
Covid-19 forced Airbnb to rethink its product offerings - MLEnthusiast
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/covid-19-forced-airbnb-to-rethink-its-product-offerings-heres-some-of-what-it-came-up-with/
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gregkerzhner
My biggest gripe with AirBnb is the search functionality. Sure, you are a
premium product, so you can price gouge my millennial bank account all you
want. But at least give me the functionality that I need. As a software
engineer, I need a place with good wifi. Hosts always claim to have wifi, but
no indication of quality. Before I knew how to be a super user, it wasn't
uncommon to show up to a listing that claimed to have wifi and only find out
that it was coming from the building next door and you could only pick up a
signal while standing up in the shower tub.

The most reliable way to find out who actually had good wifi was by searching
the reviews for the term "wifi". However, AirBnb refuses to implement the
ability to filter your results by terms inside review. They claim that it's
because it's too technically difficult to implement this. I am no search guru,
but I have fired up an Elastic Search instance to make a-one-to many
relationship searchable back in my day without too many issues. I guess
AirBnb's "scale" is just too awesome to to do this? I mean damn... google
indexed the whole internet. You can't index your own reviews?

Then, a few months ago, I noticed that AirBnb got rid of even the search
functionality on the individual listing page, so now the only way to search a
listing's reviews for the word "wifi" is to go to the listing, infinite scroll
the list of reviews for a few minutes to load all of them onto the page, and
then use the browser's search tool.

~~~
rickyc091
Yep, I've been burned by this a few times. Now, I ask them what their internet
speeds are and if there are any dead zones in the apartment.

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hn_throwaway_99
There was an article in NYT that was discussed here a couple months ago that
talked about early employees losing their equity is AirBnB didn't go public by
2020. Does anyone know more details about that?

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yellowapple
Pivoting into these more "essential" reasons for renting, like wanting to
isolate from family, seems like a smart move, so long as AirBnB hosts are
taking the necessary precautions to make their properties suitable for self-
quarantine. Certainly a better option isolation-wise than, say, a hotel (even
if you decline room service - and room service actually recognizes that you've
declined it - the rooms are in close proximity to one another, often have some
degree of shared air, and the lack of a usable kitchen means having to break
quarantine if you want to eat anything other than microwaved food). I'd
imagine partnering with local/state/national governments to provide housing
for people being specifically quarantined would be another good use for AirBnB
in a similar vein.

Another legit non-tourism-related use case I can see still being relevant is
for people needing temporary housing, whether due to moving into an area or
because of foreclosure/eviction or some other reason why they don't have
permanent housing. I don't know what the process of renting or buying a home
looks like with social distancing (thankfully I moved right before the
outbreak and didn't have the "fun" time of finding out for myself), but I
can't imagine it's particularly easy or quick. And likewise, while you'd hope
that banks and landlords would have the slightest bit of human decency and be
a bit lenient on late mortgage/rent payments, I strongly suspect there are
plenty of assholes out there.

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rdslw
they're short-term doomed. long-term, (2021+) -> time will tell.

what they're planning now to do is to invent completly new business, utilising
assets they have at hand (relations with hosts, but this is it).

their 'online experiences' is a lesson on 'wishful thinking' or 'painting the
grass green'. Quoting article: "we have nearly 100 hosts offering experiences
online and thousands more who’ve offered to host experiences".

Let me remind them, that they have at least THREE..FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE
bigger hosts number (problem 1), there is no space in youtube/twitch area for
that amount of content creators (problem 2), and most hosts can't do it
(problem 3).

~~~
shostack
I wonder what knock on effects there will be for this part of the economy. How
many towns and cities have a significant chunk of real estate that was
purchased exclusively for Airbnb rentals that may eventually get foreclosed as
a result of this? What will be the impact to surrounding real estate markets?

~~~
ForHackernews
Seems like it would only be positive if more housing became available for
locals?

For myself, I'm hoping Airbnb go bankrupt. In my mind, they're similar to Uber
in that their only true innovation is a willingness to disregard local laws.

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yalogin
Airbnb must be making ZERO dollars right now. Wonder how long they can survive
in this situation. They sure have a lot of funding but they were close to
going public and returning money to their investors. If this continues they
will need to raise more cash and that round is going to be severely
discounted.

In general I am not sure how their business will pan out over the next year or
so.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
Not zero dollars, but certainly less. I'm in an Airbnb in The Canary Islands,
and will be through at least May. When I found out the lockdown was happening,
I scrambled to rent Airbnbs thru May because I didn't have a place to return
to, and staying in Spain felt safer to me than returning to the USA.

~~~
thulecitizen
> staying in Spain felt safer to me than returning to the USA

Because of better adherence to social distancing rules? Are you a SWE working
remotely?

~~~
PopeDotNinja
Yes to both.

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amiga_500
> TC: Are these spaces being offered at no cost?

> AS: They are donated or offered at reduced pricing.

This decision was made by the market, not by AirBnB, because they can't get
anywhere near your former price.

> AS: Yes, like “Sangria mixing with Pedro,” which is a cocktail mixing show

This isn't going to work.

AirBnb's sole "value" proposition was exploiting a regulatory loophole to
allow offering accommodation that has:

\- lower to no safety inspection

\- zoned in residential spaces often with angry neighbours

Does it have another idea like this, that allows them to extract value created
by the community?

I don't see any.

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canada_dry
Gotta give them some credit though for pretty rapidly releasing their
"experiences" [i]. 𝖮̶𝖽̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗁̶𝖺̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗁̶𝗂̶𝗌̶ ̶𝖺̶𝗋̶𝗍̶𝗂̶𝖼̶𝗅̶𝖾̶ ̶𝖽̶𝗈̶𝖾̶𝗌̶𝗇̶'̶𝗍̶
̶𝖾̶𝗏̶𝖾̶𝗇̶ ̶𝗆̶𝖾̶𝗇̶𝗍̶𝗂̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ ̶𝗂̶𝗍̶.̶

I'm highly unlikely to use the service but I still think it shows they can
respond quickly to radical events.

[i]
[https://www.airbnb.ca/s/experiences/online](https://www.airbnb.ca/s/experiences/online)

~~~
ejstronge
> Gotta give them some credit though for pretty rapidly releasing their
> "experiences" [i]. Odd that this article doesn't even mention it.

This is discussed in the text of the very first question in the article

~~~
canada_dry
Ouch. Thanks for the correction.

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badpassword
hotels rooms in bali are $200 per month now

five stars hotel like westin sells a 2days voucher for 1mil rupiah (~70 usd),
valid until dec 31, 2021.

~~~
somecoolguy
Is there a way to buy these vouchers online?

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mothsonasloth
Staying in sub-par accomodation with no standards, or potentially sharing it
with an awkward host; who likes to talk about their vegan diet and pet pug, or
with wifi spy cameras, is not really a product offering.

Sure they have disrupted the property market and inflated rent and property
prices already, which are now ironically crashing a little bit.

Support good hotels and chains, who hire and invest in great staff.

~~~
lasgsf
Yeah no thanks on staying at hotels where you have hundreds of people going
through it and underpaid maids who "clean" tons of rooms a day. Sure that is
really safe in this environment.

~~~
andy_ppp
Haha, last Airbnb I had was mega cheap and the mattress smelled of dried piss.
The hosts were nice but god I hated staying there in an extreme way, felt very
unsafe.

Hotels (short of the “accommodation” in Chung King Mansions) have never made
me feel this way...

~~~
standardUser
It's up to you, the renter, to vet your host and rental to the best of your
ability. Maybe don't pick a "mega cheap" place next time? I've used AirBnB
tons of times and cannot relate even a little with all the complaints in this
thread (and other HN threads).

~~~
vorpalhex
My rule of thumb is I only use AirBnB in areas where there's a good selection
of options. AirBnBs in the middle of nowhere tend to be miserable because
there's no competition.

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Cyclone_
Airbnb has always figured out clever ways to screw the hosts. When I first
hosted guests were much more polite and clean. The last few years the ones
I've gotten have been pretty messy and more likely to break house rules.

~~~
noirbot
I'm not sure I understand how these are related? It's not as if they're
intentionally sending you bad guests to torment you as a "clever way" to screw
you...

~~~
strgcmc
More likely this is a version of the "Eternal September" problem. Early
adopters of Airbnb were more likely to be "true believers" of the idealized
vision of a kind/generous host matched with adventurous/courteous guests, but
this vision gets diluted over time as the userbase grows. Once Airbnb reached
true ubiquity, the general user population is just looking for a good deal and
isn't nearly as savvy or as committed to the original ideals; this applies to
both hosts and guests, of course.

It's impossible to scale a platform to 10s/100s/1000s millions without finding
an ever-lowering lowest common denominator.

~~~
noirbot
I think the interesting thing now is that, at least personally, I'm willing to
pay hotel-level rates to stay at somewhere run by one of those "true
believers". I know one of the things I look for is someone who's got a lot of
reviews/a long history, but also seems to be renting just one space (or
multiple rooms in the same house). I'm not looking for a deal - if I wanted to
be cheap and central and social, I'd stay at a hostel. I'm totally willing to
pay a bit more to stay somewhere with a host that cares.

