I have an airbnb experience and just hired 2 people. Airbnb decided to pause my experience for no reason. Tried hitting up their support but they didn't provide a reason for the pause and a date when it would be resumed. This is why you never rely on one customer channel
It amazes me that companies like AirBnB get huge valuations and user bases when the fundamental feature of searching for listings is phenomenally atrocious.
- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).
- Inability to change pagination size.
- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.
- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.
- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.
Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.
Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.
Airbnb started strong, but it has become a minefield for travelers. Scam listings have exploded -- Airbnb admitted in 2023 that it removed nearly 60,000 fake ones, but that's only a fraction of what slips through. Investigations like one by VICE uncovered organized scams exploiting the platform for years, yet Airbnb has been slow to implement meaningful preventative measures. Meanwhile, pricing has grown increasingly deceptive: hosts tack on hefty cleaning and service fees, often doubling the advertised nightly rate. Although Airbnb recently added an option to show total prices up front, it's not the default, and hidden costs remain a major complaint.
Even more troubling are the widespread privacy violations. Thousands of guests have reported hidden cameras in their rentals -- some even found in bedrooms and bathrooms. Airbnb didn't ban indoor cameras until March 2024, after more than a decade of complaints and several high-profile criminal cases. Combined with fake photos, misleading descriptions, and little accountability for bad hosts, it's clear the trust that once defined the platform has eroded. Airbnb didn't just lose its shine -- it actively neglected the safety and transparency that made it appealing in the first place.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.
AirBnB provides an amazing service, the ability to painlessly book hotels that feel like houses.
I guarantee you they are not going to be the next Apple or Microsoft, they're instead just going to dilute the value of their core business chasing things that aren't going to work, instead of focusing on their core service, and then in so many years time they will become irrelevant rather than inevitable.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.
Because those CEO are unhappy. They want more in their life, they want everything; so that maybe then, they'll be fulfilled.
The path to success is made by many failures; and when you get to success, you can't take the success, you can't be 'done', you need more success. It's a long form of chasing the next dopamine rush.
He probably hasn't felt more alive than the week he threw everything in the blender. It's a mix of issues that starts with childhood and leads to a life of addiction for more.
On the cover of a magazine, it's an inspiring story, but deep down it's a sad human trait.
All power to him though, it sure makes for interesting stories.
Because the writing is sort of on the wall for airbnb's current business model. Local regulations are finally catching up to them, limiting new listings or applying the same taxes and fees applied to regular hotels. And airbnb's are not cheaper anymore, and many times not any more convenient than a hotel, due crappy hosts and their excessive fees and regulations.
Airbnb is still a great option if the location is under served by normal hotels, or if you are traveling with families so you want to have a kitchen/amenities. But otherwise I almost exclusively book hotels now.
I will always love AirBnB for driving down prices by breaking the hotel cartels in major cities.
Over 10 years ago I rented a folding couch right off of Pearl ST. Boulder, CO.
I stayed in the living room of someones 1 bedroom apartment for $300 a night instead of 1k+ a night for the equivalent at what amounted to a travel lodge motel. The prices there were out of control, no inventory, just awful.
There are "plausible deniability" cartels everywhere, it's and it's always nice to see their grip on a region drop.
Can you actually? Every major city I've been to in the past five years is pretty harsh on that sort of thing. I'd happily pay $300 to avoid the risks of arrest and having all my stuff stolen.
Funny but couches can be pretty comfortable, and in the days of Airbnb being a monetized couchsurf, you'd at least wake up to fresh coffee
Safe place to stash your luggage is another matter, there's a dozen apps that cater to this need now too so if you are sleeping in the bus station at least you can put your baggage behind a locked door
For travel it’s just an option and always will be. Thats okay because the travel use case only hits most people once or twice a year. The future of Airbnb was and always will be using that option as entry point into your life at home. The app update and launch into these lifestyle categories are the starting point of this.
They chose to stick experiences and services as a root choice in the mobile app, not something that is attached to a booking or stay you already have. While I expect the major use case to be using these new services during a stay, the app design shows they are paving a future where you take some of what you loved about your airbnb stay back home with you.
> It is also revitalizing an unsuccessful experiment the company began in 2016: offering bespoke local activities, or what it calls “experiences.” The next stage, launch date unspecified, involves making your profile on Airbnb so robust that it’s “almost like a passport,” as Chesky puts it
> After that comes a deep immersion into AI: Inspired by his relationship with Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.
That kind of makes sense to me - Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company (except maybe Uber/Lyft)
Looking at incumbents:
Tour booking - TripAdvisor and Viator, not enough network effect
Home services - Angie's List and Thumbtack, not enough network effect
Events and concerts - Ticketmaster, enough said
Classified ads - Facebook Marketplace, enough said
Gym and fitness - Classpass, which I think is pretty good actually, but definitely going to be acquired or copied by Big Tech
Volunteer event hosting - Meetup, anyone under 40 even remember that?
Greed. Focusing on their core service doesn't let them keep drawing graphs going up and to the right. It plateaus, and we can't have that. So layoffs/enshitification will continue until stock price improves.
I think paypal is probably an example of why this is probably imposible for a publicly traded company.
Paypals revenues have been growing for ever. They basically do just one thing. But since the market in that one thing has a limit. The market can only price in a certain amount so the stock never grows.
Here is how it should work. When people go on vacation they want an Apple like experience where it all just works. That is what AirBnB needs to sell. The only other person who probably understands this is Richard Branson (and Disney)...
call it AirBnB Concierge (or even AirBnB vacations) to blend in the AmEx style angle. It's easy peasy Chesky, make it happen.
That's exactly where Airbnb's business model collapses. They don't own or run the properties. They'll never be able to offer "it all just works" at any meaningful scale.
https://archive.is/yYdut
I have an airbnb experience and just hired 2 people. Airbnb decided to pause my experience for no reason. Tried hitting up their support but they didn't provide a reason for the pause and a date when it would be resumed. This is why you never rely on one customer channel
It amazes me that companies like AirBnB get huge valuations and user bases when the fundamental feature of searching for listings is phenomenally atrocious.
- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).
- Inability to change pagination size.
- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.
- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.
- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.
Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.
Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.
Airbnb started strong, but it has become a minefield for travelers. Scam listings have exploded -- Airbnb admitted in 2023 that it removed nearly 60,000 fake ones, but that's only a fraction of what slips through. Investigations like one by VICE uncovered organized scams exploiting the platform for years, yet Airbnb has been slow to implement meaningful preventative measures. Meanwhile, pricing has grown increasingly deceptive: hosts tack on hefty cleaning and service fees, often doubling the advertised nightly rate. Although Airbnb recently added an option to show total prices up front, it's not the default, and hidden costs remain a major complaint.
Even more troubling are the widespread privacy violations. Thousands of guests have reported hidden cameras in their rentals -- some even found in bedrooms and bathrooms. Airbnb didn't ban indoor cameras until March 2024, after more than a decade of complaints and several high-profile criminal cases. Combined with fake photos, misleading descriptions, and little accountability for bad hosts, it's clear the trust that once defined the platform has eroded. Airbnb didn't just lose its shine -- it actively neglected the safety and transparency that made it appealing in the first place.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nationwide-fake-host-scam-on...
AirBnB provides an amazing service, the ability to painlessly book hotels that feel like houses.
I guarantee you they are not going to be the next Apple or Microsoft, they're instead just going to dilute the value of their core business chasing things that aren't going to work, instead of focusing on their core service, and then in so many years time they will become irrelevant rather than inevitable.
The path to success is made by many failures; and when you get to success, you can't take the success, you can't be 'done', you need more success. It's a long form of chasing the next dopamine rush.
He probably hasn't felt more alive than the week he threw everything in the blender. It's a mix of issues that starts with childhood and leads to a life of addiction for more.
On the cover of a magazine, it's an inspiring story, but deep down it's a sad human trait.
All power to him though, it sure makes for interesting stories.
Because the writing is sort of on the wall for airbnb's current business model. Local regulations are finally catching up to them, limiting new listings or applying the same taxes and fees applied to regular hotels. And airbnb's are not cheaper anymore, and many times not any more convenient than a hotel, due crappy hosts and their excessive fees and regulations.
Airbnb is still a great option if the location is under served by normal hotels, or if you are traveling with families so you want to have a kitchen/amenities. But otherwise I almost exclusively book hotels now.
I will always love AirBnB for driving down prices by breaking the hotel cartels in major cities.
Over 10 years ago I rented a folding couch right off of Pearl ST. Boulder, CO.
I stayed in the living room of someones 1 bedroom apartment for $300 a night instead of 1k+ a night for the equivalent at what amounted to a travel lodge motel. The prices there were out of control, no inventory, just awful.
There are "plausible deniability" cartels everywhere, it's and it's always nice to see their grip on a region drop.
You paid $300 to stay on a fold out couch in a strangers living room. $1000 sounds like market price for a hotel room then.
What you described is an experience I would expect using couchsurfing.com which was around long before airbnb.
Source: Have hosted couchsurfers very long ago
Was there an event? I stayed at the historic Boulderado hotel for 350/night 13 years ago when Airbnb was getting started.
You could have saved yourself $300 and slept on a bench in the central bus station for approximately the same level of accommodation.
Can you actually? Every major city I've been to in the past five years is pretty harsh on that sort of thing. I'd happily pay $300 to avoid the risks of arrest and having all my stuff stolen.
Funny but couches can be pretty comfortable, and in the days of Airbnb being a monetized couchsurf, you'd at least wake up to fresh coffee
Safe place to stash your luggage is another matter, there's a dozen apps that cater to this need now too so if you are sleeping in the bus station at least you can put your baggage behind a locked door
For travel it’s just an option and always will be. Thats okay because the travel use case only hits most people once or twice a year. The future of Airbnb was and always will be using that option as entry point into your life at home. The app update and launch into these lifestyle categories are the starting point of this.
They chose to stick experiences and services as a root choice in the mobile app, not something that is attached to a booking or stay you already have. While I expect the major use case to be using these new services during a stay, the app design shows they are paving a future where you take some of what you loved about your airbnb stay back home with you.
Compression of their enterprise value and share price, governed by TAM. The transition from growth company to boring incumbent.
TLDR
> It is also revitalizing an unsuccessful experiment the company began in 2016: offering bespoke local activities, or what it calls “experiences.” The next stage, launch date unspecified, involves making your profile on Airbnb so robust that it’s “almost like a passport,” as Chesky puts it
> After that comes a deep immersion into AI: Inspired by his relationship with Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.
That kind of makes sense to me - Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company (except maybe Uber/Lyft)
Looking at incumbents:
Tour booking - TripAdvisor and Viator, not enough network effect
Home services - Angie's List and Thumbtack, not enough network effect
Events and concerts - Ticketmaster, enough said
Classified ads - Facebook Marketplace, enough said
Gym and fitness - Classpass, which I think is pretty good actually, but definitely going to be acquired or copied by Big Tech
Volunteer event hosting - Meetup, anyone under 40 even remember that?
Luma is on it's way to being the new meetup
Because when companies stick to their core values, you end up with Yelp
Greed. Focusing on their core service doesn't let them keep drawing graphs going up and to the right. It plateaus, and we can't have that. So layoffs/enshitification will continue until stock price improves.
I think paypal is probably an example of why this is probably imposible for a publicly traded company.
Paypals revenues have been growing for ever. They basically do just one thing. But since the market in that one thing has a limit. The market can only price in a certain amount so the stock never grows.
So they look for growth else where
Here is how it should work. When people go on vacation they want an Apple like experience where it all just works. That is what AirBnB needs to sell. The only other person who probably understands this is Richard Branson (and Disney)... call it AirBnB Concierge (or even AirBnB vacations) to blend in the AmEx style angle. It's easy peasy Chesky, make it happen.
That's exactly where Airbnb's business model collapses. They don't own or run the properties. They'll never be able to offer "it all just works" at any meaningful scale.