15 ms·

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 o

• 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.
    • bell-cot 4y ago
      Might you tell us about any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support? Yes, it's "a choice". Sadly, it's an overwhelmingly popular choice.
      • stewx 4y ago
        My employer chooses to staff our customer support lines with North American agents who know what they are doing.
      • smugma 4y ago
        Zappos, from inception to 1B acquisition and beyond.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          Although I would argue that Zappos didn't "limit profits." Rather they (correctly) surmised that the only way to successfully sell shoes online as a core business was to be seen as bending over backwards from a customer service perspective. Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.
      • bmj 4y ago
        And it's a popular choice because the consumers often don't seem to care. Many are willing to accept poor customer service in the pursuit of lower prices for goods and services.
      • HWR_14 4y ago
        > any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support? Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos. Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.
  • madaxe_again 4y ago
    I don’t know why I’ve had such a different experience to others, but in both cases where I complained to Airbnb when a host was unable or unwilling to offer a resolution, Airbnb made things right for me - in one case even covering the parking ticket I’d ended up with from the host’s crappy instructions, in the other, the listing was removed as the issues were too egregious to number.
• netsharc 4y ago
  Makes me think that there's a market for a 3rd party website for reviews for AirBnB hosts (and probably guests). But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
  • mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
    It's fundamentally a problem of trust. Hotels and big brands work because you can trust them. Why do you trust them? Because they have skin in the game. If their products suck their brand suffers and that's what they want to avoid the most. If Apple releases crappy products they can't just create a new "BtwNotApple" brand. They can sell overpriced products because you're paying for trust/brand. In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
    • Fnoord 4y ago
      Hmm, I've never used it, but something like Silkroad worked, it did not have trust issues. To me it reads like they try to save pennies on customer support.
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        The differences between Silk Road and Airbnb is that the former didn't have lots of investors and techbros to pay returns to, so they could actually offer a fair escrow service and still remain profitable, where as Airbnb has to commit fraud by pitching you an "insurance" service that never actually pays out because doing so would lower or even negate the techbros' returns.
• mcculley 4y ago
  This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve. I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets. I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    What AirBnB missed was to include hotels in its listings, which would have allowed them to over a complete experience for travelers in general. booking.com started with hotels and included more AirBnB style listings.
    • VBprogrammer 4y ago
      Expanding into different niches like that is difficult. It's like Booking.com expanding into the camping market. They end up trying to shoehorn camping into the same database tables as hotel stays and it just becomes an abomination which misses many of the subtleties in the market.
      • rjsw 4y ago
        I think Booking.com expanding into camping would work fine in Europe, most campsites are busineses with a defined set of facilities that they offer.
        • hef19898 4y ago
          Depends on the camp grounds. Those with specified and defined places it should be rather easy to do (Italy, Croatia, Germany are among those regions were you tend to have a lot those, France is a mixed bag and I haven't been to GB or Scandinavia recently). Those without defined places, that's gonna be difficult...
• shoulderfake 4y ago
• elforce002 4y ago
  My family went to an Airbnb (basically they were selling themselves as sort of resort) and when my wife saw she had to cook, etc... She was really mad. The listing didn't say it. Long history short, never again. We're going to resorts and hotels ever since. The extra money is not that much since Airbnb basically ramping up their prices.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    I’ve never seen an AirBnB listing say you have to cook, because it’s assumed.
    • nobodyandproud 4y ago
      “BnB” means bed and breakfast, which of course has lost its meaning with Airbnb. I knew someone whose family ran a small bed-and-breakfast (pre-web). I don’t think they cooked all 3 meals but they did at least provide breakfast and brownbag lunch.
      • respondo2134 4y ago
        Well the "Air" part is for air mattress, which is no longer true, if it ever was. The name was supposed to connotate a very spartan take on a traditional bed-and-breakfast. I've never heard of anyone booking all-inclusive travel through airbnb.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        In my experience, and I've stayed at a lot of them, BnBs usually have a hot sit down breakfast but it's not universal. I've certainly stayed at BnBs where the host is politely but firmly clear they're not there to entertain you and there will be coffee out in the morning and feel free to grab some yogurt from the fridge. While there is usually fruit and muffins that you can grab for lunch, they don't usually provide a brownbag lunch as such and rarely dinner.
        • denton-scratch 4y ago
• specproc 4y ago
  Hotels are great. They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!
  • lambic 4y ago
    Having stayed in some truly shitty hotels I would have to disagree with this sentiment.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      Stay in better ones?
  • nobodyandproud 4y ago
    To add to that: Hotels are rightly regulated. The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option. Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Hotels are also hilariously taxed, because it's perfect taxation without representation - the people staying at the hotels aren't residents!
      • HWR_14 4y ago
        They are opting to go to the city. They are literally voting with their dollars to be taxed.
  • fruit2020 4y ago
    They are sometimes too small if you go with young kids and want to spend a week or so.
    • 4y ago
• roenxi 4y ago
  > 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. Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    And genuine government-issued ID, which is also difficult to fake.
    • noasaservice 4y ago
      If you know the right people, no it's not. And these types of scammers are and know the "right" people.
    • dazc 4y ago
      Airbnb are not a govt agency and can not tell a genuine document image from one which has been slightly altered. There is a reason why stolen passports are so valuable.
  • iandanforth 4y ago
    Not hard to fake at all. Here are some of the ways - Large friends and family network, rotate through other peoples homes - Own a series of apartment buildings, rotate through addresses - Unoccupied buildings with accessible mail drops (pick up mail from outside) Similar tricks exist for non-residential address requirements. Never underestimate the creativity of scammers.
• hourago 4y ago
  > 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. Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists. Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
  • nebula8804 4y ago
    You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.
    • aliqot 4y ago
      Holiday! Inn! Express!
      • _hcuq 4y ago
        Free! Breakfast! Clean! Rooms!
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        A franchise is very comforting. All of those consistent, comfortable minimum standards constantly checked by employees from checklists; the excellent insurance; the ability to speak to someone in charge when something goes wrong and get a nearly instant reply... comforting. When I stay in them, I don't even have to wonder if I'm raising residential rents in the area (although I'm certainly raising commercial ones.)
        • 4y ago
• nebula8804 4y ago
  Ever since the worker shortage started, the quality of traditional hotels has gone down the hole. I have traveled far more this year than any other year in my life and my anecdotal experience shows that below 4 star the quality has just nosedives so much so that you don't know what you are getting until you show up and end up feeling lucky or totally screwed. And I am referring to hotels in America(Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit) and Europe/UK(Amsterdam, Dublin, London).
  • 988747 4y ago
    I spent vacations in California this year, and noticed the same: housekeeping is every 5 days instead of everyday, hotel bars/restaurants are either closed or turned into fast foods (menu consists only of burgers, sandwiches and salads), amenities like gyms are closed. And all that for prices that are significantly higher than before the pandemic.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Hotels have definitely cut back on servicing rooms. Although honestly? I not infrequently stay in "serviced apartments" that are only cleaned once a week. And that's just fine. The housekeeper is more likely to interrupt me to clean the room than provide a service I actually care about.
      • zucked 4y ago
        I'm with you - I don't need (or even want, really) my room cleaned every day. It's friggin annoying. I always happen to be needing to access the room when housekeeping is in there. Just come once every 3-5 days if it comes to that, thanks.
      • astura 4y ago
        Housekeeping is now largely "upon request" with sometimes a minimum and I absolutely love that. I don't really care for housekeeping everyday, I'll let them know if I need anything. I don't know of any hotel that will refuse to send housekeeping everyday if you request it. You just need to request it. I've been staying at the same a hotel every few months for the last four years, even during 2020. The last time I checked in instead of saying "let us know when you want housekeeping" like they have for the last 3 years; they started saying "what's your preferred housekeeping interval?" I think that's a better system to ask than question. The only slight downside for me is that if I'm in a room for a while the toilet paper can start to run low, but that's fixed with a text to the front desk.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  But it's also Airbnb themselves. It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited, this is something many people including myself have experienced. Any doubts, spend some time on the Airbnb subreddit, which is run by hosts, and check out both their attitudes and their advice about how to remove bad reviews. Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product. I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels. You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either. Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
  • boringg 4y ago
    Hopefully those properties will come back on the market at a reasonable price so that we can offset some of the housing inequity that airbnb is directly responsible for.
    • dorchadas 4y ago
      Seriously. I can only hope the tide is turning and these AirBnBs will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. Sadly corporations will probably eat them up and let, though hopefully as long-term instead of short!
      • berkes 4y ago
        > will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.
• ghaff 4y ago
  It's also exacerbated by a lot of people looking for a bargain however slight. Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group). I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true. One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
• nlh 4y ago
  You make a great point about the (de)evolution of marketplaces. Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution. I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • asciimov 4y ago
    Regulations. Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out. For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • MaxMatti 4y ago
      Or just have a lower fine that increases exponentially every time it occurs. That would make it easier for small companies to compete which would otherwise just have to go bankrupt on the first violation.
  • mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
    I think you need to consider both parties: 1. The incentives of the platform 2. The incentives of the individual For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven. For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
• macspoofing 4y ago
  >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. That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise. >How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
• site-packages1 4y ago
  I’m an early adopter of things like this and I’ve been using Airbnb since about Day 1. There was so much promise early. One of my best AirBnB memories was staying at a startup hotel in SF through AirBnB, the hosts had purchased a Victorian house to turn into a boutique hotel, seemed young and optimistic, and it was a fun, quirky experience. There was still construction and things happening, apparently we were one of the first few people to ever stay there under its new ownership. So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list. Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent. I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb). As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    If I'm traveling on business I mostly just want predictability. I might want somewhere I can leave my bag after I check out. I want to be able to get in at midnight if my flight is delayed. Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
• pjc50 4y ago
  > 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. See "We become what we behold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 and https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ from the first comment. A high trust society, or marketplace, is an opportunity for the defectors to extract value. Unless they can be punished somehow ...
• trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  Chain-of-trust The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nfca 4y ago
  Accountability, responsibility and minimum standards. Hotels provide these, Airbnb does not. Hotels are direct service providers; Airbnb is a middle-man which does not assume responsibility nor enforces minimum standards effectively. These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.