We landed at our destination and ready to check into our Airbnb that we booked almost 6 month ago, for an entire month.
The airbnb is managed by a company, who I assume manages the entire building.
The host promptly tells us it's no longer available, and that we should accept their offer of either refund or another listing that's in a completely different location, with no picture or reviews, but promised that it's "similar"
Of course, being hesitant, we said no thanks, we're happy with just a refund.
They proceeds to tells us to contact airbnb, and then ghosts us.
We open a ticket with Airbnb, calls them, and they proceed to give us the run around and tell us to just book another stay.
So what else are we going to do? be homeless for a night in foreign city?
So of course we try to book, except it's last minute and the only listings available are the once you must contact the hosts first.
Good thing we arrived at 11am and not 6pm. or we'd be literally f*cked for the night.
Why am I complaining?
Airbnb, you should do better.
I am a startup founder, I understand these types of situations has probably zero affect on your bottom line. So you probably never prioritized the need to spend engineering time "fixing" it.
You also probably look at your metrics and say, well these situations happen to <1% of our overall bookings, it's not a problem.
But PG says, the best startups are the ones who solve intense immediate pain for a small number of people.
Well, my confidence in you is absolutely shaken, and now I'm not so sure your position in the space is so infallible anymore. Because eventually this will happen often enough that "the small number of users with intense pain" will give arise to a newer and better version of you, and you will be legacy.
In the end, we booked another place last minute, had to spend 2x the amount and received a refund (well let's see in 10 days).
If I was in a much lesser able financial situation, I might not have been able to float a few thousands of dollars on my credit card, and may have literally ended up homeless.
Airbnb knows about this scam but hasn't done anything to stop it.
Here's Joe Lycett on this exact scam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LhbOKQnhBU
First thought on reading that the "host" offered another place. I've read about this scam numerous times, and you are absolutely correct to refuse it, as the likely target would be a near-uninhabitable insect-infested hole, but without the option to cancel because you just "rebooked" within 24 hrs, after the refund time.
I once arrived in SV and we got to our AirBNB after midnight to find that the listing was nothing like what was described - it was literally 3 different bunks in different random rooms when we'd booked several rooms in a shared house. AirBNB did give us credit worth about half the cheapest single hotel room we could find, but only after arguing for an hour.
I'd previously had good experiences with AirBNB, but it seems seriously overrun with scammers at this point, and the executives just clearly don't get it, especially at the level of PG's "solve intense immediate pain for a small number of people". There's enough of it out there to generate a lot of bad publicity and it just goes ignored. Maybe they'll pay attention with their stock near a 5-year low and under half their 52week high, but I'd sooner short it than buy it.
No offense to you OP whatsoever. AirBnB is not a startup. It’s a public company with a $56B market cap that is optimizing for profit above all else, and your shitty experience unfortunately doesn’t matter to them. They won’t fix the problem until not doing so materially impacts their financials (or incurs regulatory wrath).
Stay at a hotel in the short term, push for more regulation in the long term. If this is innovation, ignore startup celebrities and start taking notes from Comcast.
(Also consider that the value you mention is occasionally driven by ZIRP monetary policy leading to VC capital infusions we may never see again at the scale previously seen; WeWork, Uber, etc)
This money could and should be better spent elsewhere, on actual productive assets and activities, rather than pushing for digital rentiership.
She had some sort of dementia which is sad, but I could not comprehend how she had been a superhost with Airbnb for years. That is, until I left a review of my experience and Airbnb promptly deleted it. I'll stick to hotels from now on. As far as LA apartment hunting goes I still think I made it out unscathed.
Oh, also I started shorting $ABNB shortly after this experience and it's almost made the whole thing worth it.
Edit: It feels really good to finally tell someone about this. It was so bizarre I'm too embarrassed to tell friends or family.
That’s interesting. They can do that? On what grounds was it deleted?
Thought about starting simple AirBNB guest insurance company, but if it was successful, AirBNB would just offer it as a service and business would be dead within days.
If you’re going to book on AirBNB only use super hosts, since odds of them canceling a stay is significantly less, especially compared to new listings.
In my case, hosts cancelled the booking with less than 24-hours prior to the month long stay starting; Host messaged me via AirBNB’s system asking me to cancel it and saying they would refund me off platform (which I obviously didn’t do and is against AirBNB’s terms of service); AirBNB cancelled the stay for host; AirBNB told me to pay the host 3-4x more to rebook the stay, then when I told them that’s bait-and-switch and fraud, they told me to take them to arbitration; AirBNB allowed the host to relist the booking for 2-3 times more and rebook the stay; AirBNB refused to let me leave a review on the listing and/or post an automatic review saying my listing had been cancelled; they funds tied to the booking for the month long stay were paid upfront and not refunded in week after booking was cancelled; AirBNB made no effort to find a like or similar stay, they basically said using their website was identical to them helping find a stay; etc.
Do NOT trust AirBNB as a guest - always have a backup plan and funds available to cover it.
AirBNB is not the one to blame here, this problem is extremely hard to solve and all you can do is minimize the risk by renting well vetted apartments from superhosts.
AirBNB left Russia and friends told me that private renting experience went downhill. You can't expect AirBNB to solve all problems and edge cases, only to minimize them. You should prepare to eventually get screwed anyways.
There are bunch of additional issues here, like having hidden cameras in your rented place. How you expect AirBNB to solve this?
They're charging very high premium for what they offer and this creating wrong expectations in the beginning that they will solve all sorts things for you if something goes wrong, but at the end you realize that you have to deal with it by yourself at 10pm when you arrive, in foreign country.
Yes, AirBNB is possible to blame. US state attorney general should investigate them.
I had 3 terrible Airbnb scam experiences in 2022, so I’m never using them again.
(My most hilarious one was that a host with like 25 positive reviews, listing said they had a hot tub and shower on property. It turns out this meant that we could go her sisters house, a 30 minute drive away, and we could ask to use hers. We tried this and she told us to piss off. That was a fun one.)
The odds of getting scammed is probably 1:100 if not less, and if people keep using them the next time even when they're the 1%, they have nothing to worry about
I finally threw in the towel and switched back to hotels after our previous stay in Toronto that was a nightmare, which included:
* Claimed we had the whole house but actually there was a family living in the basement and the laundry room was shared
* Host had crudely typed out instructions and labels over everything in the place
* House rules were extremely strict and required us to clear snow
* Had a 10pm curfew (which we broke because we got in late exhausted)
* Place wasn't terribly clean despite a listing with a $250 cleaning fee
* Absolutely the worst bed I've ever slept in
* Check-out instructions included a list of chores that went above and beyond the usual asks (eg: throwing out trash)
It wasn't always like this, but I feel like the quality of hosts has gone way down. I'm guessing most of the good hosts moved on during the COVID years.
In many cases, the prices are noticeably better, but the two big other reasons are location and a unique experience.
The last time I traveled, it was to Europe (I'm US-based), where I visited France, Germany, and Switzerland. The AirBnB we had in Provins, France was amazing—it was basically just a shed in a backyard (far enough away from the house that no sound reached there), but it was very well-appointed, and right outside the window were chickens, and we were encouraged to just go take freshly-laid eggs for our breakfast.
When we stayed in a guest room in a German village near the border with France (I'm afraid I've forgotten the exact location), the host couple invited us down for drinks in the evening—we're not big drinkers, so we didn't take much, but the selection was (at least to our American eyes) amazing, and the company was just lovely.
On the other hand, our AirBnB in Switzerland was almost as bad as some of the horror stories being told here. The host couple was disinterested almost to the point of hostility, and they left us a very bad review on AirBnB afterward, for reasons I can no longer recall, after pressuring us to give them a perfect review. Even if the pandemic had not stopped our travel after that, this experience was enough that we were seriously, seriously reconsidering using AirBnB ever again.
And that's the thing: when you're planning a vacation, one bad experience can so easily overwhelm all the good experiences—especially when it comes to having a safe, clean, reliable place to sleep at night.
Chores and curfews, no (although they often have rules that you have to be "quiet" after a certain time). Cleaning fees, yes.
Why would anyone use them?
Honestly I can only think of two good reasons.
You want to stay somewhere really out of the way where there aren't any hotels.
Sometimes when you are 5 or more people it can be cheaper to rent one large apartment rather than 3+ hotel rooms.
I know sometimes people also use them if they're going to be staying for a several weeks and want a real kitchen, living room etc.
Other than that, I would never use Airbnb. And even in the cases where Airbnb would be useful, I would seriously consider booking with another company before using Airbnb.
Full disclosure. Never personally had a problem with AirBnb, but heard enough stories and know enough people who have.
It's not about money, for me at least, but the experience. Hotels are generally boring, soulless, and isolated, whereas AirBnBs tend to be more like an actual home: comfortable, with personality, located in the place you are there to visit. You generally get access to a kitchen. A hotel is more convenient if you're just crashing somewhere for a night or two, but if you are trying to visit a place, and enjoy the time you spend living there, an AirBnB is better.
If you have 3-4 kids, many hotels will require that you rent a second room. That usually makes the AirBNB cheaper.
It's often more expensive. I don't understand it either.
The place itself was fairly standard but the host was very professional and appreciative of the custom. Seems this is a lot to expect nowadays?
Was mostly suprprised to read this, as if they'd never even heard of hotels. Depending on the location, a hotel may or may not have been available, but there are shocking number of hotel rooms available on any given night in almost any location (U.S. in my exerience)
Sure.
> Of course it costs more, this is why. You essentially get what you pay for.
What costs so much here is finding new accommodation at the last second. Airbnb isn't significantly cheaper than a hotel on average, from what I can find. It mainly has a lot more options to draw people in. So really, you're not getting what you pay for.
The pricing isn't that different. It's just a worse service.
- Can't open the damn window in >95% of hotels. It's often too warm.
- Noisy ventilation you can't turn off in a significant number.
- No way to prepare your own food. If I'm staying somewhere for a week (or longer) then I don't want to eat out every day.
- There's rarely decent desk to work at. That thing with 20cm depth and a height suitable for midgets does not count.
- There's rarely a decent sofa.
People don't choose AirBnB because it's cheaper. They choose it because it gives them a better service.
After getting the official cancellation, Airbnb offered a $100 coupon for my next booking and asked me to book another option that fit my criteria. They asked for some "must-have" and "nice-to-have" criteria but basically just did a search for me and couldn't book for me; I had to book myself. After calling them (Airbnb's phone support is actually quite responsive, which is awesome), I was able to up the coupon to $300. Luckily there were alternative listings available for the dates I found at a reasonable price so it ended up working out, but I wonder what would have happened if I had instead booked a very unique stay in a remote area with no alternatives nearby...
* A lake house in Washington that had a boat that I could row to get to my friends house on the other side (a few hundred yards away).
* A cute apartment in the center of Bologna that had a secret bedroom behind a bookcase (perfect for young children!)
* a beautiful and large 3 bedroom in Knightsbridge for about the cost of a nice hotel (£500/nt). Went here after the first Airbnb had cockroaches (the owner came and met me and gave a full refund)
* bright and stylish 2 bedroom apartment in Palermo in Buenos Aires
Etc. when going on a trip with a large family or a set of friends, there are huge advantages to having a house/apartment to stay in. That said, I’ve mostly lost faith in Airbnb. Went to Banff with a group of 6 and instead of an Airbnb we found a hotel/Bnb that had 1 and 2 bedroom cabins. We were confident we weren’t going to get stuffed and that was worth more than any potential upside of all being in one place or a hot tub that may or may not be working.
But really, I expect to be let down by airbnb at any point, and always plan for a hotel as plan B . Unregulated services have never been dependable in my experience .
I'm just going to post a link to Paul Graham's bragging about Airbnb since this is his website and he backed Airbnb from the start, and I would like to think that someone around YC would have enough pride to fix this mess:
http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html
Now I just book hotels--you know what to expect and get what you pay for.
We were staying in a super touristy area during peak season, and the last minute hotel cost us $2000+ more than we had budgeted for the trip.
The host was completely non-responsive and our polite but negative review was removed by AirBnb. None of us have used AirBnb since.
It is a difficult problem. Hosts need to be able to cancel for extreme situations, such as damage to the unit, or some other emergency. Realistically, the vast majority of people who can afford an airbnb can float for an alternative place for a few days, although especially on longer stays, that might not be the case. There should at least be a priority routing inside airbnb customer service to immediately escalate to a supervisor and resolve the situation via an alternative booking, if someone comes back and says "I have nowhere else to go". It sounds like you did not get to that point to find out if they have that, but I can see how you felt like you were in an unstable situation.
It's hard for me to draw a line on what is a reasonable expectation here, but I guess they should try to provide immediate funds for everyone. Since at least a subset of people will not find their current process reasonable, and when that happens, they will find it extremely distasteful.
all the places i travelled to, airbnb had the cheapest offers. in one place where i could not get airbnb because hosts were not responsive (it was christmas, and i was booking on short notice) i ended up switching hotels twice before we found something in our budget range that was barely acceptable, while there were airbnb listings for full apartments in the same price-range.
Airbnb really made me appreciate hotels again.
Been there a few times, once told on leaving there was a piece of string hanging from an open window and I should tie the key to it and then throw it inside.
It was obvious -- even back then -- that I'd eventually run into a _really_ bad time. These kinds of new businesses basically operate -- and get rich on -- an "all the benefits, none of the responsibilities" model, glossed over with good marketing ("we're disrupting ESTABLISHED_BUSINESS_MODEL_X, aren't the new possibilities exciting?!").
As others have mentioned, your bad experience doesn't effect their business (at least not yet). Kicking up a storm about some injustice in the hotel lobby however, effects the hotel's business, and the employee's work, which is why it rarely will escalated to a storm.
We ended spending more money to stay at a much worse place and the host had zero repercussions from it.
We stopped by the home while on the island and found that there were other folks staying there during our reserved dates.
1. An absolutely beautiful loft run by a sweet woman in Ubud, Bali. It was a killer location.
2. I have a very reactive dog, so ground floor guest house near a venue was a no brainer.
But I'd take a hotel at least 90% of the time when given the opportunity. I'm still totally surprised AirBnB has reached the ubiquity they have, when it feels like a niche business.
Any business that is effectively a middleman is potentially replaceable by a decentralized solution. I know lots of readers here aren't really "into that", but I'd take a guess that there also isn't much love for middlemen.
Back in 2011 @bluehat and I started one of the first professional hacker houses in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto).
One of our competing hacker houses had somebody die at it (found out later it was of meningococcal meningitis - yay fun terrifying times). I believe we had multiple calls from Airbnb support to help absorb some of their guests.
I also distinctly remember multiple times where we had support contact us trying to help a guest who had a last-minute cancellation from someone else. But my data is super old… We shut that hacker house down around 2016 that was around the last time I had any of these kind of calls. I also haven't hosted in 5 years.
A big part has been life stage changes, but also I think there's been a decline in safety in many major cities, such that I just don't want to risk the crap-shoot of an Airbnb any more. Hotels are not perfect, but it's a known product compared to Airbnb listings.
Instead in professional airbnbs, there's a race to the bottom with extremely bad mattresses, uncomfortable beds, heaters that don't work to save money.
I personally see Airbnb, Booking and other marketplaces as just a know-nothing intermediary, and treat them accordingly. For example, I always prefer to book directly after finding a property on a marketplace. Most of the time the price is the same or even the property may throw in a free breakfast of airport transfer.
Airbnb is no longer a startup, it went public so it's a regular business. Airbnb owns no property and will always be biased in favor of the hosts. Guests don't matter, there will always be people who need an accommodation somewhere...
However, a bit of sleuthing and you can sometimes find secret unadvertised support phone numbers they have that give premium support.
I found such a number for Airbnb (I don't remember what it was though, sorry) and they refunded me a $1.5k refund the frontline support refused to give me. And they did it on the spot.
I surmise these hidden support lines are for premium customers they actually care about.
And after having similar and more issues with Airbnb, i look for a hotel room.
Well, idk, I've booked hotels and motels in many countries sometimes at 11:30pm, or just by showing up at similar times and asking if they have room available, and usually there is one.
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/990
I bet there is class action potential here given the number of people just in this thread who say it has happened to them.
> Section 23 of these Terms contains an arbitration agreement and class action waiver that apply to all claims brought against Airbnb in the United States. Please read them carefully.
> 23.11 No Class Actions or Representative Proceedings. You and Airbnb acknowledge and agree that, to the fullest extent permitted by law, we are each waiving the right to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action lawsuit, class-wide arbitration, private attorney general action, or any other representative or consolidated proceeding. ...
I've never had a bad experience. Not one... I've had some odd experiences like a host who really wanted to make us breakfast and chat, but none of these horror stories.
It's been a great platform for me, saved me thousands of dollars when traveling and I have met some exceptional people due to interactions with it.
- a worse experience
- more expensive
- unreliable
Is it because it's "trendy"? I don't get it.
It also usually makes sense for longer stays, say a 30-day stay where the Airbnb's usually grant a ~20-30% discount, which makes them cheaper than a hotel.
Other than that, I agree there's little reason to choose an Airbnb over a hotel.
We are much cleaner and more reliable than any hotel I have ever stayed in, but I understand that no guest could know that beforehand given the problems with some hosts on the platform.
If I'm on vacation I want to relax in a house, not a hotel. Hotel's are for sleeping to me. I guess that's fine if you just get up and go do touristy things all day. Feels weird to me that people think of hotels and airbnbs as solving the same problem.
Each apartment was exactly as advertised and considerably, like a third or less, cheaper than the least expensive *d hotel around. The hosts were responsive and I had no troubles.
My travel costs would have doubled if I had to stay at a hotel, possibly more since hotels typically don't have kitchens.
Hotels pamper you, clean your room and towels daily, often have food and alcohol, often have shuttles to take you around, great locations, etc. AirBNB has none of that. I have to be missing something?
This seems to be increasingly not the case between the pandemic & low unemployment (and the long-term trend towards running laundry less frequently to save on water), but I've always preferred to not have them in my room while I'm there.
Also always check reviews, it shows there how many guests host cancelled (unless they changed it since last year), so if you find even one cancellation ignore such place.
It starts off with cool intentions. Let's create a place where people can stay with other people - and chip in a little money. Instead of paying $150 for a hotel room, they get an air mattress for $20. It's a cool, couch-surfing kinda deal between people who want a cool experience.
Some time passes and someone starts thinking. What if we let them rent a whole place while the owner is away. The owner is going on vacation and it would be great to rent the place for a week and make $500 rather than letting it go to waste, right? That way you can go on vacation and a bit of it is paid for by renting out the place you won't be!
More time passes and more "good" ideas come. Travelers want a more professional experience with services like someone who has keys if they get locked out, someone to call if something goes wrong with the house and they need maintenance, etc. Likewise, the people offering space want cleaning fees because it's no longer a quirky site catering to people looking to have a cool experience, but also to every traveler who is looking for a bargain hotel - and is going to treat the property like a bargain hotel, not like a guest in someone else's home. It becomes a way for landlords or other property companies to make more money than they can with a long-term lease. Why rent an apartment for $2,500/mo when you can get $200/night ($6,000/mo potential) on Airbnb?
Well, you placate people by throwing cash at them. A host cancels? Your staff rebooks them at an amazing hotel in the area. A guest is messy? Throw some extra cash at the hosts. It's not your money. Nice Uncle VC is picking up the tab.
But then you're supposed to be getting to the stage where you can make money. The honeymoon is over. If you keep rebooking people in nice hotels at 2-3x what they're paying you, if you keep believing every sob story someone tells you about a place not being as advertised or a guest creating a mess, you're just going to keep bleeding money. You start instructing your support staff to be more skeptical of claims. Previously, it was always "we're so sorry, we'll deal with that immediately!" Now it becomes, "the host says that you checked in and until we hear back from them, there's nothing we can do."
It's not just Airbnb. The problem is that you start looking at the amount of money you're losing to various things and you want to tighten that up. How many customers do you think are just complaining about a cold food delivery or a room that doesn't live up to their expectations just so that they can get a discount?
In the beginning, you were something new and different. In the beginning, there weren't huge expectations. You were making something cool that could be really useful to people. Once the expectations became so high along with other people's money banking on those expectations, it becomes kinda difficult because the original, more limited scope isn't going to get those people the money they're expecting. Worse, even if you want to create a small and sustainable business, someone else will undoubtedly take the idea to its conclusion. Even if Airbnb didn't go this route, someone else would have and Airbnb might fade away.
And this happens with lots of things. Addictive social media? Well, if you don't do it, someone else will and then they'll stop using your site. Not only that risk, but your addictive competitor will now have so much more money so they can hire away your engineers and hire so many more engineers until you really can't keep up.
Even things like moderation policies end up here. Yep, you've worked hard to deal with things fairly and reasonably, but you can't spend an hour on every report and you've suspended someone that shouldn't have been. It starts out small with people who have reasonably similar expectations. Over time, a larger group might have more disparate and even competing expectations. Some even want to do things that benefit them at your expense - I bet I could grow my follower base if I got suspended for something innocent showing that the platform is biased against me! At the same time, there's pressure from advertisers to have a brand-safe environment while some users are trying to figure out exactly where the line is and maybe even push the line a bit. And all that was initially intended was a cool way to post messages to friends!
> But PG says, the best startups are the ones who solve intense immediate pain for a small number of people.
Not to nitpick a word in there, but it does say "startups", not "companies". I don't know if PG said startups, but you've paraphrased it as such. Startups might live and die by their reputation. People hear about how awesome Airbnb is in 2009 and it creates this great word of mouth - even problems are handled swiftly to everyone's satisfaction. It's the future. However, at some point their reputation is reasonably solidified and they're reasonably entrenched. Now they can act differently. Back in 2009, other startups might have fought for Airbnb's crown. Today, it's their market.
I think a big part of it is money - and not just on the company's end. Now property owners are looking how to maximize their money too. Can they work the Airbnb system to milk a few thousand more a year out of it? What might have started as happy guests having a cool experience are now guests looking to maximize as well - in part because they're now paying hotel-like prices with similar expectations. Not only that, if you get a reputation for being too easy, unscrupulous guests will try and figure out how to work the system to get more than they've paid for. And every industry has these problems, but with something like Airbnb, they're supposed to be a low-touch tech firm just taking a percentage for running some software, not a big company employing a lot of boots on the ground making sure things are what people are claiming. They're not looking to be Marriott with an army of workers.
Things can go from something somewhat nice and new to something where everyone starts looking closely at the bottom line. "Why am I renting out my spare bedroom so cheap?" "Why am I paying X when I'm not getting Y?" "Why am I accepting this report of a bad room with no evidence?"
I think this is why the Batman/Harvey Dent quote has so much sticking power: you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And I'm not even saying it's the company's fault or anything. It's more just to note that at some point you start having to deal with the mess of reality. What starts with a lot of trust, hope, and optimism starts becoming a bit more actuarial. In some way, it has to become that way. If it doesn't, it's simply a target for bad actors. Or maybe this is just a cynical comment at the end of a long day and I'll feel silly for having written it tomorrow, but I do think there's something real about moving from the optimism stage to a more actuarial stage in a company's growth. At some point, you've gotten hit on the head and you create a rule and some people aren't going to like what that rule means. I remember AWS's S3 not charging for requests - and then someone created FUSE-mountable volumes backed by S3 generating incredible numbers of requests. At some point, any "unlimited" service gets limits - even if you just want the limit there so that a customer will email you why they need more and what they're doing. And I'm not calling companies evil or villains, but I do think that they do start looking at things a bit more like an insurance company would - with a bit more skepticism and a bit more of an eye toward the bottom line. That isn't necessarily a bad thing because businesses do have to make some hard decisions, but it certainly does change the feeling.
I'm really sorry that you had a bad experience. I hope that you're safe, healthy, and that Airbnb makes things right by you. I hope the rest of your vacation goes well.
Good old bait and switch.
Besides issuing a prompt refund and hopefully banning the fraudulent host, what exactly is Airbnb supposed to do in such situation?
They operate a platform, not an hotel chain. They have nowhere to actually host you and are in no contractual agreement with the guest to actually get you a place to stay whatsoever. Buyer beware so they say?
They could take a deposit in advance from the host that is forfeited (and goes towards compensating the would-be guest) in case of a major problem. This would remove the financial incentive for bad actors.
Same can apply for delivery drivers, etc - if the law can't be enforced (or if the law doesn't cover this bad behaviour), you need an incentive to keep them honest.
Problem is, doing this would eat into the company's margin - bad actors still provide "supply" in this marketplace and as long as the actor isn't bad enough to land them in significant PR/regulatory trouble, they are actually still an asset to the company. Most people for example, would settle for this scam when stranded in a foreign location late at night, so in the end both the scammer and Airbnb benefits. In terms of food delivery, a dishonest driver nibbling on orders here and there is likely to go unnoticed for a long time and is better than throwing an error about no delivery drivers being available, and the occasional complaint for an outright-stolen order can be stonewalled as most people (even here!) don't seem to be aware that payment card chargebacks are a thing.
Weeding out most bad actors would mean that prices on the marketplace will rise as the downwards pressure from less scrupulous hosts (if not outright scammers) goes away, to a level where it's no longer competitive with hotels.
I think the ask is that they do these things at a bare minimum; at the moment, it appears they do neither with any reliability.
However, there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads, because they're repetitive [1] and don't contain significant new information [2]. (That's not to say they aren't significant and important to the person in the given situation—of course they are—but that's not the same thing.)
When the story is about a YC-funded startup, these principles conflict. We recently decided to start downweighting them more, though, in the hope of addressing the community pushback about this. I've been posting about this recently in the context of Stripe threads, but the same points apply here too:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34282052
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34190090
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=33745192
The upshot is that we're adjusting a bit to downweight this class of posts more in general because that's what the community reaction is telling us; and that means downweighting the YC-related posts in this class more as well (although still not as much as the non-YC-related posts).
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
How do you expect airbnb should handle this situation?
AirCover policy says that they will find a similar place (whatever it means) or do a refund.
To not risk getting homeless, I think you need to always plan in advance for what to do in case expectations are not met with your stay.