[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.