[tootie]

I think the question is what are they going to do with $1B though? Like why would they ever need that much money? I have the same question about a bunch of unicorns like Lyft and Uber. Their core offering hasn't changed all that much in years. My only guess is that it's like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where they have spend 10% of operations and 90% on running their complaint department.

[icebraining]

"Airbnb Will Give $250 Million to Hosts Who Lost Income to Virus"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-30/airbnb-wi...

[DevKoala]

When you write it like that, they sound generous. In reality, they tried to pass the hit for Coronavirus related cancellations to the hosts and then realized they were in for legal trouble if they followed through.

[hkmurakami]

Iirc they passed the costs from the end user to the hosts by enforcing a much more lenient refund policy than what many hosts had put on their listings?

[DevKoala]

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/43/what-happens-if-my-gu...

> Guests who cancel are automatically refunded according to YOUR cancellation policy—unless the cancellation qualifies as an extenuating circumstance or falls under our Guest Refund Policy.

Exactly. And they were not legally allowed to do that. Which is why they are reimbursing hosts. They were flooded with cancellations and did right by the renter, but wanted the host to take the hit, when in reality the broker (AirBnb) is liable.

[slenk]

Still screwing people though. We had reservations that fell outside of their "coronavirus window" (the 24th) so they wouldn't give us a refund.

When Trump extended his guideline, they only offered half the cash back or all of it in credit. That doesn't even feel legal to me.

[foobar1962]

Yes, particularly those with "strict" policy which was originally no refund, then Airbnb degraded it to 50% refund if cancelled before 14 days, then degraded to 100% refund if the guest had an "extenuating circumstance", then a full refund when virus-related things were added to the ECs.

[thelittleone]

Amazing. What worth does a policy have if it can be changed at will?

[bogomipz]

Might you or someone else be able to elaborate? Did they simply tell hosts that they were responsible for refunding the money or was it that hosts were on the hook for AirBnBs percentage of the bookings?

[eisa01]

Why would they do this? I thought this is what travel insurance is for, at least in Norway I think they are liable for the bill when the government deems an area unsafe to visit

[gnopgnip]

This certainly varies by country. In the US and many other countries travel insurance typically excludes pandemics.

[xchaotic]

PR and they thought they could get away with hosts shouldering the costs

[refurb]

With 13,000 employees at an average fully-loaded cost of $150K/yr (just a guess), $1B will let you keep them all employed for about 6 months.

[derision]

They have 13000 employees. That's a lot of money in salary alone

[fullshark]

Well why do they have so many employees?

[whymauri]

The number of countries they operate in and the assumption that the next few years would be growth years. This isn't really rocket-science.

[jonathankoren]

It’s not just that. Being flush with cash causes engineering bloat. You start chasing blue sky trendy ideas (AirBnb was reportedly doing chatbot for a while, ala Volara.) or chasing more and marginal gains on existing products. It’s inevitable, when money is cheap.

[xchaotic]

So they probably need to let go of those staff and projects rather than raising money at high interest?

[thelittleone]

The vulnerabilities of this business model laid bare. If you're a business like Airbnb you have to be global, otherwise a competitor will be and they'll eat you up. You need solid in country representation otherwise competitors with a deeper regional focus (even smaller companies) will have better offerings and eat your market share. It seems being global and local is possible with 13,000 employees.... except when tourism crashes 90+%.

[tootie]

Sure, but why do they need 13,000 employees is the question.

[dzhiurgis]

No doubt there's big layoffs coming