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I’ve lived in Airbnbs full-time for the last two years. While the existence of the service has enabled a fun lifestyle for me, my opinion of the company has fal

I’ve lived in Airbnbs full-time for the last two years. While the existence of the service has enabled a fun lifestyle for me, my opinion of the company has fallen and fallen over that time: * I’ve paid them tens of thousands of dollars in service fees. Yet the customer service experience is on par with an airline or cable company. Getting bounced from person to person every hour, having to explain the situation a dozen times (really, a dozen), and in the end they rarely help me. * Easily 90% of listings contain some kind of misrepresentation. Probably half it’s something egregious. Airbnb doesn’t seem to care. Hopefully they’re trying to turn the ship here. We’ll see.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
Agreed, I haven't lived in them full-time but I use the service quite a lot and have spent many many months in Airbnbs and definitely think it'd be a great idea if they had some sort of preferred service in the same way airlines do for frequent fliers that gave additional support. I luckily haven't had the same issue with you on the scale of misrepresentation for listings but agreed that many of them at least leave things out that would have been desirable to know (e.g. one in Armenia I stayed in was great, but while it technically had an elevator it looked pre-Soviet and liable to plummet to the bottom of the shaft at any minute, not to mention the rats in the trash room).
dominotw 4y ago
They use a 'dark pattern' where they don't really make clear how much you are actually paying for night till you are on the checkout page. Lots of hosts use this pattern and make their listing real cheap buck tack on a huge 'cleaning fee' and there are whole bunch of local taxes, service fees ect which you only know at the end. They count on people to just go through with checkout since they spent a whole bunch of time to get through that point. Compare this with kayak which shows you final price right on the search screen. And then there is a problem with reviews where a guest is not really motivated to write a bad review even if they have a bad experience because people are usually conflict avoidant. So almost all airbnbs have positive reviews 4.9 review average making the whole review section useless. Also, there is no way for user to sort reviews in ascending order of star rating.
- owlninja 4y ago
  The cleaning fee and service fee is under the rate off to the right, and it lists your total before taxes.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Currently, it's hidden in a collapsible widget, not in the main view. Ideally, cleaning fees and similar shouldn't be allowed - they're a cost of doing business and should be rolled into the nightly. Heck, taxes too for that matter - no reason they need to be hidden from the main view.
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    The point is that the total should be what is shown in search. As it is, search is meaningless.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    The fees should be included in the list price. Instead you have to open each listing in order to compare real prices, which disadvantages hosts who don't play games with the fees. The last time I stayed at an Airbnb we found a host with reasonable fees, but they were buried under a bunch of "cheaper" listings that were all actually $100+ more expensive. The way things are is bad for guests and bad for honest hosts.
    - enos_feedler 4y ago
      It makes sense for the user to have this feature. The ticketing app Gametime has a settings flag that says "all in pricing" and it's so much better when turned it. It keeps me off of other platforms like ticketmaster. I guess the problem here is: who are they competing against? There are a few reasons to keep it the way it is: Airbnb is probably aspirational about its userbase: they don't want people to choose based on price comparison, it's more about the unique space. Or maybe this even speaks to actual measured user behavior. Airbnb invests a lot in data science so I would assume they have either tested this or have data to show the performance impact of such a change. They also might want to one day reduce or eliminate such fees using a membership program of some kind. So a perk of this membership would effectively be "all in pricing"
boringg 4y ago
They won't ever fund their customer service operations to a high level in that you get great client care across the board. It costs them too much money. The best you could hope for is some kind of tiered class care.
- joshuajill 4y ago
  Good luck. Only for VIP's.
alistairSH 4y ago
Curious, where have you been staying with the egregious misrepresentation? What sorts of things were false? We've used Airbnb about 2x/year for a while now and the worst we've had is a house that's a bit dirty (but never to the point we'd leave). But, most of our stays are rural, smaller towns, or western Europe, so maybe it's a location thing? I dislike the pricing visibility (fees and taxes only shown later, and sometimes the feed are astronomical). That's probably my biggest gripe with the platform.
- doix 4y ago
  > Curious, where have you been staying with the egregious misrepresentation? What sorts of things were false? The biggest offender I've seen is a "Dedicated workspace". Everyone seems to just tick that box, and it never really exists. I can see from the photos that it doesn't exist, but it makes searching really annoying. I stopped ticking it, because it just filters out otherwise acceptable places. I've also seen people tick stuff like gyms/pools when really they mean a commercial one is available a short walk away. What counts as a 'kitchen' is pretty debatable as well, I've seen places with only a microwave tick that box. I don't mind all these things, I know what to expect judging from the photos. I just wished there was some penalty for doing that to make filtering easier. In the current state, the filters are pretty useless (in my experience). Cleaning fees for dirty places also feels pretty bad. I don't mind paying the fee if the place is actually clean, but it seems people just set it to make extra money. I've had hosts ask me to take out the trash and put the bed sheets in the washing machine whilst also asking for $100 cleaning fees. I don't actually mind cleaning the place myself (if there's a vacuum/mop and washing machine), but charging for it and not providing it really rubs me the wrong way.
  - golergka 4y ago
    > The biggest offender I've seen is a "Dedicated workspace". Everyone seems to just tick that box, and it never really exists. Different people seem to have different understanding of what it means. To some, it implicitly means a separate room; to others, any table and chair are a workspace.
agloeregrets 4y ago
> * Easily 90% of listings contain some kind of misrepresentation. Probably half it’s something egregious. Airbnb doesn’t seem to care. This. We stayed in Philly and got a nice looking AirBNB. What wasnt mentioned was that the nice pictures were of the owner's kitchen that is shared with their family room and that the room reserved for us in a 'private apt' was just a room off to the side with a glass door and a camera pointed at the door.
robofanatic 4y ago
Wonder how human support scaling is done for a business with potentially millions of customers
- mh- 4y ago
  It was done just fine for decades by all manner of businesses...
  - mrgordon 4y ago
    Comcast, AT&T, the DMV… I can think of a lot of businesses that struggle with customer service
shiftpgdn 4y ago
Airbnb could EASILY fix the issues by two tiering their market place and having a HUMAN BEING validate listings and holding hosts to a very strict set of standards. Unverified listings could be in the tier two marketplace. The problem would sort itself out.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  I don't believe they would do that. They know we know there are both honest and dishonest hosts, but they prefer that it is us who take the risk. Based on the reviews, apparently.
  - joshuajill 4y ago
    They have underpaid, undertrained human beings.
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    That behavior is going to drive their company to ruin as they slowly poison their own well with bad experiences.
    - alexashka 4y ago
      That's not what happens when you're a monopoly. What happens is the people just eat it. You can see it more clearly in politics. Does anyone think politicians have the people's interest at heart? The answer is it doesn't matter, because people have proven that they'll just eat it, for decades.
      - shoulderfake 4y ago
        Its not a monopoly at all. In europe booking.com is more prevalent and for example florida rentals most ppl use vrbo
        alexashka 4y ago
loceng 4y ago
They're optimizing for profits and not allowing a buffer of higher costs in the short term for support, which would support higher profits in the long-term by maintaining a good relationship with people in the present. It's an externalized or delayed cost they don't seem to be accounting for. I think a competitor will pop up before they fix themselves, just the right conditions have to occur and Airbnb's market share will quickly sink - they likely will have exited and dumped the risk and unsustainable platform onto the general public by that point though.
ravedave5 4y ago
Same experience I had constantly misrepresented, especially internet/quality of A/C which are not minor things.
- mh- 4y ago
  Air conditioning is my pet peeve. Surprised I didn't see more mentions of it. Book a large-ish house that says it has A/C. What it really has is a single small window unit in one of the bedrooms.
yeputons 4y ago
On the other hand, it's still the only website I know of where one can find and pay for a short/mid-term apartment online in lots of countries. Booking.com is mostly pricy hotels. Local bulletins are even cheaper, but typically have worse interfaces, awful listings, and require that you are already in the town to view the place in person.
bogomipz 4y ago
I'm curious how much time you estimate you have spent dealing with customer service per year or per month in those two years. That would be an interesting statistic given that you've been full time for two years. It's not uncommon to burn the better part of an hour with cable customer service calls with an airline or cable company. And it's hard to quantify them solely in terms of time as I think most people would rate those two businesses' customer service at the bottom of the heap in terms of experience.
mox1 4y ago
This is like the dirty secret of Airbnb. They have absolutely garbage customer service. The Reddit /r/airbnb is mostly frequented by Hosts, and there is a horror story posted there weekly. I get that people only kinda show up there to complain, but there is a theme amongst these stories. 1. Customer Service doesn't understand their own policies. Often, a host will need to read their own terms of service back to the CS rep to get some requested action (undo an instant booking, not allowing a pet, etc). 2. To get a promised refund / money owed / etc. you need to call and call and call, continue to ask the status, etc. etc. 3. Their $1 million host guarantee isn't worth anything. Their marketing on this vs the reality is comically far apart. Unless it results in bad publicity for them, they will stick very very strictly to all of the gotchas. (Claim denied, guest says it wasn't them, existing damage. Ohh you had another guest in, claim denied it could have been anyone.) The general recommendation is that as a host, you need to 100% look out for yourself and that the company does not have your back at all.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > They have absolutely garbage customer service. I'm not a customer of AirBnB; I'm the neighbour of an unhosted AirBnB flat, that is let for most of the year. They dump food-waste in my recycling bin; break the common parts, leaving me to fix the damage; come and go at all times of night; and they intimidate me if I'm unlucky enough to meet them. I'm OK with the old-style "couchsurfing" model. But the unhosted ultra-short letting model means that I don't have a neighbour, instead I live next to a glorified holiday chalet, except that a holiday chalet is usually let for a couple of weeks; this place is rarely let for more than 2 days. I want to see AirBnB banned from the city I live in.
  - soperj 4y ago
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      Yes, it's a damn shame those last guests were such party animals that they wrecked the entire place...
estensen 4y ago
I've stayed in multiple Airbnbs avg 6 weeks since January. The first one had mold everywhere. Took two weeks to get refunded by Airbnb. Talked with like 10 customer service people. Customer service found alternatives that was 50% more expensive, but we couldn't afford that, so had to book something not-so-great ourselves. Got a small coupon as compensation.
nikanj 4y ago
You've actually managed to reach people at AirBnB? And not just one, but enough to get bounced from person to person? That's better than my track record..
dominotw 4y ago
I cut my reservation short according to host's cancellation policy. Host wrote a review on my page that I was racist to her. I never even met the said host or anyone at the airbnb. WTF. I explained this to airbnb but they said they have policy that reviews cannot be be removed/modified. So now I have that on my reviews. Great!
bradly 4y ago
Check Vrbo for the same listing before booking on Airbnb. We have vacation rentals on both and we need to charge more on Airbnb to cover our their extra fees and charges.
kbos87 4y ago
100% agree with you that the fees are really substantial when you start to pay attention to them. I guess when you are invested in a particular property and already dropping $2,000, it's easy for them to tack on another $400 without a lot of people questioning it. On your second point, I think a lot of this has to do with the price point you are renting at. My experience - I'm usually staying with a group of people at a relatively expensive property as a vacation/splurge, and I've never had anything less than a 5 star stay. I'm pretty choosy in reading reviews (but don't expect someones' home to be as spotless or perfect as I expect a hotel to be) - nonetheless my expectations are always met on Airbnb. On the flip side, I've seen comments like this one from guests who have been deceived or disappointed, and also chatter among Airbnb hosts renting less expensive properties complaining about the constant stream of problem guests they have. There's a particular host on TikTok I occasionally get served who talks about her hosting experience and she's constantly dealing with issues (and as a result, micromanaging her guests.) Downward spiral.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago

Agreed, I haven't lived in them full-time but I use the service quite a lot and have spent many many months in Airbnbs and definitely think it'd be a great idea if they had some sort of preferred service in the same way airlines do for frequent fliers that gave additional support. I luckily haven't had the same issue with you on the scale of misrepresentation for listings but agreed that many of them at least leave things out that would have been desirable to know (e.g. one in Armenia I stayed in was great, but while it technically had an elevator it looked pre-Soviet and liable to plummet to the bottom of the shaft at any minute, not to mention the rats in the trash room).

dominotw 4y ago

They use a 'dark pattern' where they don't really make clear how much you are actually paying for night till you are on the checkout page. Lots of hosts use this pattern and make their listing real cheap buck tack on a huge 'cleaning fee' and there are whole bunch of local taxes, service fees ect which you only know at the end. They count on people to just go through with checkout since they spent a whole bunch of time to get through that point. Compare this with kayak which shows you final price right on the search screen. And then there is a problem with reviews where a guest is not really motivated to write a bad review even if they have a bad experience because people are usually conflict avoidant. So almost all airbnbs have positive reviews 4.9 review average making the whole review section useless. Also, there is no way for user to sort reviews in ascending order of star rating.

owlninja 4y ago
The cleaning fee and service fee is under the rate off to the right, and it lists your total before taxes.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Currently, it's hidden in a collapsible widget, not in the main view. Ideally, cleaning fees and similar shouldn't be allowed - they're a cost of doing business and should be rolled into the nightly. Heck, taxes too for that matter - no reason they need to be hidden from the main view.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  The point is that the total should be what is shown in search. As it is, search is meaningless.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The fees should be included in the list price. Instead you have to open each listing in order to compare real prices, which disadvantages hosts who don't play games with the fees. The last time I stayed at an Airbnb we found a host with reasonable fees, but they were buried under a bunch of "cheaper" listings that were all actually $100+ more expensive. The way things are is bad for guests and bad for honest hosts.
  - enos_feedler 4y ago
    It makes sense for the user to have this feature. The ticketing app Gametime has a settings flag that says "all in pricing" and it's so much better when turned it. It keeps me off of other platforms like ticketmaster. I guess the problem here is: who are they competing against? There are a few reasons to keep it the way it is: Airbnb is probably aspirational about its userbase: they don't want people to choose based on price comparison, it's more about the unique space. Or maybe this even speaks to actual measured user behavior. Airbnb invests a lot in data science so I would assume they have either tested this or have data to show the performance impact of such a change. They also might want to one day reduce or eliminate such fees using a membership program of some kind. So a perk of this membership would effectively be "all in pricing"

boringg 4y ago

They won't ever fund their customer service operations to a high level in that you get great client care across the board. It costs them too much money. The best you could hope for is some kind of tiered class care.

joshuajill 4y ago
Good luck. Only for VIP's.

alistairSH 4y ago

Curious, where have you been staying with the egregious misrepresentation? What sorts of things were false? We've used Airbnb about 2x/year for a while now and the worst we've had is a house that's a bit dirty (but never to the point we'd leave). But, most of our stays are rural, smaller towns, or western Europe, so maybe it's a location thing? I dislike the pricing visibility (fees and taxes only shown later, and sometimes the feed are astronomical). That's probably my biggest gripe with the platform.

doix 4y ago
> Curious, where have you been staying with the egregious misrepresentation? What sorts of things were false? The biggest offender I've seen is a "Dedicated workspace". Everyone seems to just tick that box, and it never really exists. I can see from the photos that it doesn't exist, but it makes searching really annoying. I stopped ticking it, because it just filters out otherwise acceptable places. I've also seen people tick stuff like gyms/pools when really they mean a commercial one is available a short walk away. What counts as a 'kitchen' is pretty debatable as well, I've seen places with only a microwave tick that box. I don't mind all these things, I know what to expect judging from the photos. I just wished there was some penalty for doing that to make filtering easier. In the current state, the filters are pretty useless (in my experience). Cleaning fees for dirty places also feels pretty bad. I don't mind paying the fee if the place is actually clean, but it seems people just set it to make extra money. I've had hosts ask me to take out the trash and put the bed sheets in the washing machine whilst also asking for $100 cleaning fees. I don't actually mind cleaning the place myself (if there's a vacuum/mop and washing machine), but charging for it and not providing it really rubs me the wrong way.
- golergka 4y ago
  > The biggest offender I've seen is a "Dedicated workspace". Everyone seems to just tick that box, and it never really exists. Different people seem to have different understanding of what it means. To some, it implicitly means a separate room; to others, any table and chair are a workspace.

agloeregrets 4y ago

> * Easily 90% of listings contain some kind of misrepresentation. Probably half it’s something egregious. Airbnb doesn’t seem to care. This. We stayed in Philly and got a nice looking AirBNB. What wasnt mentioned was that the nice pictures were of the owner's kitchen that is shared with their family room and that the room reserved for us in a 'private apt' was just a room off to the side with a glass door and a camera pointed at the door.

robofanatic 4y ago

Wonder how human support scaling is done for a business with potentially millions of customers

mh- 4y ago
It was done just fine for decades by all manner of businesses...
- mrgordon 4y ago
  Comcast, AT&T, the DMV… I can think of a lot of businesses that struggle with customer service

shiftpgdn 4y ago

Airbnb could EASILY fix the issues by two tiering their market place and having a HUMAN BEING validate listings and holding hosts to a very strict set of standards. Unverified listings could be in the tier two marketplace. The problem would sort itself out.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I don't believe they would do that. They know we know there are both honest and dishonest hosts, but they prefer that it is us who take the risk. Based on the reviews, apparently.
- joshuajill 4y ago
  They have underpaid, undertrained human beings.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  That behavior is going to drive their company to ruin as they slowly poison their own well with bad experiences.
  - alexashka 4y ago
    That's not what happens when you're a monopoly. What happens is the people just eat it. You can see it more clearly in politics. Does anyone think politicians have the people's interest at heart? The answer is it doesn't matter, because people have proven that they'll just eat it, for decades.
    - shoulderfake 4y ago
      Its not a monopoly at all. In europe booking.com is more prevalent and for example florida rentals most ppl use vrbo
      - alexashka 4y ago

loceng 4y ago

They're optimizing for profits and not allowing a buffer of higher costs in the short term for support, which would support higher profits in the long-term by maintaining a good relationship with people in the present. It's an externalized or delayed cost they don't seem to be accounting for. I think a competitor will pop up before they fix themselves, just the right conditions have to occur and Airbnb's market share will quickly sink - they likely will have exited and dumped the risk and unsustainable platform onto the general public by that point though.

ravedave5 4y ago

Same experience I had constantly misrepresented, especially internet/quality of A/C which are not minor things.

mh- 4y ago
Air conditioning is my pet peeve. Surprised I didn't see more mentions of it. Book a large-ish house that says it has A/C. What it really has is a single small window unit in one of the bedrooms.

yeputons 4y ago

On the other hand, it's still the only website I know of where one can find and pay for a short/mid-term apartment online in lots of countries. Booking.com is mostly pricy hotels. Local bulletins are even cheaper, but typically have worse interfaces, awful listings, and require that you are already in the town to view the place in person.

bogomipz 4y ago

I'm curious how much time you estimate you have spent dealing with customer service per year or per month in those two years. That would be an interesting statistic given that you've been full time for two years. It's not uncommon to burn the better part of an hour with cable customer service calls with an airline or cable company. And it's hard to quantify them solely in terms of time as I think most people would rate those two businesses' customer service at the bottom of the heap in terms of experience.

mox1 4y ago

This is like the dirty secret of Airbnb. They have absolutely garbage customer service. The Reddit /r/airbnb is mostly frequented by Hosts, and there is a horror story posted there weekly. I get that people only kinda show up there to complain, but there is a theme amongst these stories. 1. Customer Service doesn't understand their own policies. Often, a host will need to read their own terms of service back to the CS rep to get some requested action (undo an instant booking, not allowing a pet, etc). 2. To get a promised refund / money owed / etc. you need to call and call and call, continue to ask the status, etc. etc. 3. Their $1 million host guarantee isn't worth anything. Their marketing on this vs the reality is comically far apart. Unless it results in bad publicity for them, they will stick very very strictly to all of the gotchas. (Claim denied, guest says it wasn't them, existing damage. Ohh you had another guest in, claim denied it could have been anyone.) The general recommendation is that as a host, you need to 100% look out for yourself and that the company does not have your back at all.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> They have absolutely garbage customer service. I'm not a customer of AirBnB; I'm the neighbour of an unhosted AirBnB flat, that is let for most of the year. They dump food-waste in my recycling bin; break the common parts, leaving me to fix the damage; come and go at all times of night; and they intimidate me if I'm unlucky enough to meet them. I'm OK with the old-style "couchsurfing" model. But the unhosted ultra-short letting model means that I don't have a neighbour, instead I live next to a glorified holiday chalet, except that a holiday chalet is usually let for a couple of weeks; this place is rarely let for more than 2 days. I want to see AirBnB banned from the city I live in.
- soperj 4y ago
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    Yes, it's a damn shame those last guests were such party animals that they wrecked the entire place...

estensen 4y ago

I've stayed in multiple Airbnbs avg 6 weeks since January. The first one had mold everywhere. Took two weeks to get refunded by Airbnb. Talked with like 10 customer service people. Customer service found alternatives that was 50% more expensive, but we couldn't afford that, so had to book something not-so-great ourselves. Got a small coupon as compensation.

nikanj 4y ago

You've actually managed to reach people at AirBnB? And not just one, but enough to get bounced from person to person? That's better than my track record..

dominotw 4y ago

I cut my reservation short according to host's cancellation policy. Host wrote a review on my page that I was racist to her. I never even met the said host or anyone at the airbnb. WTF. I explained this to airbnb but they said they have policy that reviews cannot be be removed/modified. So now I have that on my reviews. Great!

bradly 4y ago

Check Vrbo for the same listing before booking on Airbnb. We have vacation rentals on both and we need to charge more on Airbnb to cover our their extra fees and charges.

kbos87 4y ago

100% agree with you that the fees are really substantial when you start to pay attention to them. I guess when you are invested in a particular property and already dropping $2,000, it's easy for them to tack on another $400 without a lot of people questioning it. On your second point, I think a lot of this has to do with the price point you are renting at. My experience - I'm usually staying with a group of people at a relatively expensive property as a vacation/splurge, and I've never had anything less than a 5 star stay. I'm pretty choosy in reading reviews (but don't expect someones' home to be as spotless or perfect as I expect a hotel to be) - nonetheless my expectations are always met on Airbnb. On the flip side, I've seen comments like this one from guests who have been deceived or disappointed, and also chatter among Airbnb hosts renting less expensive properties complaining about the constant stream of problem guests they have. There's a particular host on TikTok I occasionally get served who talks about her hosting experience and she's constantly dealing with issues (and as a result, micromanaging her guests.) Downward spiral.