels full on arrival late at night, noisy rooms, electrical failures and one flood from a guest upstairs, who managed from room 6XX vacate rooms 5XX 4XX 3XX and 2XX -- quite an achievment! I may be lucky, but all my AirBnb stays were pretty good to excellent. I book for convenience, not trying to beat the hotel on price and prioritize listings with long, consistent history. In general, having several rooms where a jetlagged family member can turn on the light and read without waking everyone else is a huge feature. So is having a full kitchen, so for me the AirBnb has been a clear net positive option. My 2c, others may have a different experience.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    I'm guessing that some of your AirBnB success is because you seem to choose fairly carefully and not just on price. That said, you also seem to have had bad luck with hotels. I've stayed in many hundreds and the percentage of memorably bad experiences I've had is tiny. I'm not sure if I have had the kind of record you have had even if I go back decades. I can't remember the last time a hotel gave away my room.
    • ptero 4y ago
      > That said, you also seem to have had bad luck with hotels. That was not the message I tried to convey, sorry. I did a lot of business travel at one time, stayed in a lot of hotels and have no aversion to them at all. If I am traveling alone, I almost always stay in hotels. Family travel is usually with AirBnB. I was simply saying that AirBnb should not be seen as universally evil based on a few stories, however horrible, as there are still use cases where it seems to work well. My 2c.
• Slava_Propanei 4y ago
• kmos17 4y ago
  Airbnb removed the visible star ratings on comments sometime ago, clearly they are optimizing for hosts and maximizing bookings, to me as a long term user of the platform it’s made it worst and disincentives hosts from providing good customer service. Overall I’ve had good experiences, and there are great places and hosts but it requires more research time to find them and to me that’s a bad sign of where it is heading.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  I don't think the interesting part of this article is that there are bad AirBnB hosts. I'm sure there are. I don't think they are the majority, and I'm basing that on my overwhelmingly positive experiences as a guest. So, that part of the article doesn't ring true to me. The interesting part is how much of a hellish experience AirBnB support was. If you're staying in an AirBnB, you likely do not have the time to spend waiting for support to get back to you. Their customer service should help the customer immediately, and sort out the details later.
  • nzoschke 4y ago
    This. A bad AirBNB can affect a customers health and safety. How can they justify taking days to come to a resolution? In this case I also wonder why the author didn’t take faster action themselves. Immediately move out into a new hotel or rental and sort out a refund later. Probably the root cause to both inaction is money. Airbnb doesn’t want to pay for a prompt help desk and for a customer friendly refund Policy. The customer doesn’t want to or can’t pay for a market rate hotel. This makes me far less likely to trust airbnb for long term rentals myself, knowing you can’t trust that listings are authentic and that you can’t count on airbnb to help if you get duped.
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      Keep in mind that hindsight is 20/20. The author may have been able to pay for an airbnb or a hotel but not both at the same time, which is what they would’ve had to do in this situation.
  • alistairSH 4y ago
    All true, but at the same time, the user didn't do herself any favors by waiting until weeks(?) into a long-term (by Airbnb standards) rental.
• asciimov 4y ago
  After living next to an AirBNB for 3 years in a quiet neighborhood, good riddance. If you haven't had the pleasure, having an AirBNB next door is like having your house moved to a cheap hotel parking lot. Random yelling and screaming at odd hours, parties every holiday (even the minor ones), lots of middle of the night loud drunken discussions. Random people all the time, is that guy trying to break into my house or is he trying to get into the AirBNB back yard. Questions, where's a good place to eat, where is the water hose, how do you like living here, do you know of a late night pharmacy nearby?
• jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  It occurs to me that the very existence of Airbnb(and so many other startups that offer cheaper alternatives) is a grift on people who can’t afford the real cost of travel and vacations. As usual, the companies make money and the product is the economically strained consumer. We see this kind of grift everywhere from car sales to real estate interest rates where poor people and people of colour are targeted because they want something more than they can afford. Everyone is always looking for a deal or something cheaper even when they don’t have to..and there are others who have been conned into parting with the few dollars they have because they have been convinced that they deserve a certain experience even if it’s sub par. The only way to deal with this societal malnutrition is to find joy in everything. Example: The notion that one has to go on a family vacation annually like it’s a sacred vow pilgrimage is a uniquely western phenomenon. and a seemingly recent one. Something strange has been happening recently. The attachment to material things has somehow made people blind to reality. Their own reality. The reality of their wallets. Consumers in the west are not the true poor, but due to social media and some perverted sense of entitlement, they want the experiences of gazillionaires. Which makes them artificially poor. Quantity over quality is the first indication that one is living with a sense of lack or scarcity. But I don’t understand the new found middle class obsession with luxury at cheap deals. Never has anyone in the world lived in such abundance. No one has childhood memories of overseas travels or annual cruises or vacations. So this must be a planted desire. It’s not real. The Airbnb customer is the product. Consumers minds are just fertile grounds where unreasonable expectations are seeded. Hence the wild chase for something cheaper. The first priority for any vacation stay should be safety and then cleanliness and then comfort. The reviewing system and site should be independent. But that’s a long game. Companies that want to stay forever put in such controls. Short grifts don’t have to worry because in a Ponzi scheme, the people at the top would have made the money early on well before the decay and rot sets in the balance sheet.
• alistairSH 4y ago
  Researching the host isn't part of people's normal Airbnb booking process? Eek. I always click into the host details, check for additional listings, check their history, and usually try to street-view the property as well (harder to do for apartments, but usually possible for full homes). It's annoying that I have to do it. No question Airbnb should do a better job ensuring their listings are legitimate. But, when I travel, I almost always need a kitchen and someplace that's dog-friendly, which rules out most hotels. Maybe I've just been lucky, but across most of the eastern US, Scotland, Italy, and Iceland, I've had good experiences. I generally pick a mid-priced listing, not the cheapest, and definitely not the most expensive.
• stuaxo 4y ago
  Air BnB is terrible it's not worth using any more. Too many of the hosts are weird, with odd rules and renting out weird spots.
• spapas82 4y ago
  The OP seems to have spend like $3000 for a month. What's very puzzling to me is why not go to a decent hotel? I'm positive that you can easily find 3 and even 4 star hotels for less than $100 per night in Portugal. This question is not specifically about the OP but in general about people that pay so much money for an Airbnb when they can have a room in a nice hotel for the same (or even less) money. I'm not talking about special occations (i.e people that want to organize party and stuff), I'm talking about traditional tourists. Why would anybody choose an AirBnb vs a hotel? Maybe I'm not in the right mindset (or age?) but I've never even considered an Airbnb when going on vacation anywhere.
  • phphphphp 4y ago
    Hotel is a room, Airbnb is a home. The difference in amenities is important and when, historically, Airbnb was cheaper, it was often superior to a hotel. Nowadays, Airbnb often costs more than a hotel, and so it’s a trade-off: pay more to have a kitchen? Another aspect is per-person cost: a hotel room is typically limited to 2 people, whereas an Airbnb can be dozens, so with higher capacity requirements Airbnb can still work out cheaper.
  • shwoopdiwoop 4y ago
    When staying at a place for longer than a few nights, hotel rooms are not as attractive as apartments. Having a full kitchen, separate dining/living/bedroom spaces available makes a huge difference. Whilst you probably can get a small hotel room for the same price, I can certainly see the appeal.
  • brosinante 4y ago
    An airbnb (often) has a washing machine, a kitchen you can cook on and a fridge you can store food in.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      For longer stays, hell even for short-term stays on weekends, I have found to like construction worker homes - usually these are rented out during the week for tradespeople and construction workers and during the weekend for tourists on a budget.
• Havoc 4y ago
  This is why I prefer chain hotels. By no means perfect but does introduce some sort of floor as to how fraud-y terrible things can get...
• mtw 4y ago
  Airbnb Support is the worst. They speak and write very well, and make you feel they listen to you and will do their best to solve your issue. In most cases though, they will come back to you with a negative answer and will leave you in the worst of situations. You can check the reddit sub /airbnb or on Twitter. Having 0 support like Google would be much better than being promised help will come, then having various customer agents taking over your case from scratch and then after exhaustion, being told you won't be refunded or no action will be taken
• CaptainZapp 4y ago
  I've used AirBnb 3 times in 2017 in Japan with mixed success. I will never ever use it again. Apart from being a terrible company that doesn't give a shit for the cities and communities they're destroying there's just a host of practical reasons to never ever use them. It starts with the key exchange. In a hotel you just get the key(card) handed, go to your room and be done. You'll never have to go through shenanigans like those described in the article. Much worse is tip toeing around neighbors who, rightfully, hate your guts. Or even worse, tip toeing around other guests, which were not part of the description. Don't get me started on hidden cameras, which may or may not be advertised. If I pay big bucks for a room I will absolutely not run a "The Conversation" type sweep of my private quarters. There's huge scam and safety issue with all things AirBnb. No thanks! If anything goes wrong in a hotel there's somebody who can deal with it. I had some bozos having a party in the room above me in a hotel in Prague. A call to the reception resolved the issue in 5 minutes. It's not the quaint experience of a host providing personal guidance to a city. Often you wind up in a bland, badly designed cookie cutter apartment managed by a faceless company. Hotels set minimum standards. Essentially I get what I pay for. I can splurge and stay at the Hyatt or a LeMeridien, or I can travel more on the cheap and get a good bed and a reasonable bathroom at an Ibis. Think you got a bargain with AirBnb? That may have been the case 8 years ago. Nowadays I can only suggest: Best of luck with that one. Support if something fucks up? Well, you just read the article I suppose. AirBnb wound up on my eternal shit list. I wouldn't touch them or any of their properties with a haz mat suit.
• thisisjasononhn 4y ago
  So I've been seeing a lot of anti or negative AirBnB reviews and comments recently and honestly, I have to ask... where the hell are people staying? I've booked about 10 AirBnBs over the past month, while travelling through Europe. I basically had to as my mental and physical health had deteriorated due to staying in hostels, with the never ending cycle of snorers, lights on, late night returns, etc. And hotels were absurdly expensive. Each AirBnB that I booked, in * Barcelona, Spain * Amsterdam, NL * middle-Germany * Denmark * Norway were all someone's extra space in their house they had; or a side unit to their main house; or their entire place and they were on travel or business outside the country. Additionally, ALL of them I booked were far, far cheaper than hotels by many margins, and I could cook to my diet in many of the spaces I stayed. That really helped cost wise too. None of them had ridiculous cleaning requirements OR cleaning fees (and I clean the dishes and pots and pans I use by hand simply because I need them again or otherwise, and I'm not an animal). None of them had ridiculous AirBnB fees, although most were pretty much a good deal, and then AirBnB fees made it a bit less of a good deal. Sorry for this sounding a bit preachy, I'm well aware of the damage AirBnB does to communities, cities, countries even but I'm baffled how many shitty experiences it sounds like people are having recently. (there's a BIG anti-tourism/anti-AirBnB mentality and movement in Barcelona, which I experienced first hand not getting any change back for a 10 euro bill on a 2 euro purchase; minor but still, sheesh) On the other side of that, I'm also fully on board with properties that were bought explicitly to use as AirBnBs or rental homes for tourists, to return to market, and I really hope that does happen. I say that because as evidenced by my experiences, there are still places that sort of follow the original ethos of AirBnBs: rent your extra personal space out. I typed all this from a small basement area in Norway, that I booked on AirBnB, which is very comfortable, and relaxing. I made some great pasta too, which honestly I can't say I've ever been able to do in hotels. Also, I have far greater concerns with hotels and *bugs than with AirBnBs and similar stuff, but that's just me Honestly though, I will probably avoid using AirBnB in the future as best I can, especially as it seems unnecessary through Japan.
• barnabee 4y ago
  I have had and have many friends who have had similar horror stories from holiday apartments and even B&Bs and hotels, as well as Airbnbs rentals. There’s a pretty simple correlation most of the time: the cheaper the accommodation compared to the local market, the higher the chance of disappointment. On the other hand, when I take Airbnbs that are only a small discount compared to a reasonable but completely average hotel room from a reputable chain, they are often fantastic. Bad and scammy holiday and short term accommodation is surely a problem, but Airbnb and their rating system doesn’t look any worse than many other alternatives from my experience. Many of the comments here show more about the author’s attitude toward a once popular start-up than much else.
• Lonestar1440 4y ago
  Airbnb and hotels both have their place. Airbnb is at it's best in spots like coastal California where a place with outdoor space, cute decor, and a kitchen is really nice AND you can always go to a Holiday Inn off the 101 if things go sideways. Avoid in places you haven't been to before or when you'd be really screwed if it ended up being unsuitable.
  • thisisjasononhn 4y ago
    AirBnB works in my opinion best for very remote, or not-tourist travelled places. Where you're going to the island of Sørøya, for example, and there's literally no hotel space or otherwise accommodations available. Unfortunately, big business management companies exist in Norway too... go figure.
• emadda 4y ago
  Side note: I released https://stay100.app https://stay100.app a few weeks ago. It is a desktop based search engine for AirBnB.
• jongunter1 4y ago
  Not surprised by this article. I lived in Airbnbs for 19 months during the pandemic and can share three similar horror stories. Airbnb's response was terrible. In one case, I had no water for three days and sewage leaking into the bathtub; Airbnb was totally unsupportive. In another case, the unit was run down and had no hot water; Airbnb was not able to help me so I actually had to shell out my own money to cancel the stay and book a new one. In a third incident, the unit was run down, unsafe, and was not following local rules that required it to have a STR license. Airbnb support did not seem to care that the host was breaking the law, and did the bare minimum to support. The flip side is I had also some amazing AirBnb stays (thank you to my wonderful hosts in Port Angeles, WA and Galveston, TX), and that does give me some hope for the platform.
  • FireBeyond 4y ago
    > Airbnb support did not seem to care that the host was breaking the law, and did the bare minimum to support. Looking the other way while their hosts break the law is what made Airbnb what it is today.
• otikik 4y ago
  I used to enjoy Airbnb until I ended up in a place with bedbugs. Never again.
  • alistairSH 4y ago
    That can happen anywhere.
  • thisisjasononhn 4y ago
    Agree with the other commentator, that can happen literally anywhere in the world. Bedbugs are THE human parasite, fuck em but they're everywhere. You should do your due diligence when staying or traveling anywhere, before putting bags down or sleeping in a new space.
    • otikik 4y ago
      I understand that for you I am “a random someone went somewhere”. So from your point of view it might make sense that talking about things that “can happen anywhere” makes some sense. What you need to understand is that for me I am not just “someone who went somewhere”. This was something that really happened to me personally and it was extremely uncomfortable and I’d rather not delve on the details. That is why a statistic-based argument makes no sense to me. I will never use Airbnb, ever again, because it left me both physically and mentally scarred. It’s not an abstract ethereous thing for me.
• nneonneo 4y ago
  I swear, we’ve gone over the hill with these dotcom companies. I stopped using Amazon and went back to shopping at my grocery store, Costco, IKEA, etc. You get to actually see what you’ll be getting, bring it back the same day, and know it’s not some fake that you need to ship back the next day. Hell, even the dollar store sells me better junk than Amazon does, and cheaper too. I stopped using Uber and went back to taxis. Three times now I’ve arrived at my home airport to Uber surging their prices to $100+ for a simple airport pickup. The last Uber I took in Vegas decided it was ok to run red lights and Uber wouldn’t do a thing about it. No thanks, I’ll take the fixed-rate taxi service, or even just rent a car. I stopped using AirBnB and now book hotels. Prices are comparable, and the quality is far more predictable. It’s getting harder and harder to find good listings, and when my family shows up and the place “isn’t as described” it’s a real downer. A recession of sorts might be the perfect thing to force these companies to start focusing on their product again, instead of this growth-at-all-costs mentality.
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    > I stopped using Uber and went back to taxis. I've never used Uber. But the various local taxi companies seem to have recently formed a cartel; they won't take bookings before 9AM, muttering about "the school run". This is new, I booked a taxi at 7:30AM two months ago, to go to the hospital, and that worked fine. Last week I was forced to either book before 7 (and spend an hour in a waiting room), or cough-up £18 for a ten-minute trip. For clarity concerning this school-run nonsense, school starts at 9AM here, and few kids go to breakfast clubs.
  • metalliqaz 4y ago
    a real wake-up moment for me was when I price checked something at CVS and it was more expensive on Amazon
  • Genghis_9000 4y ago
• nimos 4y ago
  IMO this reeks of data-driven myopia. Slow bleeds to goodwill are incredibly difficult to properly capture into a model. Anything that isn't measured - or poorly measured - is liable to be traded off for what is measured.
• geijoenr 4y ago
  I was an enthusiastic user of Airbnb until I faced the reality of the platform on a trip to Seul. After being offered to sleep in what looked like a maintenance closet because the room I had booked was no longer available for the first time contacted Airbnb support. Apart of the fact that the experience was infuriating and frustrating, I am pretty sure 80% of the time it was a bot replying my messages not a support agent. I never got a full refund and I decided it was not worth the trouble, since then I just book hotels.
  • astura 4y ago
    >being offered to sleep in what looked like a maintenance closet because the room I had booked was no longer available This bait and switch scam seems somewhat common-ish on Airbnb https://www.vice.com/en/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-scam-on-airbnb https://www.vice.com/en/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-...
• alistairSH 4y ago
  Almost all of what's described can happen outside of Airbnb as well. Take Asheville, NC for example... they banned short-term rentals (for good reason). So, if somebody wants a 1-2 month rental, you would use Craigslist/Facebook, both of which are full of scammers. Friends got taken by a scam in 2020. Found a listing on Craigslist, had some email with "landlord", signed a 1-month lease, etc. When they arrived, the house was occupied (by its real owner, maybe). The neighbor came out and laughed, said they were the 3rd or 4th couple to be scammed at that address.
• mcguire 4y ago
• lobocinza 4y ago
  <insert any tech company here> "...might seem like they care, they might seem like they have processes and teams in place to take care of you but they do not. Their call center and support center staff are an outsourced company in the Phillipines who do not care about you, who do not bother reading your issues and cases and who do not care if you are in danger."
• nazgulnarsil 4y ago
  The incentives of marketplaces are partially aligned with scammers. Solving this would be of major impact for the global economy.