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Comment by fareed79 | Hacker News Reader

basically, author expects calibrated minimal services, good support, and a minimal standard of quality. This is what you call a classic hotel/lodge. I fully agree with you, and those living close to these miserable BnB businesses surely would agree as well. This "model" is rotting city centers and popular places. AirBnB will never care about that poor lady. AirBnB will know how to make her anger disappear into the zero-star reviews statistics - it is much more important to keep a large density of cheap appts in the center of Lisbon.

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There's no good reason AirBnb could not offer proper support. Showing contempt for your customers like this is a choice.

Might you tell us about any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support? Yes, it's "a choice". Sadly, it's an overwhelmingly popular choice.

My employer chooses to staff our customer support lines with North American agents who know what they are doing.

Zappos, from inception to 1B acquisition and beyond.

Although I would argue that Zappos didn't "limit profits." Rather they (correctly) surmised that the only way to successfully sell shoes online as a core business was to be seen as bending over backwards from a customer service perspective.

Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.

And it's a popular choice because the consumers often don't seem to care. Many are willing to accept poor customer service in the pursuit of lower prices for goods and services.

> any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support?

Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos.

Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.

There is a very good reason: their business model. They absolutely do not want to be in the business of verifying and maintaining their listings.

I don’t know why I’ve had such a different experience to others, but in both cases where I complained to Airbnb when a host was unable or unwilling to offer a resolution, Airbnb made things right for me - in one case even covering the parking ticket I’d ended up with from the host’s crappy instructions, in the other, the listing was removed as the issues were too egregious to number.

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