[asmithmd1]

It just seems a little too perfect to me. With the amount of money at stake in disrupting the hotel business it is not impossible that the event was staged. Her writing is just a little too perfect and why doesn't she respond to emails from the press?

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011...

It seems like the only person who has talked to her is the CEO of airbnb

[danso]

With his business model at stake, don't you think the CEO is smart enough to do some basic vetting before giving a response that acknowledges the veracity of the alleged crime?

EJ may be anonymous to the rest of the world (though her blog has lengthy posts from as long as two years ago...pretty good trolling setup if she were a troll, even though you can backdate posts), but presumably, airbnb has all of her personal information, and as an tech-savvy startup, has conducted basic online research of her (her credit card was obviously valid; does she have a FB account. does googling her bring up any connection to the hotel industry, etc.?)

[corin_]

I'm not jumping on the conspiracy theory bandwagon and think that the idea is nonsense, but hypotheticall, if I were trying to make Airbnb look bad (and had had spare cash to do it with), I wouldn't just pay someone to say it happened, I'd also per someone to rent the appartment, and actually do this stuff, so that any checks show the crime did indeed happen.

[danso]

Sure...but the more people you bring into the conspiracy, the more likely it is to be found out. Of course airbnb will call the cops into investigating this. If this were a setup, EJ and her fellow perpetrators made it MUCH more complicated than it needed to be. The alleged homewrecking occurred over a lengthy time period and involved not only simple burglary, but destruction of walls and bizarre behavior (such as the picture moving). Moreover, they apparently left a lengthy e-paper trail. If EJ faked all of that, she gave the cops and airbnb a lot of avenues to poke holes in the story, such as checking timestamps, IP addresses, even the linguistics in these alleged email exchanges.

What would the hotel industry have to gain? The beatdown of a website that has yet to reach mainstream consciousness...Airbnb is a long ways from being the Netflix to the hotel industry's Blockbuster Video. What do they have to lose? Hmmm...millions, maybe a billion in liability and legal fees, nevermind prison sentences for the numerous people involved in such a scheme.

Also, look at the date of the original post: http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...

June 29. I only found out about this through HN a day ago, and that seems like when this all went viral.

Maybe I'm underestimating the hotel industry's savviness and patience here...but why would it wait for a viral campaign to serendipitously happen, as opposed to going through their considerable resources of outreach and media contacts? EJ could've easily made a sincere-in-appearance call out to a Bay Area publication...hell, even Patch...instead, she apparently left only a blogpost.

And hell, her blogpost is terrible SEO: "Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned" One thing I would expect of big-calcified-industry folks to have at least down is their SEO bulls*.

If a major hotel company were clever and innovative enough to pull this off without being exposed (which would include not only faking the fake crime emails, but hiding the emails they used to internally discuss all of this...something that no business, such as the financial giants, have yet done successfully) it's far, far more likely they would've come up with a better Internet business model by now.

[asmithmd1]

I guess you are right - If the CEO had any doubt he could try to float that angle. And if it were a planted story you would expect it to come from the mainstream press instead of bubbling up organically.

I would just like to see some basic reporting from a mainstream news outlet instead of just repeating blog posts.

Speaking of fact checking - I just checked out some of her old posts and they are pretty extensive and point to the fact she is probably a travel writer - that would explain the excellent writing. I thought there were only 3 posts on her blog, there have only been 3 this year - but there are dozens of extensive posts with many pictures going back 2 years.