There continues to be a major point of conflict between EJ's concerns and AirBnB's position. In fact, the point of conflict is actually within AirBnB's safety policies itself:
1 - Private messaging that lets users learn about each other prior to booking, without revealing private information
2 - Reservation system that allows hosts to accept or decline guests, giving them complete control over who books their space
I'm sorry, but that just isn't consistent - which is, I believe, a major point EJ is trying to get across.
How can you have "complete control over who books [your] space" while not "revealing private information." It's so blatantly inconsistent that it just comes out sounding like marketing drivel.
The fundamental issue, as I see it, is that as long as private information is withheld, you not only have very limited control, it also simply isn't safe.
What are AirBnB's reasons for blocking the exchange of private information? Is it their form for DRM? Or is there really a good reason that isn't about protecting AirBnB's revenue stream?
Before booking, AirBnB does not allow you swap personal information, primarily so you can't go outside their system to make your arrangements. There are both financial and community-building reasons for this.
Once the payment has been made (well before the guest arrives), the host gets access to all of the private information of the guest. I believe they could chose to rescind the offer of hospitality at this point -- they haven't received the money, so if they are uncomfortable with the individual, they can still do something about it.
I know this is an emotional issue, but their response was hardly "blantantly inconsistent ... marketing drivel."
Let's say for a moment that AirBnB let you exchange private info prior to booking. You've then released you're information to a stranger who could do what they want with it. I've never rented with AirBnB, but sites like Homeaway do not restrict the passage of contact information, so I had to give my credit card information to a complete stranger. By bypassing AirBnB, youve no one on your side to protect your credit information and address from relative strangers. at least here, they were able to assist the investigation because of the payment and personal identification info the no doubtedly used to help the police actually catch the guy. yeah, it benefits AirBnB to maintain control of their revenue, but it is also a safeguard for all users.
Not only are 1) and 2) inconsistent, but rejecting a booking negatively impacts your search-rankings and they warn you loudly about it. I've certainly been in the situation where I wanted to decline a booking, but the search ranking penalty made me re-consider.
I don't get it though. I made a reservation through AirBNB, and while you can't explicitly exchange emails or phone numbers, there are many, MANY ways by which this can be circumvented ("I am <firstname>.n at the Googol's email service", or "you can check me out as 'shr1k' on Twittr")
Since I was the potential tenant, I went out of my way to ensure that the landlord could check me out in whatever manner possible before coming to a conclusion one way or another. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume the landlord would want this too?
I can't stop thinking that this was a top-secret hit job by some shady character working for the hotel industry looking to derail AirBnB's next fund-raising round. Heck, if Nixon could do it, why couldn't The American Hotel & Lodging Association?
So my question to you is: am I quite paranoid or merely rather paranoid?
Whatever you are, I'm the same, because it's the second thing I thought of.
But the first thing was that there are a lot of privileged young people out there whose friends might very well have thought a week of utter abandonment and breaking every possible rule would be the height of fun. And yeah, I can easily see that privileged young asshole finding it the height of humor to email the owner every now and then saying how nice the place was - more than likely laughing at how nice the owner actually found the place, if you see what I mean.
I've been a landlord. There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all, that will destroy your faith in humanity more quickly. Seriously. Even though the majority of tenants are perfectly wonderful people, and even though I only had a grand total of six tenants before giving it up as a bad idea, there were some that were just ... well. It's really like a bad dream.
This experience was worse than any of mine, and it was compressed into a single frenetic week of probable partying, but it's the same genre as one particular tenant I'm thinking of. She meant well. Her friends did not. And in the end, I was the one left with the holes punched in the wall, with the dryer stolen, with the garden shed piled to the roof with months-old garbage, with a kitchen floor that could easily have been a bus station, with evidence of a three-inch flood of water from the washing machine, with fleas in the carpet and holes in the yard after she'd signed a clear no-pets clause. (A friend and neighbor of ours owns several apartments in the neighborhood. One of the tenants she evicted had stabbed the refrigerator multiple times. Apparently on a lark.)
So even though it's more fun to imagine it as a conspiracy, I'm afraid the gritty reality is that there are people out there who just don't give a shit about who suffers from their actions, and who think it's fun to damage things.
"...came into my home earlier this month (apparently with several others, according to witnesses)..."
So there were several of them. If this were a hotel industry conspiracy, I think it would be very difficult to pull off this way. All you need is for one renter to do this. Adding people to the conspiracy puts your conspiracy at risk of being found out.
However, it's not too hard to imagine a random group of renters doing stupid stuff like this. Think about some immature people who weren't raised well and who are also drunk, on drugs, and/or slightly mentally ill.
tl;dr It stretches the imagination less to chalk this up to a group of thugs than to a conspiracy.
My apartment in SF was burglarized and the burglars used a crackhead from the park to act as a lookout and then take the heat later.
I don't think this was an industry setup. However, I would be willing to bet that the real burglar just did the physical and ID theft part, and then let in a bunch of tweakers to wreck the place and throw the subsequent investigation off track.
Second answer to the same question: while it's almost certainly not a conspiracy, it's equally certain there are champagne corks flying in certain quarters.
Because the President of the United States is a preposterously entitled individual, and Nixon is one of the few that got caught while probing the limits of that entitlement.
Arguing that something is plausible is not the same as arguing that something happened.
I thought the same but it does not matter wether this is a setup or not. What matters is that it could happen. airbnb can't do the same: sending somebody in a Hotel and destroy the room? That would prove nothing.
Hotels/dedicated accommodations are run by professionals and the business model is sound.
Airbnb is maybe too ahead of its time and will work greatly when our online identities are more "stable" if you see what I mean.
Right now it's like finding a good developer by asking my friends in Facebook because it seems cheaper and cooler.
It's not.
Hosting somebody is not as easy as pointing the bed and the bathroom.
It's way more complicated than that.
Safety is just one aspect that non professional hosts have troubles dealing with.
Disclaimer: I run an accommodation reservation system in many ways similar to airbnb and I love their idea.
But we are going in the opposite direction: only professional hosts renting places dedicated to tourists (they don't live there), local Managers meeting and selecting the owners, visiting the accommodations (I often even test them sleeping there) and supporting the guests locally.
It does not allow for fast growth but it's much safer for all the parties involved.
It does sound just too ridiculous. I mean it's one thing to find the safe and steal credit cards, but I find it more than a little odd that he burned a spare set of sheets in the fireplace.
I think if the broader public knew about this it could damage AirBNB but at this point I'm guessing 90% of AirBNB customer base doesn't follow TC or HN and therefore will not be aware of the substantiated risk to their possessions.
Maybe after the 10th or 11th serious robbery/rape/murder then This American Life will make an interesting show about it.
I want to believe that people are fundamentally good as well and there is definitely evidence that supports that.
But this incident has left a bad taste in my mouth, and their response hasn't made me feel any better. It's not like Ebay where if you have a bad experience, your loss is stemmed to the material good you have given away. On AirBnb, the potential harm in the worst case for both a guest and a host are massive -- total material loss or even rape or death.
I'm sure many people find value using their service, but after today, the risk is so clearly present that I don't think you can pay me to use it.
It's not like Ebay where if you have a bad experience, your loss is stemmed to the material good you have given away
If you're going to play the rape-or-death card, then why not also say that an EBay package you receive could contain a bomb or anthrax spores?
Personally speaking, AirBnB always baffled me, even before this incident. I would never have given my home for others to use and would find it weird to use that of a strangers' when travelling, but that's just me.
Other people clearly find value in it.
I'm surprised that this incident would have left a bad taste in your mouth, in the same way that I'm surprised when people who store super-sensitive information in Dropbox find out that maybe its not a secure bank vault.
It's interesting that he quoted the positive parts from EJ's post; but not the negative parts:
My next call was to airbnb.com - I tried their "urgent" line, their email address, their general customer support line. I heard nothing - no response whatsoever - until the following day, 14 sleepless hours later, and only after a desperate call to an airbnb.com freelancer I happen to know helped my case get some attention.
This post is in the right direction and I applaud Brian for stepping up, but this has taken too long for this to happen. If you note in EJ's post, she states that she would not be compensated for any damages and she was on the hook. Airbnb didn't step up to the plate until it was posted on Techcrunch. This has been simmering since June and they really could have gotten ahead of this and handled this entirely different. Imagine had they come out in June and fessed up and said this is how we are going to handle it. EJ we are taking care of everything, we are instituting new policies, looking into insurance and we will have a dedicated 24 hour hotline for customer support. They would have set the precedent for how to handle these situations. Instead they did like everyone else and only dealt with it once it became a much larger issue.
/sidenote if I was Brian I would by no means be quoting EJ's blog post as proof to saying they handled this correctly. Because they didn't.
They were hoping nobody would notice. I'm sure they've been working on changes as a result of this since June and have had a response plan in place as well, but in their ideal world, this would have never made it to the top of HN and other sites, and TechCrunch would have never gotten involved.
Why point people towards something that will always give you a black eye when they could say "see the new features we have to keep you safe" instead?
FWIW, similar to PayPal paying well north of $100M to really learn how to do fraud prevention, AirBnB should consider the cost of making things right for her as part of the cost of learning how to rent safely. Not doing so is a very short-term decision that reduces trust in their ecosystem and trust is fundamental to their success.
this has taken too long for this to happen. If you note in EJ's post, she states that she would not be compensated for any damages and she was on the hook. Airbnb didn't step up to the plate until it was posted on Techcrunch.
Is this really the case? EJ's post from June says this in the fifth paragraph: "They have offered to help me recover emotionally and financially". I cannot find anything in her original post that contradicts that. Can you point me to a paragraph number and sentence where you are getting the info that she originally would not be compensated?
The only source for the idea that EJ would not be compensated seems to be the original TC article from today. That was sourced from a company spokesperson who was citing policy, and was contradicted by Chesky's post here. Given the original blog post, it seems a lot more probable that this is a detail that TC (and Airbnb's spokesperson) got wrong, not that Airbnb changed their mind.
AirBNB has a huge asymmetric trust problem. The hosts have real physical addresses and need to be able to take a payment. Hosts can easily be held accountable.
The guests on the other hand could be anyone. The company's attitude seems to be that allowing the host to interview the guest over email is sufficient to vet the guest. That's absurd. I don't have any special ability to identify a con artist vs. an honest person, and neither does anyone else.
What would be a good solution? Here's a partial solution: require guests to make a partial payment on the credit card they intend to use 30 days before their first booking. This would at least offer some security that the card wasn't stolen. Also of course ban pre-paid cards.
It really gets on my nerves when I see cases like this and the responses that follow. As you have pointed out, you have no special skills to be able to recognise con artists or criminals. As this is the case with most people, how would having further private information on the guest help you to make a different judgement.
Unless we start talking criminal background checks, you are no safer than before. If anything it gives a false sense of security, which might make you less likely pursue further avenues of safeguarding. Of course criminal background checks are a completely stupid idea. I'm sure many good natured people would be hesitant to put this level of info in the hands of someone they don't know.
The truth is though even criminals can get credit cards, debit cards and any other method of verification you can think of. So that info doesn't really help. Worse still they can use fraudulent information just as easily. What do you do now? You also have to remember those opportunistic types, you know the person who has never really done anything wrong, but for whatever reason at that moment they are compelled to break the law or behave in a manner they normally wouldn't.
In a society that is mostly good, we have the police the courts, the law and prisons, to deal with bad people. You can not really on airbnb to provide you with a definitive solution to this problem, if they did then they should be running the country. Nor should you expect them to put systems in place that violate the rights of the majority, or systems that provide a false sense of security. The best they can ever do is provide you with support and advice on preventative measures.
Your safety should still be your top concern. You should not be relying on another to provide it for you.
I was with you until your final paragraph, which seems to me only to address payment problems by making payment and planning more difficult, without actually addressing the asymmetric trust or renter-vetting problems.
The renter-vetting problem is a real one. A past history of good experiences at AirBNB would probably be a good mechanism - a new member of the community would then be scrutinized a little more closely. (Maybe they already do this, I don't know - I haven't used them and won't, because I travel with a wife, two kids, and a dog, and there's no freaking way I'd leave somebody in my home without supervision if it was Jesus Christ Himself.)
Generally, people are not "fundamentally good". Generally, most people are only good when they believe the reward for being so is >= the required effort or discomfort (rewards aren't always monetary and could be as simple as feeling good about yourself for helping the crippled-orphaned-widow-beggar across the street). An example of this is airbnb's own policy of not disclosing renter contact information. Despite what they say, airbnb believes that people are not fundamentally good as their concern of users circumventing their payment system is greater than their concern for the safety of said users (at least to the extent that stories such as this don't hurt their business more than payment bypassing would).
If airbnb believed what they espouse, they'd quit trying to outsource their trust in humanity to their customers whom they aren't liable for and instead actually trust that people in general won't sidestep the payment process.
> ...a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good
> Private messaging that lets users learn about each other prior to booking, without revealing private information
The reason why Airbnb doesn't let people "reveal private information" prior to booking / paying is so they won't circumvent their system and exchange money without paying Airbnb's fees.
So in fact Airbnb isn't so trusting of people's "fundamental" goodness and honesty; the matter of fact is that Airbnb assumes every single one of its users is a potential cheater.
Instead of the marketspeak / ass-protecting / legalese response we've witnessed so far from Airbnb about this incident, an interesting experiment would be to lift this restriction and let people exchange personal information from the very beginning: how many would actually try to game the system?
I love what AirBnB is doing - and I know they'll pull through this. But there's one policy of theirs that just needs to change: Stop penalizing hosts for declining reservations
My wife and I used AirBnB to rent out our place in San Francisco very early on in the life of AirBnB. At one point we'd booked about 60 reservations and were making a killing. It was simply wonderful having the freedom of place that AirBnB afforded us. Trip to Hawaii for the weekend? Our rental earnings for just the weekend easily paid off the flight.
We stopped using AirBnB (and renting out our place in general) for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason was safety. We were finding that 9 of 10 reservation requests were from people without AirBnB ratings nor profiles, but the moment you decline a reservation, for any reason (even if you know the person isn't legit), your search ranking drops considerably.
The way AirBnB determines your search ranking for a particular area is directly related to how many successful bookings you've had over a trailing 60 days. This is why the top 50 places in SF right now on AirBnB are "full time" or professionally-managed rentals, and not normal people just renting on the weekends. At one point we were renting out our place consistently almost every weekend, and because airbnb's search interface is so poor, making it into the top 20 for an area resulted in a twentyfold increase in reservations.
The problem then becomes, as a host - do I decline reservations from people I know nothing about and take a rating hit that may prevent me from renting again, or, do I accept the reservation and "trust in humankind" that everything will be ok?
We obviously took the latter road, and for the most part had great interactions with the people we met. However, after a couple of "close calls" - an elderly couple who almost burned our place down and an obviously high-functioning crazy person, we decided that it wasn't worth the risk anymore.
I really want AirBnB to work - and I understand why they maintain this policy of penalizing you for not being generally available, but in light of the recent incident, I hope they rethink it and help promote "real" hosts who don't do this as a business.
I once rented out my apartment privately and it turned out to be a major mistake. I had just come home from surfing the Caribbeans and was sitting on a train going home from the airport when I got a job offer that would entail me moving halfway across the world.
I took the job and was basically on a plane in a week or two. I decided to save time by renting my apartment out fully furnished. My mom met some dude she thought looked OK and we rented it out to this guy. Turns out this was one shady guy. First month comes around, no rent. I call the guy and he comes up with an excuse, not wanting to really deal with this at the time I bought the excuse and was expecting two rents the next month. Next month comes along and no rent again so I get my friend to go into the apartment and he opens the door only to find basically everything I owned stolen.
After calming down I found the guy on facebook and then reported him to the police, they couldnt do much seing as the guys excuse was that he had left the apartment and dropped the key into the mailbox so someone else must have fished it up and opened the door and stole everything.
tl;dr I rented out my apartment and got everything I own stolen and the police didnt manage to do anything.
What did I learn from this? ALWAYS get a deposit. 2-3 months rent up front. Have insurance, have friends that are able to go check up on the place from time to time. And dont leave anything valuable in the apt when renting it out.
And this is why I will never ever use a service such as Airbnb, no control.
This sure is where things start to get tricky in managing the organizational growth of a company. Something like this happens and the reaction is to create a new department. That's understandable and demonstrates commitment to tackling the issue at hand. But then another adverse event (inevitably) happens and people will complain complain that the "Trust & Safety" department was isolated from the rest of the company and that those topics now have to get mainstreamed (or insert other buzzword) across the whole company.
Just one of the many challenges that comes with great success.
Bruce Shneier often talks about terrorist tactics only being worrying when they are reliable enough to build a plot around - if a someone gets through security checks by random chance, it's sad, but not a fundamental flaw in the system because nobody could plan to exploit the same situation in the future.
My worry about this case is that this does seem an entirely reliable and repeatable method of nastiness. I'm happy to assume that any given random person is fundamentally good, but now that it's been demonstrated that identity fraud + Airbnb = swag, fundamentally bad people will be actively planning ways to exploit it.
I'm glad someone's in custody, but I don't see anything announced in this post that is going to dissuade wrongdoers from looking at Airbnb as a massive opportunity.
The article says they are working to offer an "insurance option" to hosts. So what, if it happens again to a host who hasn't taken this option, they're screwed? What would have been more reassuring is saying "airbnb will of course fully indemnify hosts against guests damaging their property" - as they've had to do in this recent case. He seems to say that airbnb are working in the opposite direction in future though.
None of this sounds like it addresses the underlying problem: you're relying on them to vet the guest yet you're the one with the most to lose if they get it wrong.
Unfortunately, no matter what safety mechanisms Airbnb puts in place, messes like this are still going to happen. Even if there were a reliable rating or karma system, and you could exchange messages with a potential renter before accepting them, you will still have the "Ebay problem" - where a malicious party gains access to a trusted user's account and uses it to fool people into renting to them.
I'd say they got off to a rocky start on this (both in the initial response to EJ, and the subsequent response to the public disclosure of the incident). AirBnB could have tried to get in front of the story, but didn't.
I can chalk a lot of that up to a green team running scared, though trying to do the right thing. I'm reserving final judgment on this until more is known.
[+] [-] latch|14 years ago|reply
1 - Private messaging that lets users learn about each other prior to booking, without revealing private information
2 - Reservation system that allows hosts to accept or decline guests, giving them complete control over who books their space
I'm sorry, but that just isn't consistent - which is, I believe, a major point EJ is trying to get across.
How can you have "complete control over who books [your] space" while not "revealing private information." It's so blatantly inconsistent that it just comes out sounding like marketing drivel.
The fundamental issue, as I see it, is that as long as private information is withheld, you not only have very limited control, it also simply isn't safe.
What are AirBnB's reasons for blocking the exchange of private information? Is it their form for DRM? Or is there really a good reason that isn't about protecting AirBnB's revenue stream?
[+] [-] trjordan|14 years ago|reply
Once the payment has been made (well before the guest arrives), the host gets access to all of the private information of the guest. I believe they could chose to rescind the offer of hospitality at this point -- they haven't received the money, so if they are uncomfortable with the individual, they can still do something about it.
I know this is an emotional issue, but their response was hardly "blantantly inconsistent ... marketing drivel."
[+] [-] brandononline|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguzman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrikant|14 years ago|reply
Since I was the potential tenant, I went out of my way to ensure that the landlord could check me out in whatever manner possible before coming to a conclusion one way or another. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume the landlord would want this too?
[+] [-] spolsky|14 years ago|reply
So my question to you is: am I quite paranoid or merely rather paranoid?
[+] [-] Vivtek|14 years ago|reply
But the first thing was that there are a lot of privileged young people out there whose friends might very well have thought a week of utter abandonment and breaking every possible rule would be the height of fun. And yeah, I can easily see that privileged young asshole finding it the height of humor to email the owner every now and then saying how nice the place was - more than likely laughing at how nice the owner actually found the place, if you see what I mean.
I've been a landlord. There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all, that will destroy your faith in humanity more quickly. Seriously. Even though the majority of tenants are perfectly wonderful people, and even though I only had a grand total of six tenants before giving it up as a bad idea, there were some that were just ... well. It's really like a bad dream.
This experience was worse than any of mine, and it was compressed into a single frenetic week of probable partying, but it's the same genre as one particular tenant I'm thinking of. She meant well. Her friends did not. And in the end, I was the one left with the holes punched in the wall, with the dryer stolen, with the garden shed piled to the roof with months-old garbage, with a kitchen floor that could easily have been a bus station, with evidence of a three-inch flood of water from the washing machine, with fleas in the carpet and holes in the yard after she'd signed a clear no-pets clause. (A friend and neighbor of ours owns several apartments in the neighborhood. One of the tenants she evicted had stabbed the refrigerator multiple times. Apparently on a lark.)
So even though it's more fun to imagine it as a conspiracy, I'm afraid the gritty reality is that there are people out there who just don't give a shit about who suffers from their actions, and who think it's fun to damage things.
[+] [-] techiferous|14 years ago|reply
"...came into my home earlier this month (apparently with several others, according to witnesses)..."
So there were several of them. If this were a hotel industry conspiracy, I think it would be very difficult to pull off this way. All you need is for one renter to do this. Adding people to the conspiracy puts your conspiracy at risk of being found out.
However, it's not too hard to imagine a random group of renters doing stupid stuff like this. Think about some immature people who weren't raised well and who are also drunk, on drugs, and/or slightly mentally ill.
tl;dr It stretches the imagination less to chalk this up to a group of thugs than to a conspiracy.
[+] [-] dlss|14 years ago|reply
- Early adopters were less likely to vandalize apartments, so as AirBnB becomes more mainstream we will see an increase in vandals.
- Criminals are starting to realize that AirBnB lets them get around mandatory hotel registrations / ID checks
- AirBnB hosts, having had many good experiences, have become more lax than they previously were in their screening/supervision of guests.
[+] [-] rdouble|14 years ago|reply
I don't think this was an industry setup. However, I would be willing to bet that the real burglar just did the physical and ID theft part, and then let in a bunch of tweakers to wreck the place and throw the subsequent investigation off track.
[+] [-] onan_barbarian|14 years ago|reply
In your shoes, I would be more than a bit embarrassed to have espoused this particular conspiracy theory in public.
[+] [-] Vivtek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
Arguing that something is plausible is not the same as arguing that something happened.
[+] [-] Lucadg|14 years ago|reply
Hotels/dedicated accommodations are run by professionals and the business model is sound. Airbnb is maybe too ahead of its time and will work greatly when our online identities are more "stable" if you see what I mean.
Right now it's like finding a good developer by asking my friends in Facebook because it seems cheaper and cooler. It's not. Hosting somebody is not as easy as pointing the bed and the bathroom. It's way more complicated than that. Safety is just one aspect that non professional hosts have troubles dealing with.
Disclaimer: I run an accommodation reservation system in many ways similar to airbnb and I love their idea.
But we are going in the opposite direction: only professional hosts renting places dedicated to tourists (they don't live there), local Managers meeting and selecting the owners, visiting the accommodations (I often even test them sleeping there) and supporting the guests locally. It does not allow for fast growth but it's much safer for all the parties involved.
[+] [-] learc83|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almightygod|14 years ago|reply
Maybe after the 10th or 11th serious robbery/rape/murder then This American Life will make an interesting show about it.
[+] [-] te_platt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] arvinjoar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hboon|14 years ago|reply
Not only to derail fund-raising, it's also a direct PR hit which can cause slowdowns in expansion and feature development.
[+] [-] hk43|14 years ago|reply
(nothing personal, but I know I would not rent my apartment just to earn a few $$$)
[+] [-] anonymous246|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physcab|14 years ago|reply
But this incident has left a bad taste in my mouth, and their response hasn't made me feel any better. It's not like Ebay where if you have a bad experience, your loss is stemmed to the material good you have given away. On AirBnb, the potential harm in the worst case for both a guest and a host are massive -- total material loss or even rape or death.
I'm sure many people find value using their service, but after today, the risk is so clearly present that I don't think you can pay me to use it.
[+] [-] statictype|14 years ago|reply
If you're going to play the rape-or-death card, then why not also say that an EBay package you receive could contain a bomb or anthrax spores?
Personally speaking, AirBnB always baffled me, even before this incident. I would never have given my home for others to use and would find it weird to use that of a strangers' when travelling, but that's just me.
Other people clearly find value in it.
I'm surprised that this incident would have left a bad taste in your mouth, in the same way that I'm surprised when people who store super-sensitive information in Dropbox find out that maybe its not a secure bank vault.
[+] [-] AndyJPartridge|14 years ago|reply
But a nutter having your key is just a minor detail if entry is desired; and with AirBnB at least you get a cash reward for your risk.
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
My next call was to airbnb.com - I tried their "urgent" line, their email address, their general customer support line. I heard nothing - no response whatsoever - until the following day, 14 sleepless hours later, and only after a desperate call to an airbnb.com freelancer I happen to know helped my case get some attention.
[+] [-] jmjerlecki|14 years ago|reply
/sidenote if I was Brian I would by no means be quoting EJ's blog post as proof to saying they handled this correctly. Because they didn't.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|14 years ago|reply
Why point people towards something that will always give you a black eye when they could say "see the new features we have to keep you safe" instead?
FWIW, similar to PayPal paying well north of $100M to really learn how to do fraud prevention, AirBnB should consider the cost of making things right for her as part of the cost of learning how to rent safely. Not doing so is a very short-term decision that reduces trust in their ecosystem and trust is fundamental to their success.
[+] [-] mlinsey|14 years ago|reply
Is this really the case? EJ's post from June says this in the fifth paragraph: "They have offered to help me recover emotionally and financially". I cannot find anything in her original post that contradicts that. Can you point me to a paragraph number and sentence where you are getting the info that she originally would not be compensated?
The only source for the idea that EJ would not be compensated seems to be the original TC article from today. That was sourced from a company spokesperson who was citing policy, and was contradicted by Chesky's post here. Given the original blog post, it seems a lot more probable that this is a detail that TC (and Airbnb's spokesperson) got wrong, not that Airbnb changed their mind.
[+] [-] kevinpet|14 years ago|reply
The guests on the other hand could be anyone. The company's attitude seems to be that allowing the host to interview the guest over email is sufficient to vet the guest. That's absurd. I don't have any special ability to identify a con artist vs. an honest person, and neither does anyone else.
What would be a good solution? Here's a partial solution: require guests to make a partial payment on the credit card they intend to use 30 days before their first booking. This would at least offer some security that the card wasn't stolen. Also of course ban pre-paid cards.
[+] [-] AshMokhberi|14 years ago|reply
Unless we start talking criminal background checks, you are no safer than before. If anything it gives a false sense of security, which might make you less likely pursue further avenues of safeguarding. Of course criminal background checks are a completely stupid idea. I'm sure many good natured people would be hesitant to put this level of info in the hands of someone they don't know.
The truth is though even criminals can get credit cards, debit cards and any other method of verification you can think of. So that info doesn't really help. Worse still they can use fraudulent information just as easily. What do you do now? You also have to remember those opportunistic types, you know the person who has never really done anything wrong, but for whatever reason at that moment they are compelled to break the law or behave in a manner they normally wouldn't.
In a society that is mostly good, we have the police the courts, the law and prisons, to deal with bad people. You can not really on airbnb to provide you with a definitive solution to this problem, if they did then they should be running the country. Nor should you expect them to put systems in place that violate the rights of the majority, or systems that provide a false sense of security. The best they can ever do is provide you with support and advice on preventative measures.
Your safety should still be your top concern. You should not be relying on another to provide it for you.
[+] [-] Vivtek|14 years ago|reply
The renter-vetting problem is a real one. A past history of good experiences at AirBNB would probably be a good mechanism - a new member of the community would then be scrutinized a little more closely. (Maybe they already do this, I don't know - I haven't used them and won't, because I travel with a wife, two kids, and a dog, and there's no freaking way I'd leave somebody in my home without supervision if it was Jesus Christ Himself.)
[+] [-] walkon|14 years ago|reply
If airbnb believed what they espouse, they'd quit trying to outsource their trust in humanity to their customers whom they aren't liable for and instead actually trust that people in general won't sidestep the payment process.
[+] [-] walkon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|14 years ago|reply
> Private messaging that lets users learn about each other prior to booking, without revealing private information
The reason why Airbnb doesn't let people "reveal private information" prior to booking / paying is so they won't circumvent their system and exchange money without paying Airbnb's fees.
So in fact Airbnb isn't so trusting of people's "fundamental" goodness and honesty; the matter of fact is that Airbnb assumes every single one of its users is a potential cheater.
Instead of the marketspeak / ass-protecting / legalese response we've witnessed so far from Airbnb about this incident, an interesting experiment would be to lift this restriction and let people exchange personal information from the very beginning: how many would actually try to game the system?
[+] [-] plusbryan|14 years ago|reply
My wife and I used AirBnB to rent out our place in San Francisco very early on in the life of AirBnB. At one point we'd booked about 60 reservations and were making a killing. It was simply wonderful having the freedom of place that AirBnB afforded us. Trip to Hawaii for the weekend? Our rental earnings for just the weekend easily paid off the flight.
We stopped using AirBnB (and renting out our place in general) for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason was safety. We were finding that 9 of 10 reservation requests were from people without AirBnB ratings nor profiles, but the moment you decline a reservation, for any reason (even if you know the person isn't legit), your search ranking drops considerably.
The way AirBnB determines your search ranking for a particular area is directly related to how many successful bookings you've had over a trailing 60 days. This is why the top 50 places in SF right now on AirBnB are "full time" or professionally-managed rentals, and not normal people just renting on the weekends. At one point we were renting out our place consistently almost every weekend, and because airbnb's search interface is so poor, making it into the top 20 for an area resulted in a twentyfold increase in reservations.
The problem then becomes, as a host - do I decline reservations from people I know nothing about and take a rating hit that may prevent me from renting again, or, do I accept the reservation and "trust in humankind" that everything will be ok?
We obviously took the latter road, and for the most part had great interactions with the people we met. However, after a couple of "close calls" - an elderly couple who almost burned our place down and an obviously high-functioning crazy person, we decided that it wasn't worth the risk anymore.
I really want AirBnB to work - and I understand why they maintain this policy of penalizing you for not being generally available, but in light of the recent incident, I hope they rethink it and help promote "real" hosts who don't do this as a business.
[+] [-] pallinder|14 years ago|reply
I took the job and was basically on a plane in a week or two. I decided to save time by renting my apartment out fully furnished. My mom met some dude she thought looked OK and we rented it out to this guy. Turns out this was one shady guy. First month comes around, no rent. I call the guy and he comes up with an excuse, not wanting to really deal with this at the time I bought the excuse and was expecting two rents the next month. Next month comes along and no rent again so I get my friend to go into the apartment and he opens the door only to find basically everything I owned stolen.
After calming down I found the guy on facebook and then reported him to the police, they couldnt do much seing as the guys excuse was that he had left the apartment and dropped the key into the mailbox so someone else must have fished it up and opened the door and stole everything.
tl;dr I rented out my apartment and got everything I own stolen and the police didnt manage to do anything.
What did I learn from this? ALWAYS get a deposit. 2-3 months rent up front. Have insurance, have friends that are able to go check up on the place from time to time. And dont leave anything valuable in the apt when renting it out.
And this is why I will never ever use a service such as Airbnb, no control.
[+] [-] scottkduncan|14 years ago|reply
This sure is where things start to get tricky in managing the organizational growth of a company. Something like this happens and the reaction is to create a new department. That's understandable and demonstrates commitment to tackling the issue at hand. But then another adverse event (inevitably) happens and people will complain complain that the "Trust & Safety" department was isolated from the rest of the company and that those topics now have to get mainstreamed (or insert other buzzword) across the whole company.
Just one of the many challenges that comes with great success.
[+] [-] thom|14 years ago|reply
My worry about this case is that this does seem an entirely reliable and repeatable method of nastiness. I'm happy to assume that any given random person is fundamentally good, but now that it's been demonstrated that identity fraud + Airbnb = swag, fundamentally bad people will be actively planning ways to exploit it.
I'm glad someone's in custody, but I don't see anything announced in this post that is going to dissuade wrongdoers from looking at Airbnb as a massive opportunity.
[+] [-] jsherry|14 years ago|reply
Something like this would be more reassuring: http://support.getaround.com/kb/insurance-infractions/how-do...
[+] [-] mattbee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commanda|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efader|14 years ago|reply
Additionally, Airbnb or another company should start to offer, FOR A Fee, a form of insurance to cover situations like this unfortunate scenario.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] DanielRibeiro|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://paulgraham.com/good.html
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
I'd say they got off to a rocky start on this (both in the initial response to EJ, and the subsequent response to the public disclosure of the incident). AirBnB could have tried to get in front of the story, but didn't.
I can chalk a lot of that up to a green team running scared, though trying to do the right thing. I'm reserving final judgment on this until more is known.
[+] [-] MisterMerkin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
EJ's blog has the tagline: I leap, the net appears. Every time.
Apparently not this time...
[+] [-] hdeo|14 years ago|reply