[bgorman]

AirBnB is a terrible platform for users.

Recently a host charged me a cleaning fee, left me a negative review about not cleaning. I requested that the cleaning fee be refunded, since it was clearly fraudulent. AirBnB declined to refund the cleaning fee. I will never use them again.

I wonder what can be done to prevent companies like AirBnB, PayPal from becoming so user-hostile over time.

[bigger_inside]

What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience. Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.

The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.

Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.

And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.

[mike_hearn]

AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.

I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.

[asdadsdad]

I was traveling and hopping from one city to another in Europe, and when I went to rent my second Airbnb using a perfectly good American credit card, they blocked me for "fraud reasons". I booked a 5* hotel which was even cheaper than the Airbnb apartment and carried on with my trip. I suspect their anti-abuse system bites them pretty often.

[hot_gril]

I didn't get scammed but did find the service too annoying to want to use it again. Actual price is very different from quoted nightly rate. Can't tell the actual location of the place before I book, wtf. Got to the place and didn't know the combo to get in; isn't that something the booking email should say? Apparently supposed to log into the site again, go to a chat, and contact the host; it's not simply over SMS.

I get that I'm not paying the extra money for a hotel with 24/7 pro staff, but there's gotta be solid automation in place of that. To each their own, I'll just pay for the hotel.

[r00fus]

I recently rented a house from booking.com and it was like night & day vs. airbnb. Other than a snafu on the door code (which was resolved in 5m), the place was in a quiet neighborhood, the place was very well appointed (mid-high end everything) and it was roomy. Also not a single thing to do when we left - we pre-paid a cleanup fee included in book price and there was no checkout list other than to text a number saying we had departed.

Left feeling quite impressed, almost like it was a hotel (but better, it was quiet).

[kaczordon]

Agreed had a similar horrible experience where Airbnb deleted my bad review. Just use chargebacks on your credit card, it’s there to protect you.

[josephcsible]

While chargebacks might get you your money back, won't they also get you banned for life from Airbnb?