[andreaja]

>“In this case, the guest booked on the evening of Jan. 7, after the wildfires had started,” a company spokeswoman told The Post.

>However, she added that the company has “contacted the guest to issue a full refund as a goodwill gesture” due to the “fast-moving situation.”

https://nypost.com/2025/01/08/lifestyle/airbnb-user-fumes-af...

[lkramer]

"as a goodwill gesture" has to be the most condescending wording imaginable. Basically translates as "we are shutting down this PR nightmare in the early stages, here is your hush money, but you were still 100% at fault all along and nothing about this episode will make us re-evaluate that.

[maxehmookau]

I hate when companies do nothing to help their customers, unless a national newspaper gets involved. Looks even worse than doing nothing.

[redeux]

That initial response is silly. They expect everyone to have perfect information about their destination before booking?

[csomar]

Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire? That's like me going to a cafe, ordering and paying and immediately the staff tells me that electricity has been down for 3 hours and they can't fulfill the order. They also won't be able to refund my money because they have a strict no-refund policy.

[mschuster91]

> Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire?

The hosts inside the disaster area have much more pressing things to think about than to disable a listing on AirBnB - primarily not to die in a fire. And AirBnB reasonably can't keep up with wildfires and other natural disasters because they don't have people on the ground across the world and there is barely any effort to develop global standards and interfaces to provide even something as basic as road closures to maps providers, much less about evacuation orders and their legal consequences.

However, and this is where AirBnB fucked up, their support agents aren't empowered to use their brains, to look up "xyz evacuation orders" and cancel reservations when they see a government issued evacuation order!

[poincaredisk]

>And AirBnB reasonably can't keep up with wildfires and other natural disasters because they don't have people on the ground across the world

This is a trick big techs played on the world. AirBnB can and should keep up with wildfires! If they need to hire more staff to do this, so be it. Imagine if traditional hotel sold you a room that is on fire, and said that they don't have enough people to monitor all their properties so it's your fault.

Facebook and other social media do the same thing for moderation (yeah there's a lot of scam, but we can't do anything because we just don't have enough people). Either hire enough people to do your job properly, find an automated solution that works, or go out of business.

[pas]

Or just process these events and their consequences through their support. They already do allocated considerable attention/resources, but mostly just to make sure they get paid.

[mschuster91]

> Imagine if traditional hotel sold you a room that is on fire, and said that they don't have enough people to monitor all their properties so it's your fault.

That can and does happen with regular hotels. For them as well, the priority is the safety of the guests already there (aka, to get them out), and the pipeline of new bookings can be dealt with once the immediate danger is passed.

[michaelt]

> Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire?

Speculation on my part, but presumably a natural disaster has several rings of declining danger around it.

"Literally on fire" at the centre, "mandatory evacuation/no electricity" around that, "strongly advised to evacuate by firefighters" around that, "advised to evacuate by a politician covering their ass" around that, "Safe for now but monitor the situation" around that, "heavy traffic and poor air quality" around that.

All of these rings could be called "the wildfire-effected area" but some are more wildfire-effected than others.