Airbnb Apologizes and Offers $50,000 Guarantee to Home Owners
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
I just finished reading the businessinsider piece and maybe they'd want to hire an outside firm to manually review all suspicious activity, from both the host and renter perspective and Airbnb itself. Also, and this may be a little bit of closing the barn door a couple of months too late, but one assumes that guest/host welfare would've been paramount right from the beginning, as one case like EJ's demonstrated how vulnerable a publicly-facing business model can be, as any real life business/insurance executive could've explained.
Is it me or did the idea of making off with $50,000 in renovations cross anyone else's mind? I think telegraphing the intent to pay a guaranteed specific amount sets the new minimum for fraudulent activity and removes the burden of responsibility from the hosts, whose relation to Airbnb is that of a customer, not a business partner.
And yes, back in the old days and out of necessity, people did stay in other people's homes, but not every apartment was a rooming house and the landlord was usually on the premises.
a) Airbnb needs to recognize the risks they are creating for guests - this move is purely a reactionary response to placate public perception about the risks to hosts. They do not care about safety so much as the supply of the product they broker.
b) $50K is a pretty good prize for anyone who can game them on this one.
The "apology" says: "There have been a lot of questions swirling around, and I would like to apologize and set the record straight in my own words. In the last few days we have had a crash course in crisis management."
If crisis management is something you're only just now learning about, in this highly risk inducing business, what does that say about your founders, investors, and your investors' funders?
I honestly now wonder if there aren't already any guest victims who we haven't heard from because, well, they're gone. I seriously wonder if this company hasn't already killed someone.
I'm also quite sincere, wearing my "engineering hat", at least as I understand it, that there are serious life-critical mistakes getting papered over here.
Airbnb now claims to be the size of, say, Albuquerque: one of the cities where I grew up, with somewhere around half a million people. In Albuquerque, there are 200 reports of vandalism, 100 stolen cars, 100 burglaries, 50 aggravated assaults, 10 kidnappings, 10 forcible rapes, two acts of arson, and one homicide, according to http://www.cabq.gov/onlinesvcs/crimestats/.
Every week.
EVERY WEEK. A murder every week. Fifty aggravated assaults every week. 200 reports of vandalism every week.
From this we can draw three conclusions:
1. You're probably right that there are other incidents. Probably some vandalism and assaults, maybe even some homicides.
2. Airbnb is a lot smaller than it appears to be. Maybe it's more like a 10 000 person town than like a million-person city. Maybe that's because their average user only use their service for a week every year as either a guest or a host.
3. Even so, Airbnb is a hell of a lot safer than Albuquerque, or actually any city in the US. An Airbnb user is a more likely to get kidnapped or murdered just at random than by someone they met through Airbnb. And that's probably still true even if you just consider the time they're actively using Airbnb.
The comparison to Albuquerque makes no sense to me. We could as well guess that Airbnb is less safe than riding a roller coaster at Disneyland -- so what? Those kinds of random comparisons prove nothing.
Because of its inherent structure, we can reasonably suspect that Airbnb is far, far riskier than current measurements yet show. I think of lots of nasty crimes that it facilitates and I'm sure you can as well. There is next to nothing in it that would prevent much higher rates of crime. It's structure is attractive to crime. The toll of the kinds of crime it is well suited for is incredibly high. Unless the basic model is significantly changed, none of those risks will go away or much diminish. Meanwhile the attractive potential for abuse of Airbnb is now well advertised to all potential criminals.
I suppose what most greatly offends and alarms me about Airbnb is how sharply it diverges from very well established cultural and legal norms. It is as if the designers of this product want glibly to overturn common sense about how far to trust strangers and it wants to ignore the many rules and regulations that are designed to prevent precisely this kind of business activity -- all on the basis that "most people are basically good" or something. That's socially irresponsible engineering.
Your cultural and legal norms are stupid. They have no basis in reality. They are the product of scaremongering TV networks competing for advertising eyeballs with sensationalism. They have produced a society of isolation and paranoia where talking to strangers in the park is a faux pas, and suicide is a major cause of death. They kill people every day. They need to be destroyed.
> Those kinds of random comparisons prove nothing.
On the contrary, comparison to a baseline is the only thing that would prove anything about riskiness. This single incident shows us that (a) apparently Airbnb is run by a bunch of insensitive and dishonest people, and (b) some people steal stuff and smash stuff up for fun. But we already knew (b). To make a judgment of whether Airbnb makes this kind of thing more or less likely, we need to know the baseline.
Urban US society as a whole, not a sanitized amusement park, is the correct baseline to use. Albuquerque is reasonably representative of urban US society.
Wow.