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Comment by vladd | Hacker News Reader

Hey brian,

- what's your side of the story on being unreachable 14 hours after the event?

- did you offer AirBnB credit or compensation to the victim to stay elsewhere during this?

To be fair I doubt the victim would be comfortable receiving airbnb credit or using the service again. If this happened to me and I was offered credit, I would feel insulted.

Purely pulling this out of my ass, but I'm hoping whoever took his initial call(s) just severely misunderstood the situation. Maybe people have had trashy guests or items broken and became irate over them, and that's what this person thought was happening. I hope.

I don't know the company's "side of the story", and would be surprised if it was ever really discussed in any way aside from steps taken to remedy this situation... But as this suggests, they apparently need, above their "urgent" number, a "Bat-Phone" for severe cases.

That doesn't matter. They are obligated to investigate each and every phone call to their fullest extent. Only if the same person called repeatedly could they even begin to think about the "boy who cried wolf" excuse.

Sure, I just mean to say that a person calling the urgent line because someone may have accidentally pocketed a key and the homeowner is concerned, is reasonable. That should be investigated.

But the guy calling with a police report on his entire place being completely trashed? The calls for the support staff to have a Bat-Phone to someone at a very high level, if not the top.

Oh I see, that's even better.

This doesn't specifically answer your question, but the post does seem to mention that financial compensation from AirBNB was offered:

"They have offered to help me recover emotionally and financially, and are working with SFPD to track down these criminals."

TechCrunch is reporting I spoke to Airbnb about EJ’s situation. They won’t reimburse her for damages, they say, and they do not insure against losses. They are helping police track down the person who did this, but their help ends there.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-air...

I love that the entire investment community is gaga over this company.

So they sold a fad product (cereal) at the right time to make a little bit of money. Just tells me they have no moral integrity (which explains the craigslist email spamming).

So they struggled to make rent in SF a while. Who told them to stay in an expensive city with no savings? That's bad financial planning, and they could've bootstrapped their startup in Austin.

Oh, and they made a startup that is illegal in many parts of US, and manage to dupe investors to give them hundreds of millions. Now they won't even give financial help to a girl whose life they help tear to shreds.

Sounds like upstanding company/fellows to me.

How is cereal a fad product? What's wrong with catering to fads?

My opinion is that the service is questionable. The fact that there is no way to contact a person until they accept your credit card. My friend paid for the stay, contacted a person via website, the person replied yes and asked to call him to make arrangements. Ended up, that nobody realized that nobody can see contact information. The day was waisted. So when my friend wanted to delete profile from airbnb, it is not allowed. So all we could do was telling about the horrible experience. They do not have detailed terms and conditions on the site, and all what a person should be aware of. I guess that they really do not care about customers. Like I heard from other people, this is like a typical startup from silicon valley, a new bubble. I guess we need to look at that in a positive way. So they just need to get enough money to get a lot of advertisement. Nothing will kill a horrible product faster that a good advertisement.

I think it's presumptious to assume AirBnB owes anybody anything. The renter knew (or should have known, if not retarded) the risk she/they were taking. And AirBnB cannot literally be responsible for every single human being's action who is a party to their service. The person that, allegedly, trashed/robbed the place is clearly the person who did something evil and illegal. Blame the perpetrator, not a middleman or scapegoat.

You know, the problem is that unless AirBnB is willing to pick up the tab on this sort of thing, they dramatically increase the risk associated with using their service.

Regardless of their legal responsibility, I would think that it was in their best interest to pay up in this type of situation. For example, a guarantee of say $10,000 for any damages (which AirBnB can then try and recoup from the perpetrator) would go a long way to making people feel more secure about renting out their apartment. That, along with a warning to store personal documents off-site, would reduce this type of event to being more of a nuisance than absolutely destroying someone. I would even think that that $10k limit could be waived in exceptional cases like this one.

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