Today our host cancelled a place we booked 6 month ago with zero communication, at time of check-in.
We landed at our destination and ready to check into our Airbnb that we booked almost 6 month ago, for an entire month.
The airbnb is managed by a company, who I assume manages the entire building.
The host promptly tells us it's no longer available, and that we should accept their offer of either refund or another listing that's in a completely different location, with no picture or reviews, but promised that it's "similar"
Of course, being hesitant, we said no thanks, we're happy with just a refund.
They proceeds to tells us to contact airbnb, and then ghosts us.
We open a ticket with Airbnb, calls them, and they proceed to give us the run around and tell us to just book another stay.
So what else are we going to do? be homeless for a night in foreign city?
So of course we try to book, except it's last minute and the only listings available are the once you must contact the hosts first.
Good thing we arrived at 11am and not 6pm. or we'd be literally f*cked for the night.
Why am I complaining?
Airbnb, you should do better.
I am a startup founder, I understand these types of situations has probably zero affect on your bottom line. So you probably never prioritized the need to spend engineering time "fixing" it.
You also probably look at your metrics and say, well these situations happen to <1% of our overall bookings, it's not a problem.
But PG says, the best startups are the ones who solve intense immediate pain for a small number of people.
Well, my confidence in you is absolutely shaken, and now I'm not so sure your position in the space is so infallible anymore. Because eventually this will happen often enough that "the small number of users with intense pain" will give arise to a newer and better version of you, and you will be legacy.
In the end, we booked another place last minute, had to spend 2x the amount and received a refund (well let's see in 10 days).
If I was in a much lesser able financial situation, I might not have been able to float a few thousands of dollars on my credit card, and may have literally ended up homeless.
Airbnb knows about this scam but hasn't done anything to stop it.
Here's Joe Lycett on this exact scam:
I'm just going to post a link to Paul Graham's bragging about Airbnb since this is his website and he backed Airbnb from the start, and I would like to think that someone around YC would have enough pride to fix this mess:
However, there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads, because they're repetitive [1] and don't contain significant new information [2]. (That's not to say they aren't significant and important to the person in the given situation—of course they are—but that's not the same thing.)
When the story is about a YC-funded startup, these principles conflict. We recently decided to start downweighting them more, though, in the hope of addressing the community pushback about this. I've been posting about this recently in the context of Stripe threads, but the same points apply here too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34282052
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192
The upshot is that we're adjusting a bit to downweight this class of posts more in general because that's what the community reaction is telling us; and that means downweighting the YC-related posts in this class more as well (although still not as much as the non-YC-related posts).
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
> Section 23 of these Terms contains an arbitration agreement and class action waiver that apply to all claims brought against Airbnb in the United States. Please read them carefully.
> 23.11 No Class Actions or Representative Proceedings. You and Airbnb acknowledge and agree that, to the fullest extent permitted by law, we are each waiving the right to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action lawsuit, class-wide arbitration, private attorney general action, or any other representative or consolidated proceeding. ...