
Airbnb Apologizes and Offers $50,000 Guarantee to Home Owners - jeanhsu
http://allthingsd.com/20110801/airbnb-apologizes-and-offers-50000-guarantee-in-hopes-of-defusing-security-concerns/
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joebadmo
Actually, I'm impressed. The apology is pretty comprehensive with no weasel
words, and the new features seem pretty serious. My personal chances of using
the service as a host have gone from 'just might try it' a few weeks ago to
'yeah, no' a few days ago, back up to 'I'll think about it' after reading this
blog post.

~~~
kragen
I feel the same way reading this — but there's a small voice in my head asking
whether they're being honest even now. Both EJ and Arrington have accused them
straight out of lying in their efforts to manage this, and it looks like at
least one other Airbnb host has had something similar happen, so I wonder how
many other people this has already happened to. Are we going to find out in
three months that there's no $50k, no customer support team, etc.?

~~~
joebadmo
Maybe that's what's keeping me from immediately jumping in, too. But I can't
imagine such a high profile startup with serious funding and such public
statements would really be straight-up lying about this. And in light of the
blog post, it seems likely to me that while their initial reaction was poor
and, well, reactionary, they've scrambled not just to address the specific
incident but to put systems into place that address the underlying causes.

~~~
kragen
Either they have been straight-up lying about it, or Arrington and EJ have
been.

------
mashmac2
From AirBnB source: <http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-
safety>

------
PaulHoule
big question: Will EJ settle for $50k or will she try to get more in court?

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jsavimbi
> Airbnb now has an in-house task force devoted to the manual review of
> suspicious activity.

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.

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dasht
Are you kidding me?!?!

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.

~~~
dasht
I know that the rules state the rule of thumb that one should not post
explaining down-votes but I am curious about these, if an exception might be
carved out. Looking at airbnb over the past week, and winding up with this
recent move, I feel like I'm watching a slow-motion train wreck that is so
predictable I can't imagine how they got to this state.

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.

~~~
kragen
My downvote was in response to what I perceived as an unrealistic (and
hysterical) assessment of risks on your part.

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.

~~~
dasht
Ok, well, thanks for answering.

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.

~~~
kragen
> I suppose what most greatly offends and alarms me about Airbnb is how
> sharply it diverges from very well established cultural and legal norms.

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.

~~~
dasht
Wow. It is "stupid" to be skeptical of handing over your home and access to
your most valuable assets to relative strangers? It is "stupid" to isolate
yourself in a non-public, unwatched space controlled by strangers? And one
would only think otherwise because of TV? And the legal landscape here "has no
basis in reality" in spite of the various laws and contracts that say
otherwise?

Wow.

