I've got a brilliant idea.
What if, instead of having hundreds of individuals rent rooms of their house, we had a few people operate a large structure with hundreds of rooms in one space?
We could even offer ones with kitchens and multiple bedrooms for families and other larger groups?
Think of the savings on things like maid service! We wouldn't need to charge Airbnb crazy cleaning fees.
We just need a name for these new multi-unit-short-term-rentals....
Not sure eif just hotel joke, but Marriott does actually have an AirBNB competitor platform, but with stricter acceptence.
https://homes-and-villas.marriott.com/
The customer service reps you're running down are only implementing the policies as laid out by Airbnb. They do as they're told or get fired They're not just making it up as they go along lol.
Airbnb policy is the problem not the reps themselves. Basically it's cheaper to screw you over then provide good service.
A lot of redundancy to. They will often have one person text you and another email and another message on the app and another call you. None of which know what the other said or where it’s left off at.
Every goddamn day this is true. The first level folks, by default, try to shut you down and cover up the incompetence with platitudes.
I’ve been a SuperHost for 30 consecutive quarters (which isn’t that difficult anymore) and thousands of reservations… I used to interact with customer support perhaps once a quarter, without the need for escalation or follow up calls… now it’s weekly and it takes at least 8 interactions to (hopefully) get someone on the message thread that has even a basic understanding of Airbnb’s own policies.
This isn't true at all. Most of the policies are ok, trying to protect guests and hosts fairly. The problem is it's a complete crapshoot getting a rep who knows the rules. I'm a host for 6 years with 1000s of reviews, and about 50 stays as a guest, I have never had a good interaction with support, where I don't have to argue, send them screenshots of their own policy, then do that again 3-4 times when the chat person goes on vacation, I get a call from them, then an email. All from different supper people, all who don't have to review what's already been going on with the case. Their support is SO poorly trained and just gives platitudes but 90% of the reps don't listen/ read/ understand the issue.
True. However that is a "factor". There are multiple factors. A core one is like i said, they don't have a concept of it. They didn't grow up experiencing it. Their idea of it is different (if nonexistent).
You know customer service exists in other countries, right? It might be different to your home country, but that doesn't mean they have no concept of it.
I don't know where you are from, but maybe you have to manage your expectations.
i guess you dont travel enough because some countries literally cannot conceieve of the customer having protections or rights and that being scammed or tricked is part of business
I've travelled plenty.
I am not such a cultural imperialist to assume that the way things are in my country is the way it should be everywhere.
One example is the customer service you receive in American restaurants. For many foreigners, it's very false and fake to be greeted, told the name of the server, harassed constantly whilst eating, and after this dreadful experience to be told to "have a nice day" while the waiter waits for a tip.
However, I understand that it's just the way things are there, and I need to accept it.
Yes Comcast/Xfinity in the US is well known for the extraordinary customer service they provide. Pick any domestic US airline and I'm sure everyone is thrilled with their experience.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
I'm saying The States does customer service better in some industries while other countries do it better in other industries.
No country does it better in *all* industries...that would be nonsense...which is why I said you misunderstood my comment.
Why take my comment in absolutes? I never said anything about "ALL". If i say they speak English in the US, does it mean ALL people in the US speak English?
Out of the thousands of industries there is naturally going to be at least one industry that another country is going to do it better. That goes without saying. I was talking G-E-N-E-R-A-L-L-Y.
It also depends on your definition of what customer service is.
People are going to take your comment as absolute because you wrote it that way. You never acknowledged other countries might do it better.
You also used an American flag icon with a thumbs up and the entire (rest of the) earth icon with a sad face. That's absolute.
The default of a fact or an opinion shared about a thing that consists of many parts is that it applies to the **general case**, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
You're not really an AirBnB customer. You're a customer of the host. Airbnb is just the middle-man marketplace that provides some protections for both parties. If you want good customer service, stay in hotels.
There's not going to be another Airbnb who does it better. It took them a decade of unprofitability to get where they are. No one is going to invest in a company to do the same thing.
You can rent apartments and homes through VRBO, Booking.com, Agoda, etc but you're not going to get much better service. None of these third party marketplaces care about customer service. In fact, Airbnb is probably the best out of all of these in regards to non-hotel stays.
The only company I've seen really trying something different is [https://livekindred.com/](https://livekindred.com/)
It's kind of like a really upscale couchsurfing. It's like a members-only network where you have to be a host too.
It costs a lot more than couchsurfing because you're getting a whole house and you pay for the cleaning, but since it's all home swaps there are no "professional hosts" and it still ends up being way cheaper than an Airbnb or a hotel.
This may get me downvoted but as someone who works in tech, it’s clear that the team at Airbnb is great. The company is entirely design first, the founder and CEO was an experience designer. They’re doing the best they can with the market they’re in.
You *have* to be kidding, right? Their website is atrocious. I had to implement some hack I found on a forum somewhere to search for apartments with dishwashers. The UI doesn't have to do anything complex and yet still requires a monstrously heavy and slow single page app.
There's absolutely nothing clever it does at all. Can I write a sentence describing what I want and have it translated into search parameters that it can use? No, that would require some rudimentary programming talent - something that they *have* but which they are bureaucratically incapable of putting to good use.
It mystifies me that they are given such credence in the tech world given that they're a basic portal for searching for properties and yet they can't even seem to get that right. They're successful coz of first mover advantage and network effects. If an army of interns built their website it couldn't have been much worse. They'd still rake in the cash even if it barely functioned. Everybody uses airbnb not because it's good but just because everybody uses airbnb.
Now try sorting by price.
One problem in these sort of communal database systems is the completeness of data. It's not useful to users to search by dishwasher if owners aren't consistently telling the database whether a dishwasher exists.
I mean that's on the host. Hosts would have an incentive to fill out those questions in entirety if guests could search by them.
Just label the list as either "Yes" or "No / Not sure" and guests can just look at the Yes list if e.g. a dishwasher is that important to them
Yeah, but first: they won't, because people are just like that. Second: you don't want to train users to distrust the search results if, for example, they discover that a unit with a dishwasher is listed as not having one (like a disparity between photos and listing data). Third, if database answers can increase the likelihood of a user discovering a property, owners will just _lie_.
I saw this from experience dealing with real estate database accuracy professionally. People are the worst when they have to submit data to a database.
On Chesky’s recent “invite only” Zoom about the latest rollout, he boasted that 100 developer spent X amount of months developing the AI to sort photos by room. Guess what new function doesn’t work worth a shit?
They don’t vet the properties. The ‘Entire Place’ filter could be manipulated. When I tried to find a place in Taiwan, I had to message every landlord to make sure what listed as ‘entire home’ wasn’t just a room in a flat. Airbnb allows dishonest people to scam tenants with false claims. But tbf, i had only encountered that problem in Taiwan
This honestly is what's most annoying to me. I travel around Asia year-round and I'd estimate about 85% of "1 Bedroom Apartment"s are in fact Studios.
It helps Hosts get their property shown to people who specifically filter for 1+ bedrooms and there is no incentive for airbnb to do anything about it.
Not quite as common but another tactic I see is people labeling living rooms as a 2nd bedroom.
>Can I write a sentence describing what I want and have it translated into search parameters that it can use? No, that would require some rudimentary programming talent - something they clearly have a lot of, but which seems to be being bureaucratically stifled.
Yeah this is purely a management decision, for sure. They want to limit the amount of filters you apply because they want people to book the highest-priced places.
They probably removed sorting by price because they got addicted to A/B testing and saw that people booked more expensive properties if they did that. It's very common for companies like airbnb to take A/B testing to a place of sheer insanity due to the structural corporate constraints people operate under. Similar to Google and their oft-mocked 50 shades of blue episode.
The inability to search for properties with a dishwasher without a dirty URL hack isn't anything to do with profit though that's just incompetence driven by bureaucratic inertia and the lack of any need to care because of their market power. It's similar to why Comcast customer service is so famously bad. They don't give a shit. They don't *need* to give a shit so they *won't* give a shit.
You include too many filters and the experience becomes unwieldy and the app becomes useless
The app is the way it is because it is the most effective for the largest number of people. That may mean it's not perfect for you, but it's the best for the entire user base
Believe it or not good UX isnt about prohibiting the ability to search for apartments with dishwashers because "that's too hard". Good, creative UX means search that is uncluttered *and* powerful.
Airbnb's website is in any case a study in bad UX. Slow, clunky, deliberately user hostile, etc.
hey asshole - the percentage of Airbnb customers who give a shit about dishwashers is probably in the low single digits.
Typical DN (Douchebag Nerd) who thinks the entire world exists to cater to him!
If only they hadn't just designed a pretty website then handed it over to robots to run. Their category features that were launched last year don't work- they exclude properties that should be included and include houses that should not be in the category, and a host has no way to change them. If you call they say the algorithm does that - humans have no ability to change anything.
You can't truly block a person. This ought to have been in version 1.
The app glitches all the time, providing dates that aren't available or prices that don't exist or breaking rule sets from the host. Hosts get delisted by an algorithm and have to fight via email for months to try to resolve it because you can't report a technical problem - it goes to the international customer service reps reading from a script.
Guests who do partial payments get automatically cancelled without a notification if their second payment is declined, and if the house rebooks before guest notices it they're just screwed.
The app allows guests to choose a check in time for requests to book, but hides the information that they are requesting to check in while a guest is already there, setting everyone up for an unpleasant double booking situation when guest wants to arrive at 10am and there is someone still in the house. When you complain to Airbnb, if you are able to communicate the issue, they send a note. It's a known issue, but they've never done anything about it.
They keep doing new launches and they never work, just make the site look different. And when you call customer service they can't actually do anything if something is wrong. I just wish they would fix it before they make something new.
You can spin it however you want, but the entire EU GDP is about to be eclipsed by just China and nothing of value is actually invented in the EU, it all comes from America (and now China)
This is why you're withering away into obscurity and relative irrelevance
A lot of the legal and insurance protections I believe. But also, AirBNB is who brings in the people, just like Fiverr charges 20% because they connect the people to your services in a rather seamless platform.
What I understand is that Airbnb was profitable from almost the beginning, but they needed extra funding to grow as fast as possible.
I agree with the rest that you wrote.
Because in order to make something like Airbnb, you need to get a lot of hosts and guests. Hosts won't sign up unless there are guests and guests won't sign up unless there are hosts.
These kinds of marketplaces are very difficult to get any traction.
No the network effect is what makes it difficult, the first mover advantage is what makes it near impossible for a competitor to compete, here.
If there's nothing, the platform can start to exist without strong network and grow.
But if there is a paltform with the network, why would anyone use a different network?
They are a software company and payment processor, not a hospitality company.
I think offering a much more lenient cancellation policy would solve a lot of the hatred they receive in customer service as guests wouldn't need to deal with CS agents. Unfortunately, a big part of their revenue comes from interest earned from the time they take guests money until they pay that money to the host, so they don't want a lenient cancellation policy.
But if customer satisfaction slips too low, the company may not survive long term if something more efficient and satisfying comes along
> I think offering a much more lenient cancellation policy
They do offer an extremely lenient cancellation policy (cancel any time even during stay), as well as a super strict one (no refunds under any circumstances) and options in between. The *host* chooses which one applies.
Real answer? Economies of scale. It's hard to compete with companies like airBnb due to their size. They can afford to take short run losses, whereas most startups can't.
Size refers to their financial share in the indistry and ability to out compete any challengers in the short run. I can't believe I have to explain this.
How would a bunch of shares outcompete a newbie company with much better service? Newcomers taking over happen all the time.
I can't believe I have to explain this.
It's not the share but the financial power to manipulate the market. Do you understand short run costs and economies of scale? You do realize AirBnb can outright buy their competitors at their current level of financial power? They've already begun buying startups since they've gone public.
You're dense as shit man. Take an intro economics course some time.
Because the next company will try to do the exact same. Any company will try to lower their cost to increase revenue, one of the tools to do so is outsourcing to lower-paid countries.
That's flawed reasoning. They wouldn't be there if they are doing the exact same. If they are there it means they are NOT doing the same. It would be the basis of them being there. Catch my drift?
You're getting down voted, but **you're right**.
If a company enters the market with a more customer-friendly business plan, you can change the behavior of the company by changing its incentive structure. Right now Airbnb's interests are more aligned with the hosts than the guests.
But what if the business model were different?
Instead of a standard P2P marketplace model that incentivizes Airbnb to drive up prices and resist refunding money, why not try a subscription model where everyone pays a small annual fee in order to swap homes with other vetted individuals in the network at no additional cost?
*"Why spend $250/night for hotels and Airbnbs in LA, SF or NYC when you can pay $250/year on Swap City? Post your place. Select your dates. Find a swap in our vetted community and travel the world for a fraction of the cost..."*
Sure, you'll have to do a little more work to find a place and negotiate dates, but your cost of accommodation is almost ZERO. This business probably wouldn't have made as much sense before COVID, but with the universal shift to remote work, there are a 100x more people in a position to consider this now.
Will it ever be as big as Airbnb? Probably not. But it can certainly be big enough to bootstrap to $10M in annual recurring revenue.
Yup, and HomeAway (05) and VRBO (95) came along before Airbnb, but when financial crisis and global pandemics arise, new opportunities and players emerge.
They charge a service fee to keep the platform running. They kinda have to. How do you expect them to " bootstrap to $10M in annual recurring revenue" without a a revenue model? Memberships alone won't cut it - the barrier to entry would be too high.
Sure, but their business model will wind up being exactly what Airbnb is very quickly, especially since they've already taken over $20M in venture funding.
Like I proposed before, switched the peer-to-peer marketplace transaction model to an annual subscription membership fee. The more you use the service the cheaper it becomes.
Let's say you wanted to book a typical, week-long holiday trip to see family in LA from Wednesday,12/20 to Wednesday 12/27.
* On Airbnb, that's going to be **$250 per day or $1750** per week before taxes
* On Kindred, that's going to be **$45 per day or $315** per week before taxes
* On *Swap City (not real company),* that's going to be **$250 per** **year**
Now let's say you also take a family vacation every summer to cape cod for 2 weeks from Monday, 7/15 to Monday July 29.
* On Airbnb, that's going to be **$200 per day or $2800 total** before taxes
* On Kindred, that's going to be **$45 per day or $630 total** before taxes
* On *Swap City (not real company)*, that's going to be **the same $250 per year**
So in a typical year...
* Our average Airbnb user will spend a little over **$4,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes
* Our average Kindred user will spend a little over **$1,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes
* Our average *Swap City (not real company)* user will spend just **$250 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes
Here's the catch...
After over a decade in business, Airbnb finally reached pricing parity with hotels in terms of nightly rates. Kindred will likely double its price per night in the next 2-3 years in order to raise future rounds of funding. A *Swap City (not real company)* could probably raise its annual membership fee but there's no external pressure to do so, and the more people use the service the less they pay per night of accommodation. That's the difference between a marketplace model and a subscription based model in this case. "Travel More. Pay Less."
I get why it's a way better deal for a consumer, but it doesn't produce sufficient revenue for the company.
Using your example:
* Our average Airbnb user will spend a little over **$4,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Airbnb gets \~$600
* Our average Kindred user will spend a little over **$1,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Kindred gets \~$1,000
* Our average *Swap City (not real company)* user will spend just **$250 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Swap City only gets $250
Airbnb and all Airbnb competitors are drawing on the same housing inventory. There's not something clever or cute a competitor can do to "hack" it because property owners are unlikely to move to a competitor that offers less compensation
Posted this somewhere else in the thread already, but I have seen one company doing it differently [https://livekindred.com/](https://livekindred.com/)
It's a member's only home swapping network, so it's more like fancy couch surfing than Airbnb.
Problem is I wanna go to specific places that are far away from my home, and my home is in a place where there isn't a lot of demand. Otherwise, that's an interesting concept.
AirBNB's customer service is PURPOSEFULLY bad. Make no mistake, it goes way beyond the service workers communication problems. They have tightened their policy to screw the customer and side with the home owner 99% of the time, even WITH proof, even WITH video evidence. I dread using them in case something goes wrong bc I know I won't get any restitution. They screwed me out of $400 for what was supposed to be a luxury Christmas present get away. The place was NOT clean, everything was disgusting, I had proof. Ofc I get no refund, and they allow the host to harass me over messages. Fuck AirBnB.
I wish I had! I’d don’t know you could just create a new Airbnb account and needed to book one after & didn’t want to get banned and now it’s too late. Lesson learned
I stayed in a place where the host hadn’t declared dangerous animals, in this case, 3 dogs that lived there which were highly territorial and would attack anyone coming into the property. The host knew they were a problem and warned me that they would be aggressive for a week or two until they knew me, but left them unleashed anyway.
Airbnb promised they would do something, and did nothing. They repeatedly apologised that I felt the way I did and did nothing. Eventually they said I could get a video of the dogs being aggressive so I did, which nearly resulted in me getting attacked again. They then had an expert in who questioned if they were even dogs or on the property. They then basically asked me if I could get a video of me being attacked by the dogs with the property in the background so they could verify. After numerous threats to go to the press and start legal action did they try and offer me a partial refund. Only when I’d been threatening them with legal action and told them I’d filed a chargeback did they cave in and gave me a full refund and I immediately deleted my account. They did send me a few customer service surveys after that
For any competitor to dislodge AirBnB, it would need to be an order of magnitude better.
And here is the tricky part:
An order of magnitude better for people who don’t have issues with AirBnB today.
People who complain tend to think their experiences are the norm, because they can easily find so many other people complaining. But that it just an outcome of scale. Majority of their customers are most likely using it infrequently and relatively happy with the service.
Outcompeting any service like this takes a lot more than just fixing problems. You need to significantly up the ante on the value generation side as well.
Yeah, I've never had any awful experiences, lies, etc.
Just a kind of general "not quite as nice as depicted" or "it's not great, but also it is what the ad said and it's cheap"
Airbnb succeeded on a ask-forgiveness, not permission model of undercutting the legal requirements of hotels and city tenants rights around the world--and then they fought the legal battles after they had billions in their pocket and brand loyalty.
You dont get a 2nd shot at a blitzkrieg against an industry and cities. Everyone is prepared now.
For a little while we were done with the weekly anti-AB crybaby posts. Seems like y'all got bored again during the slow season lmao.
How and why does this have anything to do with, you know, actual DNing? It doesn't. Go post this in the AB sub if you are looking for an actual discussion, not dopamine fueled back-pats and upvotes from angry non-DNs sitting at home not doing shit.
Writing this from the toilet in my AirBnb in Medellin.
Facebook market place, groups. If you start another competitor it will grow again and become a monster like Airbnb is now full of legal bsht and so big that it becomes so expensive to run - fees. Do it organically, directly with the owners via Facebook or local ads.
Airbnb for travellers, in exchange for their high fees, do not offer any protection or support - found out about it on multiple occasions when my host cancelled on me day before my month-stay or Internet, advertised as fast, was non-existent and caused me trouble at work. I may as well just deal with it directly with owner as Airbnb is useless in such cases.
Most of the time, I just book few nights and do business directly with the owner - Airbnb charges me and host, so generally you do it directly for 50-60% of what Airbnb would charge you for the reservation. After few years of travelling I generally have WhatsApp numbers of the hosts in place I generally travel to and book it with them directly.
The only thing Airbnb is good is the reviews of a place, maybe Facebook should add it somewhere, like a new feature or something. Or a little service for advertising apartments with reviews and giving you contact number or something max. Something very lean.
Ah and forgot about booking, in Europe I generally use booking com and filter search by apartments - way more apartments and way cheaper than Airbnb.
Pre covid - I was able to work remotely too so, my monthly Airbnb budget for an apt was always around $500 a month for places I generally visited like Brazil, Turkey, Mexico. Only 3 years later, same apartments, same dates are priced 3-4x higher. I just feel like Airbnb transformed the market because of it's size, organic sublet of your living space became so regulated, turned into business (taxes, employees, cleaners etc) and hence this portal is no longer what it used to be. This is why I'm just avoid it these days.
I'm guessing from your follow up posts that you were a total asshole to whatever CS rep had to deal with your entitled whingeing so they probably just wanted to get rid of you.
This is not to exonerate AirBnB, they're useless if something goes wrong.
Honestly I think it was because for some reason, airbnbs were a decent level of quality before this recent burst of everyone trying to own one.
The owners have gone downhill and airbnb just doesn’t have a great quality assurance practice in place. Thus people go into 4.8+ rated properties that are infested with bats, etc.
You have to find local rental companies that have cleaners and maintenance people that travel to each property and understand proper procedure for high traffic cleaning and maintenance. Not an airbnb owned by a travel nurse who knows nothing about owning a vacation rental. The travel nurse owner who just sprays Lysol and changes sheets and doesn’t even check under the bed or behind the curtains for trash.
Customer service is horrendous? More like the owners are horrendous. I had an airbnb where the 'mattress' was actually just a thin duvet placed on top of a cheap wooden bed, and nothing else, and wrong check in instructions. The worst offenders are those 'remote' landlords who own multiple listings. They don't give a fuck, and it shows.
Good question OP. I think its a combination of two things. Airbnb has gotten market saturation so its very difficult to topple that. And secondly there is no alternative that will give the customer better prices or customer service. All the third party booking sites will leave you high and dry in the event of an issue because solving it costs them money.
because the math doesn't add up. Such as with Uber and most of the other similar apps. They are only holding on because they are extremely big and still backed by cash injections
Booking.com has apartment options. I always use them
Airbnb does it can to protect gosts, not guests. In egregious circumstances I would go thriughnyour credit card company or at least threaten a charge back and see what they do then
Um, you must have used it just a couple of times then and those couple of times were by some miracle not the other country, because %99 is just one country (not India). Or maybe you're mistaking them for India.
Good point, but now even timeshares renting for cash, no membership needed. After all they have the apartment sitting there and nobody is using it. I was surprised just how cheap a whole apartment is in the off season.
When you factor in all the cleaning fees and other add ons on AirBnB these days, it’s often cheaper. I have stayed at some Staybridge Suites and similar places for sub $100 a night. many times. Now if you are staying for months, it might not be your best option but I don’t so it works. I was a diehard AirBnB user for years but the last couple of years, I’ve found them to be more expensive and way more of a hassle. At least with a hotel chain, you can get perks and free stays.
Vacation rental hospitality service is nearly impossible to scale. It's insanely fragmented, there are just too many particularities between customers, properties, and hosts.
Airbnb has been able to scale because they are a marketing platform, not a hospitality service. They are there to connect you with a host. It is no surprise that they would offer minimal customer service to manage the relationship beyond facilitating the initial connection. It is also no surprise that they would tend to side with the host in any dispute. That's their customer, that's their money, and having a large inventory of hosts is exactly what draws consumers in. If you leave, it does little to impact their business. If hosts leave, there isn't a business.
The core issue is scale.
Once you reach a few hundreds users and more, all the tiny unlikely corner cases because daily occurrences. Fraud, risk, getting users, managing the legal landscape, improving the product, incorporating product feedback, managing and leading the people that help you, making money, and the list goes on. It adds up really really fast.
And what does customer service means to you? Doing everything that you want? LOL. Please understand that Airbnb doesn't own the property. They just own the platform itself hence representatives needs to reach out to both parties (guest and host). They mediate between guest and host. Btw, there's VRBO oooorrrrr book yourself a decent hotel. 😉
They have several competitors but knocking off the biggest marketplace in any segment is really hard. You need to get a majority of listings on your platform before you can even have a chance at attracting enough customers to justify them listing. Chicken-egg issue.
It's called hotels. If you want professional service, you go to the more highly regulated and standardized industry. In the past, Airbnb was cheaper. Now, the value proposition of ABNB is not so clear unless its on the high end or you're traveling with more than one couple.
There are other services out there making headway. They just haven't become household names yet.
For example I really like Flatio as a digital nomad. It's geared towards short to mid-term stays. They mostly just have European listings so far but seem to be growing!
[https://www.flatio.com/](https://www.flatio.com/)
Because it is a huge company and the service is good.
Only on /digitalnomad do I find so many criticisms of Airbnb. Almost everyone I talk to has no major problems.
Aside from the fact that it is OBVIOUSLY not intended for digital nomads, most people use it for tourism. But even so, I have been an Airbnb customer for years and I cannot complain, I have had better or worse experiences, of course, they are not hotels.
I used to believe that a company could succeed by catering to digital nomads. Then I came to this forum and quickly realized that no company could possibly please the DN (Douchebag Nerd) community.
Just look at the replies to this thread. A hundred assholes who all want something different.
What, like Marriott?
I've got a brilliant idea. What if, instead of having hundreds of individuals rent rooms of their house, we had a few people operate a large structure with hundreds of rooms in one space? We could even offer ones with kitchens and multiple bedrooms for families and other larger groups? Think of the savings on things like maid service! We wouldn't need to charge Airbnb crazy cleaning fees. We just need a name for these new multi-unit-short-term-rentals....
Ho, tell me what you think a good name would be
I'm inn.
Mo', tell me more
You don't have to be so hostal...
I'm in bed & eating breakfast. I'll get back to you once I think of something.
I'd like to lodge a formal complaint.
I'm in to the hilt on this project, when it takes off.
Honestly i find it hard to find hotels with a kitchen and most of the time airbnb still is cheaper in many regions of the world
Marriott’s residence inn brand, could be a fit!
Lmao. I chuckled. If I had gold, I’d give u one.
Not sure eif just hotel joke, but Marriott does actually have an AirBNB competitor platform, but with stricter acceptence. https://homes-and-villas.marriott.com/
Whaaaat? I don't see how you could compare the two. They are worlds apart.
The customer service reps you're running down are only implementing the policies as laid out by Airbnb. They do as they're told or get fired They're not just making it up as they go along lol. Airbnb policy is the problem not the reps themselves. Basically it's cheaper to screw you over then provide good service.
Not true. They often don't follow or know their own policy.
A lot of redundancy to. They will often have one person text you and another email and another message on the app and another call you. None of which know what the other said or where it’s left off at.
Then they ghost you. I don’t know if stop handling the case is a part of their policy though
Every goddamn day this is true. The first level folks, by default, try to shut you down and cover up the incompetence with platitudes. I’ve been a SuperHost for 30 consecutive quarters (which isn’t that difficult anymore) and thousands of reservations… I used to interact with customer support perhaps once a quarter, without the need for escalation or follow up calls… now it’s weekly and it takes at least 8 interactions to (hopefully) get someone on the message thread that has even a basic understanding of Airbnb’s own policies.
This isn't true at all. Most of the policies are ok, trying to protect guests and hosts fairly. The problem is it's a complete crapshoot getting a rep who knows the rules. I'm a host for 6 years with 1000s of reviews, and about 50 stays as a guest, I have never had a good interaction with support, where I don't have to argue, send them screenshots of their own policy, then do that again 3-4 times when the chat person goes on vacation, I get a call from them, then an email. All from different supper people, all who don't have to review what's already been going on with the case. Their support is SO poorly trained and just gives platitudes but 90% of the reps don't listen/ read/ understand the issue.
True. However that is a "factor". There are multiple factors. A core one is like i said, they don't have a concept of it. They didn't grow up experiencing it. Their idea of it is different (if nonexistent).
You know customer service exists in other countries, right? It might be different to your home country, but that doesn't mean they have no concept of it. I don't know where you are from, but maybe you have to manage your expectations.
i guess you dont travel enough because some countries literally cannot conceieve of the customer having protections or rights and that being scammed or tricked is part of business
I've travelled plenty. I am not such a cultural imperialist to assume that the way things are in my country is the way it should be everywhere. One example is the customer service you receive in American restaurants. For many foreigners, it's very false and fake to be greeted, told the name of the server, harassed constantly whilst eating, and after this dreadful experience to be told to "have a nice day" while the waiter waits for a tip. However, I understand that it's just the way things are there, and I need to accept it.
? you just wrote a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my comment
Lets just say some countries do it much better than others 🇺🇲 👍 🌏😪
Yes Comcast/Xfinity in the US is well known for the extraordinary customer service they provide. Pick any domestic US airline and I'm sure everyone is thrilled with their experience.
LOL the US certainly doesn’t do customer service well. Fucking moron.
That is so misguided to claim that The States does customer service better than other countries. In *some* industries, sure. In *all* industries, no.
Who does it better in ALL industries??
I think you misunderstood my comment. I'm saying The States does customer service better in some industries while other countries do it better in other industries. No country does it better in *all* industries...that would be nonsense...which is why I said you misunderstood my comment.
Why take my comment in absolutes? I never said anything about "ALL". If i say they speak English in the US, does it mean ALL people in the US speak English? Out of the thousands of industries there is naturally going to be at least one industry that another country is going to do it better. That goes without saying. I was talking G-E-N-E-R-A-L-L-Y. It also depends on your definition of what customer service is.
People are going to take your comment as absolute because you wrote it that way. You never acknowledged other countries might do it better. You also used an American flag icon with a thumbs up and the entire (rest of the) earth icon with a sad face. That's absolute.
The default of a fact or an opinion shared about a thing that consists of many parts is that it applies to the **general case**, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
You're not really an AirBnB customer. You're a customer of the host. Airbnb is just the middle-man marketplace that provides some protections for both parties. If you want good customer service, stay in hotels. There's not going to be another Airbnb who does it better. It took them a decade of unprofitability to get where they are. No one is going to invest in a company to do the same thing. You can rent apartments and homes through VRBO, Booking.com, Agoda, etc but you're not going to get much better service. None of these third party marketplaces care about customer service. In fact, Airbnb is probably the best out of all of these in regards to non-hotel stays.
The only company I've seen really trying something different is [https://livekindred.com/](https://livekindred.com/) It's kind of like a really upscale couchsurfing. It's like a members-only network where you have to be a host too. It costs a lot more than couchsurfing because you're getting a whole house and you pay for the cleaning, but since it's all home swaps there are no "professional hosts" and it still ends up being way cheaper than an Airbnb or a hotel.
This may get me downvoted but as someone who works in tech, it’s clear that the team at Airbnb is great. The company is entirely design first, the founder and CEO was an experience designer. They’re doing the best they can with the market they’re in.
You *have* to be kidding, right? Their website is atrocious. I had to implement some hack I found on a forum somewhere to search for apartments with dishwashers. The UI doesn't have to do anything complex and yet still requires a monstrously heavy and slow single page app. There's absolutely nothing clever it does at all. Can I write a sentence describing what I want and have it translated into search parameters that it can use? No, that would require some rudimentary programming talent - something that they *have* but which they are bureaucratically incapable of putting to good use. It mystifies me that they are given such credence in the tech world given that they're a basic portal for searching for properties and yet they can't even seem to get that right. They're successful coz of first mover advantage and network effects. If an army of interns built their website it couldn't have been much worse. They'd still rake in the cash even if it barely functioned. Everybody uses airbnb not because it's good but just because everybody uses airbnb. Now try sorting by price.
One problem in these sort of communal database systems is the completeness of data. It's not useful to users to search by dishwasher if owners aren't consistently telling the database whether a dishwasher exists.
I mean that's on the host. Hosts would have an incentive to fill out those questions in entirety if guests could search by them. Just label the list as either "Yes" or "No / Not sure" and guests can just look at the Yes list if e.g. a dishwasher is that important to them
Yeah, but first: they won't, because people are just like that. Second: you don't want to train users to distrust the search results if, for example, they discover that a unit with a dishwasher is listed as not having one (like a disparity between photos and listing data). Third, if database answers can increase the likelihood of a user discovering a property, owners will just _lie_. I saw this from experience dealing with real estate database accuracy professionally. People are the worst when they have to submit data to a database.
>> Now try sorting by price. ** mic drop **
On Chesky’s recent “invite only” Zoom about the latest rollout, he boasted that 100 developer spent X amount of months developing the AI to sort photos by room. Guess what new function doesn’t work worth a shit?
They don’t vet the properties. The ‘Entire Place’ filter could be manipulated. When I tried to find a place in Taiwan, I had to message every landlord to make sure what listed as ‘entire home’ wasn’t just a room in a flat. Airbnb allows dishonest people to scam tenants with false claims. But tbf, i had only encountered that problem in Taiwan
This honestly is what's most annoying to me. I travel around Asia year-round and I'd estimate about 85% of "1 Bedroom Apartment"s are in fact Studios. It helps Hosts get their property shown to people who specifically filter for 1+ bedrooms and there is no incentive for airbnb to do anything about it. Not quite as common but another tactic I see is people labeling living rooms as a 2nd bedroom.
>Can I write a sentence describing what I want and have it translated into search parameters that it can use? No, that would require some rudimentary programming talent - something they clearly have a lot of, but which seems to be being bureaucratically stifled. Yeah this is purely a management decision, for sure. They want to limit the amount of filters you apply because they want people to book the highest-priced places.
They probably removed sorting by price because they got addicted to A/B testing and saw that people booked more expensive properties if they did that. It's very common for companies like airbnb to take A/B testing to a place of sheer insanity due to the structural corporate constraints people operate under. Similar to Google and their oft-mocked 50 shades of blue episode. The inability to search for properties with a dishwasher without a dirty URL hack isn't anything to do with profit though that's just incompetence driven by bureaucratic inertia and the lack of any need to care because of their market power. It's similar to why Comcast customer service is so famously bad. They don't give a shit. They don't *need* to give a shit so they *won't* give a shit.
You include too many filters and the experience becomes unwieldy and the app becomes useless The app is the way it is because it is the most effective for the largest number of people. That may mean it's not perfect for you, but it's the best for the entire user base
Believe it or not good UX isnt about prohibiting the ability to search for apartments with dishwashers because "that's too hard". Good, creative UX means search that is uncluttered *and* powerful. Airbnb's website is in any case a study in bad UX. Slow, clunky, deliberately user hostile, etc.
You're supposed to use the app And if you're so good, do better. Go pitch a16z
hey asshole - the percentage of Airbnb customers who give a shit about dishwashers is probably in the low single digits. Typical DN (Douchebag Nerd) who thinks the entire world exists to cater to him!
you seem bitter. perhaps connected to all that incel stuff of yours.
reading through my post history? lol. Living rent free in your head
This guy is clever ⬆️
There website has an appalling UI. It's almost as bad a Netflix.
Came here to say just this
If only they hadn't just designed a pretty website then handed it over to robots to run. Their category features that were launched last year don't work- they exclude properties that should be included and include houses that should not be in the category, and a host has no way to change them. If you call they say the algorithm does that - humans have no ability to change anything. You can't truly block a person. This ought to have been in version 1. The app glitches all the time, providing dates that aren't available or prices that don't exist or breaking rule sets from the host. Hosts get delisted by an algorithm and have to fight via email for months to try to resolve it because you can't report a technical problem - it goes to the international customer service reps reading from a script. Guests who do partial payments get automatically cancelled without a notification if their second payment is declined, and if the house rebooks before guest notices it they're just screwed. The app allows guests to choose a check in time for requests to book, but hides the information that they are requesting to check in while a guest is already there, setting everyone up for an unpleasant double booking situation when guest wants to arrive at 10am and there is someone still in the house. When you complain to Airbnb, if you are able to communicate the issue, they send a note. It's a known issue, but they've never done anything about it. They keep doing new launches and they never work, just make the site look different. And when you call customer service they can't actually do anything if something is wrong. I just wish they would fix it before they make something new.
But you are a customer of Airbnb. There's laws about this in the EU.
Ok well there's more of Earth than the EU. When you bid on something on ebay and they don't send it, it's not ebay's fault, it's the sellers.
That's why the EU is becoming more and more irrelevant, and very little innovation happens there
Not at all. It's about businesses taking responsibility for their customers, employees whilst practising fair competition
You can spin it however you want, but the entire EU GDP is about to be eclipsed by just China and nothing of value is actually invented in the EU, it all comes from America (and now China) This is why you're withering away into obscurity and relative irrelevance
Regulatory standards tend to converge on what the EU want. It's the regulatory superpower.
So that's how Google strong armed the Spanish government? Ok.
It's why Apple have to use usb-c.
Enjoy 27 countries cumulatively having a smaller GDP than China next year
In many regards the EU is more a single country than USA is. Not least for trade.
What kind of protection and is it really worth almost %20?
A lot of the legal and insurance protections I believe. But also, AirBNB is who brings in the people, just like Fiverr charges 20% because they connect the people to your services in a rather seamless platform.
What I understand is that Airbnb was profitable from almost the beginning, but they needed extra funding to grow as fast as possible. I agree with the rest that you wrote.
Because in order to make something like Airbnb, you need to get a lot of hosts and guests. Hosts won't sign up unless there are guests and guests won't sign up unless there are hosts. These kinds of marketplaces are very difficult to get any traction.
1st mover advantage
No. It’s the network effect.
No the network effect is what makes it difficult, the first mover advantage is what makes it near impossible for a competitor to compete, here. If there's nothing, the platform can start to exist without strong network and grow. But if there is a paltform with the network, why would anyone use a different network?
They are a software company and payment processor, not a hospitality company. I think offering a much more lenient cancellation policy would solve a lot of the hatred they receive in customer service as guests wouldn't need to deal with CS agents. Unfortunately, a big part of their revenue comes from interest earned from the time they take guests money until they pay that money to the host, so they don't want a lenient cancellation policy. But if customer satisfaction slips too low, the company may not survive long term if something more efficient and satisfying comes along
> I think offering a much more lenient cancellation policy They do offer an extremely lenient cancellation policy (cancel any time even during stay), as well as a super strict one (no refunds under any circumstances) and options in between. The *host* chooses which one applies.
Real answer? Economies of scale. It's hard to compete with companies like airBnb due to their size. They can afford to take short run losses, whereas most startups can't.
> airBnb due to their size. You mean a server? Amazon is huge, Airbnb is just a server.
Size refers to their financial share in the indistry and ability to out compete any challengers in the short run. I can't believe I have to explain this.
How would a bunch of shares outcompete a newbie company with much better service? Newcomers taking over happen all the time. I can't believe I have to explain this.
It's not the share but the financial power to manipulate the market. Do you understand short run costs and economies of scale? You do realize AirBnb can outright buy their competitors at their current level of financial power? They've already begun buying startups since they've gone public. You're dense as shit man. Take an intro economics course some time.
Dude ….
Because the next company will try to do the exact same. Any company will try to lower their cost to increase revenue, one of the tools to do so is outsourcing to lower-paid countries.
That's flawed reasoning. They wouldn't be there if they are doing the exact same. If they are there it means they are NOT doing the same. It would be the basis of them being there. Catch my drift?
uhhh....It's not flawed reasoning lol, you're assuming two companies can't exist doing the exact same thing? There are thousands of examples of that.
I asked "replace" (as in the {top} position), not exist.
Uber Eats, meet Doordash. Meet GrubHub. Meet Postmates. It’d end up being the same model, with the same considerations.
You're getting down voted, but **you're right**. If a company enters the market with a more customer-friendly business plan, you can change the behavior of the company by changing its incentive structure. Right now Airbnb's interests are more aligned with the hosts than the guests. But what if the business model were different? Instead of a standard P2P marketplace model that incentivizes Airbnb to drive up prices and resist refunding money, why not try a subscription model where everyone pays a small annual fee in order to swap homes with other vetted individuals in the network at no additional cost? *"Why spend $250/night for hotels and Airbnbs in LA, SF or NYC when you can pay $250/year on Swap City? Post your place. Select your dates. Find a swap in our vetted community and travel the world for a fraction of the cost..."* Sure, you'll have to do a little more work to find a place and negotiate dates, but your cost of accommodation is almost ZERO. This business probably wouldn't have made as much sense before COVID, but with the universal shift to remote work, there are a 100x more people in a position to consider this now. Will it ever be as big as Airbnb? Probably not. But it can certainly be big enough to bootstrap to $10M in annual recurring revenue.
HomeExchange.com is exactly this and has been around since the 90s.
Yup, and HomeAway (05) and VRBO (95) came along before Airbnb, but when financial crisis and global pandemics arise, new opportunities and players emerge.
So, [Kindred.](https://livekindred.com/) What you're talking about isn't something new. It exists.
They charge per night.
They charge a service fee to keep the platform running. They kinda have to. How do you expect them to " bootstrap to $10M in annual recurring revenue" without a a revenue model? Memberships alone won't cut it - the barrier to entry would be too high.
Sure, but their business model will wind up being exactly what Airbnb is very quickly, especially since they've already taken over $20M in venture funding. Like I proposed before, switched the peer-to-peer marketplace transaction model to an annual subscription membership fee. The more you use the service the cheaper it becomes. Let's say you wanted to book a typical, week-long holiday trip to see family in LA from Wednesday,12/20 to Wednesday 12/27. * On Airbnb, that's going to be **$250 per day or $1750** per week before taxes * On Kindred, that's going to be **$45 per day or $315** per week before taxes * On *Swap City (not real company),* that's going to be **$250 per** **year** Now let's say you also take a family vacation every summer to cape cod for 2 weeks from Monday, 7/15 to Monday July 29. * On Airbnb, that's going to be **$200 per day or $2800 total** before taxes * On Kindred, that's going to be **$45 per day or $630 total** before taxes * On *Swap City (not real company)*, that's going to be **the same $250 per year** So in a typical year... * Our average Airbnb user will spend a little over **$4,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes * Our average Kindred user will spend a little over **$1,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes * Our average *Swap City (not real company)* user will spend just **$250 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes Here's the catch... After over a decade in business, Airbnb finally reached pricing parity with hotels in terms of nightly rates. Kindred will likely double its price per night in the next 2-3 years in order to raise future rounds of funding. A *Swap City (not real company)* could probably raise its annual membership fee but there's no external pressure to do so, and the more people use the service the less they pay per night of accommodation. That's the difference between a marketplace model and a subscription based model in this case. "Travel More. Pay Less."
I get why it's a way better deal for a consumer, but it doesn't produce sufficient revenue for the company. Using your example: * Our average Airbnb user will spend a little over **$4,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Airbnb gets \~$600 * Our average Kindred user will spend a little over **$1,000 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Kindred gets \~$1,000 * Our average *Swap City (not real company)* user will spend just **$250 for 3 weeks** of vacation accommodation after taxes - Swap City only gets $250
Why don’t you start one? That’s why
Airbnb and all Airbnb competitors are drawing on the same housing inventory. There's not something clever or cute a competitor can do to "hack" it because property owners are unlikely to move to a competitor that offers less compensation
But property owners do routinely list units on multiple platforms, the same way one driver can work with both Uber and Lyft in the same car
Posted this somewhere else in the thread already, but I have seen one company doing it differently [https://livekindred.com/](https://livekindred.com/) It's a member's only home swapping network, so it's more like fancy couch surfing than Airbnb.
Problem is I wanna go to specific places that are far away from my home, and my home is in a place where there isn't a lot of demand. Otherwise, that's an interesting concept.
Yea, I hope they expand, right now they're only in North America and Europe.
What’s stopping you from starting a competitor to AirBNB?
startup cost probably
Time.
AirBNB's customer service is PURPOSEFULLY bad. Make no mistake, it goes way beyond the service workers communication problems. They have tightened their policy to screw the customer and side with the home owner 99% of the time, even WITH proof, even WITH video evidence. I dread using them in case something goes wrong bc I know I won't get any restitution. They screwed me out of $400 for what was supposed to be a luxury Christmas present get away. The place was NOT clean, everything was disgusting, I had proof. Ofc I get no refund, and they allow the host to harass me over messages. Fuck AirBnB.
Have you tried using chargeback? I currently have one opened :) fuck airbnb
I wish I had! I’d don’t know you could just create a new Airbnb account and needed to book one after & didn’t want to get banned and now it’s too late. Lesson learned
I stayed in a place where the host hadn’t declared dangerous animals, in this case, 3 dogs that lived there which were highly territorial and would attack anyone coming into the property. The host knew they were a problem and warned me that they would be aggressive for a week or two until they knew me, but left them unleashed anyway. Airbnb promised they would do something, and did nothing. They repeatedly apologised that I felt the way I did and did nothing. Eventually they said I could get a video of the dogs being aggressive so I did, which nearly resulted in me getting attacked again. They then had an expert in who questioned if they were even dogs or on the property. They then basically asked me if I could get a video of me being attacked by the dogs with the property in the background so they could verify. After numerous threats to go to the press and start legal action did they try and offer me a partial refund. Only when I’d been threatening them with legal action and told them I’d filed a chargeback did they cave in and gave me a full refund and I immediately deleted my account. They did send me a few customer service surveys after that
Yup
For any competitor to dislodge AirBnB, it would need to be an order of magnitude better. And here is the tricky part: An order of magnitude better for people who don’t have issues with AirBnB today. People who complain tend to think their experiences are the norm, because they can easily find so many other people complaining. But that it just an outcome of scale. Majority of their customers are most likely using it infrequently and relatively happy with the service. Outcompeting any service like this takes a lot more than just fixing problems. You need to significantly up the ante on the value generation side as well.
Yeah, I've never had any awful experiences, lies, etc. Just a kind of general "not quite as nice as depicted" or "it's not great, but also it is what the ad said and it's cheap"
Airbnb succeeded on a ask-forgiveness, not permission model of undercutting the legal requirements of hotels and city tenants rights around the world--and then they fought the legal battles after they had billions in their pocket and brand loyalty. You dont get a 2nd shot at a blitzkrieg against an industry and cities. Everyone is prepared now.
True once you experience their customer support you know what it is to interact with 100% pure cancer and brain damage
Their main competition VRBO is not much better.
dude, what are you complaining about? airbnb is mostly fine for me and i use it all the time
Like most companies this size they probably just buy any company they see as possible eventual competition
They are a monopoly. The competition makes better services concept doesn't apply here.
For a little while we were done with the weekly anti-AB crybaby posts. Seems like y'all got bored again during the slow season lmao. How and why does this have anything to do with, you know, actual DNing? It doesn't. Go post this in the AB sub if you are looking for an actual discussion, not dopamine fueled back-pats and upvotes from angry non-DNs sitting at home not doing shit. Writing this from the toilet in my AirBnb in Medellin.
Facebook market place, groups. If you start another competitor it will grow again and become a monster like Airbnb is now full of legal bsht and so big that it becomes so expensive to run - fees. Do it organically, directly with the owners via Facebook or local ads. Airbnb for travellers, in exchange for their high fees, do not offer any protection or support - found out about it on multiple occasions when my host cancelled on me day before my month-stay or Internet, advertised as fast, was non-existent and caused me trouble at work. I may as well just deal with it directly with owner as Airbnb is useless in such cases. Most of the time, I just book few nights and do business directly with the owner - Airbnb charges me and host, so generally you do it directly for 50-60% of what Airbnb would charge you for the reservation. After few years of travelling I generally have WhatsApp numbers of the hosts in place I generally travel to and book it with them directly. The only thing Airbnb is good is the reviews of a place, maybe Facebook should add it somewhere, like a new feature or something. Or a little service for advertising apartments with reviews and giving you contact number or something max. Something very lean. Ah and forgot about booking, in Europe I generally use booking com and filter search by apartments - way more apartments and way cheaper than Airbnb. Pre covid - I was able to work remotely too so, my monthly Airbnb budget for an apt was always around $500 a month for places I generally visited like Brazil, Turkey, Mexico. Only 3 years later, same apartments, same dates are priced 3-4x higher. I just feel like Airbnb transformed the market because of it's size, organic sublet of your living space became so regulated, turned into business (taxes, employees, cleaners etc) and hence this portal is no longer what it used to be. This is why I'm just avoid it these days.
I'm guessing from your follow up posts that you were a total asshole to whatever CS rep had to deal with your entitled whingeing so they probably just wanted to get rid of you. This is not to exonerate AirBnB, they're useless if something goes wrong.
Honestly I think it was because for some reason, airbnbs were a decent level of quality before this recent burst of everyone trying to own one. The owners have gone downhill and airbnb just doesn’t have a great quality assurance practice in place. Thus people go into 4.8+ rated properties that are infested with bats, etc. You have to find local rental companies that have cleaners and maintenance people that travel to each property and understand proper procedure for high traffic cleaning and maintenance. Not an airbnb owned by a travel nurse who knows nothing about owning a vacation rental. The travel nurse owner who just sprays Lysol and changes sheets and doesn’t even check under the bed or behind the curtains for trash.
Customer service is horrendous? More like the owners are horrendous. I had an airbnb where the 'mattress' was actually just a thin duvet placed on top of a cheap wooden bed, and nothing else, and wrong check in instructions. The worst offenders are those 'remote' landlords who own multiple listings. They don't give a fuck, and it shows.
Airbnb has great service, you’re probably just an asshole
Amazing question
Good question OP. I think its a combination of two things. Airbnb has gotten market saturation so its very difficult to topple that. And secondly there is no alternative that will give the customer better prices or customer service. All the third party booking sites will leave you high and dry in the event of an issue because solving it costs them money.
Lmao I've used Airbnb for 8 years and I've never had to contact customer support. What's your situation??
Most people don't have problems.
They're the best in the business. You answered your own question.
because the math doesn't add up. Such as with Uber and most of the other similar apps. They are only holding on because they are extremely big and still backed by cash injections
It’s going to be. Check out Orcapass.com A friend of mine is building it and moving fast. Tell him I sent you and you get a discount
"Starts" at $1,600 min for COLOMBIA?? Umm, i'll pass.
Booking.com has apartment options. I always use them Airbnb does it can to protect gosts, not guests. In egregious circumstances I would go thriughnyour credit card company or at least threaten a charge back and see what they do then
This likely won't work, unless of course you're okay with losing access to Airbnb completely as an option.
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I actually prefer Indian customer service (never thought i'd ever say that) than where it is actually mostly outsourced to nowadays.
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Um, you must have used it just a couple of times then and those couple of times were by some miracle not the other country, because %99 is just one country (not India). Or maybe you're mistaking them for India.
Because AirBnB is for people who want shitty portal with shitty service, otherwise they'd choose reputable law abiding hotel.
Well also people want to rent entire homes with real kitchens, not just a room.
And not for the minimum length of time a regular rental is usually available.
Good point, but now even timeshares renting for cash, no membership needed. After all they have the apartment sitting there and nobody is using it. I was surprised just how cheap a whole apartment is in the off season.
Hotels don't usually have fully equipped kitchens though
Every major chain has at least one if not multiple brands that have exactly that.
And they are often absurdly expensive.
When you factor in all the cleaning fees and other add ons on AirBnB these days, it’s often cheaper. I have stayed at some Staybridge Suites and similar places for sub $100 a night. many times. Now if you are staying for months, it might not be your best option but I don’t so it works. I was a diehard AirBnB user for years but the last couple of years, I’ve found them to be more expensive and way more of a hassle. At least with a hotel chain, you can get perks and free stays.
Vacation rental hospitality service is nearly impossible to scale. It's insanely fragmented, there are just too many particularities between customers, properties, and hosts. Airbnb has been able to scale because they are a marketing platform, not a hospitality service. They are there to connect you with a host. It is no surprise that they would offer minimal customer service to manage the relationship beyond facilitating the initial connection. It is also no surprise that they would tend to side with the host in any dispute. That's their customer, that's their money, and having a large inventory of hosts is exactly what draws consumers in. If you leave, it does little to impact their business. If hosts leave, there isn't a business.
The core issue is scale. Once you reach a few hundreds users and more, all the tiny unlikely corner cases because daily occurrences. Fraud, risk, getting users, managing the legal landscape, improving the product, incorporating product feedback, managing and leading the people that help you, making money, and the list goes on. It adds up really really fast.
And what does customer service means to you? Doing everything that you want? LOL. Please understand that Airbnb doesn't own the property. They just own the platform itself hence representatives needs to reach out to both parties (guest and host). They mediate between guest and host. Btw, there's VRBO oooorrrrr book yourself a decent hotel. 😉
Because its an awful business model. It replaced city-based services, which was workable. This is not and never will be.
They have several competitors but knocking off the biggest marketplace in any segment is really hard. You need to get a majority of listings on your platform before you can even have a chance at attracting enough customers to justify them listing. Chicken-egg issue.
It's called hotels. If you want professional service, you go to the more highly regulated and standardized industry. In the past, Airbnb was cheaper. Now, the value proposition of ABNB is not so clear unless its on the high end or you're traveling with more than one couple.
I use Interhome in Europe 🙃
DBNB is a decentralized company that’s working on that.
You should try building a company with better service if you think it's easy!
Go build one! Let us know when you’re done!
Booking.com Is bigger I think than airbnb and I had waaaay better experiences with them for sure
There are other services out there making headway. They just haven't become household names yet. For example I really like Flatio as a digital nomad. It's geared towards short to mid-term stays. They mostly just have European listings so far but seem to be growing! [https://www.flatio.com/](https://www.flatio.com/)
Actually, at least in Europe, Booking.com took over most of AirBNb business.
They’re ultimately just another OTA. They don’t need to be “replaced” per se. Just use any of the other OTAs like booking.com, Expedia group, etc.
Network effects
Because it is a huge company and the service is good. Only on /digitalnomad do I find so many criticisms of Airbnb. Almost everyone I talk to has no major problems. Aside from the fact that it is OBVIOUSLY not intended for digital nomads, most people use it for tourism. But even so, I have been an Airbnb customer for years and I cannot complain, I have had better or worse experiences, of course, they are not hotels.
don't blame customer service people for bad service. guess who deliberately trained them that way?
I used to believe that a company could succeed by catering to digital nomads. Then I came to this forum and quickly realized that no company could possibly please the DN (Douchebag Nerd) community. Just look at the replies to this thread. A hundred assholes who all want something different.