[blue039]

How is this any different than with a hotel?

Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.

The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.

Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.

[trillic]

Hotels have support. You can actually walk into the hotel and speak to the manager if it comes to that.

AirBNB is a faceless website. If you're banned your recourse seems to be a support line or chat. Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.

[timr]

Meh, good luck going to the manager of your local instance of Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt and getting a corporate-level ban lifted. They're going to tell you that it's above their pay grade, and to contact HQ. HQ will ignore your attempts to contact them unless they come on the letterhead of a law firm. Maybe you can get a ban lifted if it was imposed by the instance, but even then, they're probably just going to tell you to go to HQ.

It doesn't matter if it's SPG or AirBNB: when you're fighting with a large company that (you believe) has made a mistake, the best/only path forward is to get a lawyer involved.

[Laaas]

Difference being there are many hotels to choose from, and quite honestly, I've never heard of someone getting banned from a hotel chain (though I assume it has happened).

[hot_gril]

> Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.

Funny enough, Twitter was the best way to get CA DMV support during the pandemic. They'd DM you unlisted phone numbers to call and get things done that the regular website can't. This is the only reason I have a Twitter account.

[Nextgrid]

In a hotel the decisions would be made by a reasonably competent human, and can be appealed to a human if there's a problem.

In Airbnb, the decision would be made by a black-box algorithm, and appeals would be directed to an outsourced monkey who is neither given the training, nor the information, nor paid enough to give a shit, if not stonewalled directly with a canned response.

[vkou]

> reasonably competent human

The reasonably competent human at the hotel is the night-shift clerk making $13 an hour, and his manager, who makes $17, both of whom are utterly terrified of getting fired.

[Nextgrid]

True, but this is still a major upgrade from the $1/hour outsourced drone working in atrocious call-center-like conditions trying to close as many support tickets as possible.

[datpiff]

A hotel ban only applies to one hotel or to a chain, not every hotel. Airbnb have a monopoly.

[anonymouskimmer]

A quick search for "airbnb alternatives" shows this isn't quite true. They're just by far the major player.

[red-iron-pine]

For starters, they're competing with actual hotels. And in terms of prices it's awfully close these days.

[JohnFen]

But as long as hotels exist, Airbnb is optional anyway, isn't it? Even ignoring hotels, there are plenty or real BnBs around. I have never felt the need to use Airbnb and haven't suffered from that.

[none_to_remain]

What is Airbnb supposed to have a monopoly on? Their own trademark?

[LanceH]

A monopoly on overnight rentals?

[ahallock]

I can't think of any competitors in the same space. Maybe they exist, but they're terrible at advertising. Hotels aren't the same industry. Completely different experience.

[jamincan]

I've actually been hearing ads for Vrbo on a lot of the podcasts I listen to, so that comes to mind immediately for me. Searching for airbnb alternatives seems to suggest that there are a number of options out there.

[vikramkr]

This seems like claiming that a pizza place and a taco place aren't competing because they're completely different experiences - I'm still only going to eat one lunch, and I'm only going to use one service for lodging overnight somewhere

[TeMPOraL]

They're definitely serving a market with only partial overlap. E.g. I personally am in a market for pizza, but not for tacos.

[zamnos]

Well, just for the two you, they have combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants, so you can have a choice of pizza and/or tacos, depending on what you feel like eating at that exact moment!

[dyno12345]

VRBO

[ahallock]

will check it out, thanks

[tayo42]

there is vrbo... hotel aggregators list vacation home rentals. there is couchsurfing. airbnb didn't invent homestays...

[JohnFen]

Actual bed-and-breakfasts, maybe?

[jimbokun]

How does AirBNB track the romantic relationship status of every single one of it's customers?

[mike_hearn]

Probably several signals including clustering via IP address.

A couple of years ago I discovered I'd been banned from AirBNB. They didn't notify me this happened and it was months after I'd last used the service (which left a good review), so I only discovered once I tried to log in much later. I know it wasn't related to the prior stay because they'd been emailing me to thank me for being a part of the "AirBNB community" for months afterwards.

As far as I could tell the only possible reason was that my girlfriend had a dumb moment and booked a place for a friend, and that friend then invited other people round in the apartment. It wasn't trashed or anything but the neighbours complained about the noise (they were playing loud music or something). So by the transitive rule of AirBNB: random person I never met makes too much noise once -> girlfriend banned -> me banned.

We weren't married and the accounts weren't obviously linkable in any way, except that we use the same internet connection. So presumably they're clustering based on that.

AirBNB claims in the article that it "employs an appeals process for people who feel they have been unfairly banned". This isn't true. The only way to appeal was to click a button, and because they don't tell you why you were banned and back then I hadn't figured out they were clustering users, all I could write was something like "I can't log in and don't understand why". Then you get a stock email back a few hours later saying the ban was upheld. That's not an appeals process worthy of the name.

I understand the chain of reasoning that leads to this sort of thing, but ultimately hotels don't pull this kind of stunt and have lots of other advantages so AirBNB is dead to me even if one day the ban is reversed. If the model AirBNB is using requires this sort of hyper-aggressive banning of users who have not actually done anything wrong then it's a broken and unsustainable model. Competitors like booking.com clearly don't need anything like this either, so that's where my business goes these days.

[zamnos]

For convenience, Airbnb lets you send/share the itinerary with other guests via their platform. That's not literally every customer's relationship status, but it would be trivial to use that to ban known associates of bad actors.