
AirBNB why did you terminate my account? – An Open Letter to AirBNB - citizen428
https://medium.com/airbnb-superhosting/airbnb-why-did-you-terminate-my-account-an-open-letter-to-airbnb-9631213f8a1b
======
disillusioned
What a shitty termination notice and a shitty way of handling things from an
account that has clearly been one of their better hosts. If you're going to
ascribe the "superhost" appellation, you'd think they'd actually give a fuck
before algorithmically cancelling the user's account, or maybe work through a
warning or validate their concerns or literally ANYTHING before turning things
up to 11 and nuking the account from orbit.

Even if AirBNB had a perfectly legitimate reason (which, to be clear, would
make the author a borderline sociopath to publish like this, but isn't out of
the question), the termination notice and the complete lack of transparency is
so Kafkaesque and needlessly horrible that this just makes AirBNB look awful.

I've considered going the host route, but reading through something like this
makes me seriously second guess using them. I understand that it's their
platform and they can de facto rule by fiat, but that doesn't mean it's good
policy and that potential hosts shouldn't have some sort of communication or
chance to rectify an issue or any level of transparency.

It's also disappointing when a company effectively has to be shamed into
taking anything resembling a human approach to a problem. It's been a week of
"we can't tell you anything, sorry" which is bullshit. There's simply no
reason for that, and it's disheartening to say the least.

~~~
danielweber
You know how the web 2.0 companies have a massive amount of revenue per
worker?

It's because the normal rough edges of handling customer complaints is shoved
out the door, because that didn't really matter, right?

"For your convenience your account has been closed. Do not reply to this
email."

------
vessenes
This is a tough read, because someone's livelihood and in some part happiness
combine with their AirBnB business, and losing it is painful.

The hell of it is that there are many circumstances in which the customer
would not be allowed to know why the cancellation.

I'm most familiar with Bank Secrecy Act rules; some of which definitely apply
to AirBnB.

So, for instance, an algorithm flags the house as a likely money laundering
location. AirBnB response: notify FinCEN, Thai authorities, turn off customer
account without explanation. In the US even telling your employees down the
line why the account was canceled might lead to fines and jail time for the
compliance folks. I am not making this up, or exaggerating. That's just how it
is.

Or, perhaps a repeat customer is the target. Same stuff. Or, perhaps the owner
is a small time pornographer / drug dealer / etc in Thailand, and Thai
authorities notify the bank, which notifies AirBnB's bank.. Of all the
employees contacted, only the CTO would know, but even he might be told
"flagged, don't ask." And, that will be all. No matter how much he might care
that a good customer stay happy and with the company, getting rid of them is
infinitely better than being deposed over a BSA violation and information
leakage.

~~~
cjg
Anti-money laundering regulation was my first guess as to why, but it doesn't
really fit because companies are not allowed to do anything to warn customers
that they are under investigation. Cancelling their account could certainly
tip them off to this and so it seems unlikely that it would comply.

Having said that, I don't know what the Thai regulations are. Perhaps this
fits better under those.

~~~
hackerboos
I read a FATF report that stated it was still far to easy to launder money in
Thailand's cash economy.

Reporting starts at 2 million baht ($56k)

[http://www.bangkokbank.com/BangkokBank/WebServices/AMLRegula...](http://www.bangkokbank.com/BangkokBank/WebServices/AMLRegulations/Pages/Default.aspx)

------
KayEss
We've been considering doing the whole AirBnB thing (also in Thailand), but
the problem with all of these online services is that you just aren't in any
control of your income.

I've kept only to business models where I bill directly. This rules out google
adsense, Apple and Android paid apps, AirBnB etc. I won't even use anything
like PayPal to collect money for me -- there's just far too much risk for
capricious loss of the business through factors that you have absolutely no
control over.

Building a business is hard, it seems utter folly to give another entity this
sort of control over what you're doing.

~~~
bambax
Reading that article makes me furious -- of course, there are many things we
don't know, and this person may be full of it, and she may have crossed a line
(knowingly... or unknowingly), etc.

But, even if that's true, not giving reasons why you're kicking users out is
infuriating.

No due process, no appeal, just a big "fuck you" with no explanation
whatsoever. These companies apparently think it's a normal way of dealing with
users -- and something they can do with total impunity once they have acquired
near-monopoly status.

Let's hope for a big backlash some day soon.

~~~
superuser2
Indeed, Stripe for example built its entire business on people's frustration
with similar behavior by Paypal.

~~~
chinathrow
Absolutely, yet they closed accounts for no good reasons too.

------
maehwasu
Airbnb is a short-term rental company, not a f __*ing nation state.

It amuses/disgusts me when the default position of companies like this is to
treat their security policies as some sort of state secret, leading to these
Kafka-esque scenarios.

Sadly, I don't really know what the person here can do except write articles
like these. Probably doesn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.

~~~
RealityVoid
Kafka-esque is the perfect qualifyer for this situation. Absurd things like
this make me feel queesy, sort of like vertigo.

------
pm24601
"Sharing economy" = shareCROPPING economy. (look up "sharecropping" to
understand )

But basically, sharecroppers were exposed to all the risk, and the landowner
got the initial first dibs on the crops. The landowner often times had
complete ability to be completely arbitrary ( like AirBNB is in this case )

You are not running a business if you don't have direct access to your
clientele. You are a shareCROPPER. Look it up.

Use AirBNB, as a marketing vehicle, not your only income source.

Woo hoo, I love these downvotes. Seriously, peeps...give me your hate. And
while you are doing that - please tell me which bit of my statement is
_factually_ incorrect.

~~~
bagels
I looked it up.

"a tenant farmer especially in the southern United States who is provided with
credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and who
receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges"

There are no crops involved in the posted story. Further, AirBNB doesn't own
the land so I'm not sure the term even makes sense as a metaphor.

~~~
drcursor
Take a look at [http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-
econ...](http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-economy-that-
isnt-what-it-is)

~~~
pm24601
perfectly said.

------
Lucadg
I don't like to be the "I told you so" guy. But I told you so.

I wrote this a couple of years ago:

"All Eggs in One Airbnb" [http://www.adormo.com/blog/marketing/all-the-eggs-
in-one-air...](http://www.adormo.com/blog/marketing/all-the-eggs-in-one-
airbnb-1st-part/)

because I keep meeting hosts who say "I'm fine with just Airbnb". The build a
whole business based on a single website, a single failure point.

Disclosure: we help hosts be present in several platforms, including Airbnb.

------
prawn
Often in these articles, you read through to some sort of detail hidden at the
end which reveals why the company actually did cut ties, and the aggrieved
party is blind to it or trying to talk around it. In this case, there's
nothing.

My guesses were assault, theft or maybe some effort to actively sabotage
Airbnb by promoting a competitor. But if any of those things happened, they're
not detailed or hinted at all.

I imagine Airbnb are vague for legal reasons. But it must feel hugely unfair
to be in the position of the author and lose a significant portion of your
life and livelihood.

~~~
knorby
The sense I get is just that they don't cancel successful accounts very often;
given the escalations, I have to believe they have some strong reason. It
sounds like they will have some host community issues now, but what got me was
how they cancelled guests. It sounds like they just used the host cancellation
process, but if I found out AirBnB did that masked as the host, I'd go from
annoyed at the world to very angry at AirBnB...

------
rdancer
AirBnB's ability to handle failure modes is beyond bad.

If a host fails to accommodate you, you better have a hotel in mind for a plan
B.

Their UK customer service phone line drops calls after 300 seconds in the
waiting queue. Go and try it: +448435047257

Form replies to e-mails, never enough detail, multiple days' response times.

What's the procedure for documenting a host has checked in, or hasn't? That's
right, there isn't one. They do everything by hand, and is't a he said/she
said, I will take a week to deliberate, and then cut the baby in half kind of
deal.

~~~
prawn
When I have had a host screw me over in a major city where finding
accommodation in a peak time is incredibly difficult, I've complained to
Airbnb very persistently and aggressively, and they've compensated me.

~~~
rdancer
That's exactly the point I'm trying to get across: there should be a well-
defined business process, reflected in the UI in their app/website, for
getting refunds. That there isn't speaks volumes.

~~~
prawn
True of almost every large company until you complain like a bastard. I've
been stonewalled by Dell, Airbnb, airlines, etc but eventually won through
sheer stubbornness.

------
Lucadg
In the meantime you may upload your apartments in Housetrip, Wimdu,
Booking.com, Homeaway and so on. None is as good and smooth as Airbnb but they
work. When hopefully Airbnb reopens your account, keep these portals too, so
you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

------
NamTaf
The iPhone logging in all over the US sounds like it's probably the cause. The
account may well have been shuttered for being a conduit of fraud or the like
and thus the account got canned. It'll be interesting to hear any follow-up to
this.

------
dynjo
Imagine if they dealt with their employees in the same way.

Your fired, leave. I'm not telling you why.

The unicorn paradox:

    
    
      1. Create a small startup to disrupt the corporations
      2. Create a loyal user base
      3. Ride the hockey stick on your unicorn
      4. Treat your users as a commodity as you scale
      5. Become a terms & conditions black box
      6. Congratulations, you are a corporation.

------
kriro
Quick read the AirBnB terms (termination). Seems like they can basically
terminate you however/whenever they want. IANAL but that seems rather flimsy.
Aren't they essentially an infrastructure provider (website, app, booking
etc.) that should have service contracts?

That pretty much means you should not and cannot depend on AirBnB as a major
source of income. Risk management wise that's just insane. It puts a decent
amount of theoretical "extortion power" in their hands. "Oh yeah we see you
make X which likely means you heavily depend on this income. Would you kindly
agree to these new terms/new rates or be screwed?"

Independent of all of this it is horrible style to terminate someone without
further notice or reason. Writing this into ToS is a pretty bad sign. It
generally seems better to have a policy that defaults to explaining the reason
for termination except in special cases (funny money laundering laws etc.).

Makes me wonder, is there is any "ToS" ranking site out there? X,Y,Z in ToS
are a bad sign, here's why? Kind of like the sites calling out bad UX
practices that are meant to trick people into buying extra stuff.

~~~
taneq
The problem here is that this sort of termination clause is basically standard
practice these days. For instance, Google's TOS just says "Google may also
stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at
any time":
[http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/](http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/)
\- That's pretty damn scary given that I (and most people I know) have a Gmail
account as their primary contact!

Everyone just accepts it on the assumption that it's a last-ditch protection
against 'bad people', and hopes that in their case if anything goes wrong the
company will deal transparently and fairly with them.

------
hoodoof
It's good to be the king.

Google is king of search and can cut you off without reason or explanation.
AirBNB is king of home sharing and can cut you off without reason or
explanation.

Companies that have a virtual monopoly can treat their ecosystem this way
because there's no reason not to.

If this is the way they treat their very best hosts, can you imagine how rock
bottom badly you'll be treated if you're anything less than a stellar
superstar.

------
noonespecial
An obscure, not fully tested algorithm applies a filter to all users. Maybe
it's an internal beta, maybe some integrator that should have considered
account history pulled a blank table instead of real values. Whatever. It
happened.

Your account gets canned. No one at the company knows why. Nobody even _can_
know why. No one has the authority to fix it because it was never supposed to
happen like that in the first place. _Nobody_ wants the responsibility for
dealing with it.

So there you have it.

~~~
chinathrow
If you have algos in place to flag an account and forget to implement the
reason why that algo came to the conclusion, you should seriously rethink your
setup.

~~~
duncan_bayne
That may not always be possible. For example, if you have a neural network
doing the flagging, you might not be able to figure out exactly 'why' a
particular account was flagged.

------
Reason077
This reminds me of a similar story of an Airbnb host in London who's suing
Airbnb for cancelling his account.

Basically, it comes down to allegations made against him by a guest.

[http://www.standard.co.uk/news/homeowner-massaged-by-his-
air...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/homeowner-massaged-by-his-airbnb-guest-
sues-after-being-kicked-off-the-website-10421149.html)

------
airbnbthrowaway
Perhaps the Thai government asked them to close the account.

~~~
KayEss
It's always possible, but doesn't seem like the sort of thing they'd do. If
it's a domestic problem they'd sort it out themselves.

------
kkapelon
"So far the emails have been opened and read over 350 times, from multiple
places around the world. Who knows who these email addresses really go to."

1)How can you track this in a reliable way? 2)So 350 read this email and did
not answer it? Do I read that correctly?

~~~
dewey
You could embed a tracking pixel and email clients that don't block remote
content will fetch it from the server where you'll see the number it's been
accessed.

------
saiko-chriskun
I recently went through the exact same experience. Absolute shit.

------
lordnacho
What was the point of having someone phone the account holder but not act like
a human being? If you're going to hide behind the algo (and hopefully do an
investigation and apology) isn't it better not to have any human contact? If
you phone someone, the person on the other end tends to expect some humanity
(ability to ask questions, commitment to investigate).

------
bagels
No mention of whether the Paris talk invitation by AirBNB was cancelled. That
would be an entertaining forum to raise this topic in.

------
chinathrow
"I really cannot understand why I am being kicked out of a community I loved,
promoted and cared for so passionately."

It's not a community - it's people meeting on a commercial platform who's in
for the big money.

Still, as a previous host and renter, I am disgusted.

~~~
Dylan16807
I guess most communities aren't communities then.

~~~
jarcane
chinathrow is right.

A community is a body of people who respect and act in each other's best
interests or for the collective good.

A company is not a community, it's a for-profit enterprise, and it does not
give a fuck about respecting you or your best interests if there is profit to
be made, or even if there is internal bureaucracy to be followed.

Loyalty to business and corporate interests is seldom well placed.

~~~
Dylan16807
The company _is_ not a community (arguable) but it _has_ a community.

------
chinathrow
To the fine folks at AirBnB who for sure are watching this thread:

\- You fucked up badly in 2011 with that wrecked apartment in SF

\- You cleaned up nicely eventually, introduced insurance and whatnot

Now, you absolutely seriously need to clean this up the proper way. The
shitstorm is already brewing.

------
venomsnake
This definitely sounds like some agency was using/used the home as a safe
house.

------
shashwat986
So, what's the situation now? Has AirBnB contacted the author? There seems to
be no update yet on the blog that I can see.

------
coverband
Sounds to me like there's fraud activity observed or reported, likely by more
than one guest in the same location.

------
chinathrow
Why did this item get burried?

~~~
Reason077
<conspiracy>YCombinator is an investor in AirBNB and doesn't like to see
negative stories about them</conspiracy>

~~~
tptacek
Nobody who knows dang or follows his comments would think this is true.

------
1arity
Does Airbnb have two factor login ? If so use it.

------
luciferous
This item was on the front page just a minute ago with 11 points. It grew to
134 but is now all the way on the fourth page. Something is suspicious.

~~~
dang
No admin touched this post. It dropped in rank because of user flags and the
flamewar detector, which is algorithmic and treats all posts the same way.

HN admins don't penalize posts for being anti-YC or anti-YC-startup.

~~~
luciferous
Ok, that's a possible reason. But shouldn't there be some amount of human
intervention for false positives? There wasn't a flamewar brewing in this
thread.

~~~
dang
'Flamewar detector' is a catchy name that stuck, but it isn't only about
flamewars. It's about damping, on HN, the kind of low-quality, unsubstantive
discussions that swell up quickly and would otherwise flood this site the way
they do most of the internet.

Indignation is a common driver of these. Look at the top comment in this
thread, beginning "What a shitty", or the one that, with admirable
forthrightness, says "Reading that article makes me furious". Such discussions
do often lead to flamewar-like behavior (e.g. the argument about the
definition of 'community'), so "flamewar detector" isn't exactly wrong,
either.

We do look several times a day at the stories that are penalized by this
software, because sometimes there are genuine false positives that need
rescuing. I wouldn't say that this article and thread rise to that level,
though.

~~~
chinathrow
Appreciate your feedback on why it get burried.

A little meta, that an algo said to flag the thread down while the airbnb host
in the linked article likely got flagged down by an alogrithm.

~~~
dang
> while the airbnb host in the linked article likely got flagged down by an
> alogrithm

We really don't have the slightest basis for that assessment, do we?

That highlights the deep problem with posts like this: they invariably have
only one side of the story. That's not the authors' fault—why shouldn't they
tell their side of the story? But it makes objective discussion impossible.
Since the internet abhors a vacuum, what rushes in to replace the missing
information is speculation and rage, and those things make for poor HN
discussions no matter what the topic.

