It's towards the bottom, but there's a good quote that shows the perfect example of when this makes sense:
> “For example, if someone is removed for a serious safety incident during an Airbnb reservation and we need to remove them and cancel their future reservations, and we then find that someone re-books the exact same future reservation with the same credit card number, we will remove the second account,” the company said.
So I can see how this is absolutely necessary in some cases, but also how there's always going to be a confusing gray area no matter where you draw the line.
It feels particularly crazy because if you travel together with a romantic partner who damages a property, and then you basically have to convince AirBNB that the two of you have broken up, and that the two of you aren't just using your account now to escape the other's ban.
I remember reading the story about Lauren Southern a few days ago, they banned her parents because they didn't like Lauren's politics (shes a very polarizing figure). I totally get bans when a guest damages property or breaks rules, but the whole reason this got kicked up in the news because that ban was just so overtly political.
They didn't ban her parents because they didn't like their daughter's politics, they likely had reason to believe Lauren attempted to circumvent her own ban by using her parents as a go-between or even through impersonating one or both of her parents (things like IPs, phone device IDs, etc can be used as signals although we all have to admit they aren't a smoking gun just hints). But due to legal risk are unable to disclose means or methods for how they did so or to comment publicly on the decision. So of course there's no way to prove this, but it would be typical of the types of systems that large tech companies' trust and safety systems use everyday. Ultimately with some situations like this they are making a judgment call and weighing brand risk if they get it wrong and retain a bad actor especially if said actor remains on the platform and does something even worse in the future VS the sort of injustice of removing a good actor due to being too careful/overly cautious. Guess which usually wins.
That's gratuitous and done for spite only. I really don't want to do business with a company that seeks revenge because of internal political activism. It's gross. Within their legal rights as it stands today, but gross nonetheless.
IIRC they banned Southern not for her politics but for being closely associated to people who had unacceptable politics, and then banned her parents for being closely associated with Southern.
"Your politics hurt my feelings so you and anyone you know is banned from using my service."
How is this reasonable to anybody? Left wingers get mad when a baker pulls this on a gay couple but apparently it's ok as long as it's against someone they don't like?
Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.
The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.
Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.
Hotels have support. You can actually walk into the hotel and speak to the manager if it comes to that.
AirBNB is a faceless website. If you're banned your recourse seems to be a support line or chat. Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
In a hotel the decisions would be made by a reasonably competent human, and can be appealed to a human if there's a problem.
In Airbnb, the decision would be made by a black-box algorithm, and appeals would be directed to an outsourced monkey who is neither given the training, nor the information, nor paid enough to give a shit, if not stonewalled directly with a canned response.
Remember that recent case where a lawyer was denied access to Madison Square Garden, because their in-house facial recognition software recognized her being an employee of a law-firm that was litigating against another subsidiary / child company of the owner of MSG Entertainment?
Between this, and that case, I can't say I'm looking forward to the future (ab)use of tech.
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart (or some subsidiary of Walmart). Or that you get checked every time you try to use their self-checkout machines.
I would prefer privatized credit scores to centrally controlled. I would prefer i was on one bad person list as opposed to the only bad person list.
This coordination already exists on some level. If you rip off a hotel they may inform their competitors and share information. Generally they don't care so much about tweets or politics as they are just trying to run a business. But if it was state controlled it runs the risk of beung used as a tool to suppress dissent or wrong think.
Large tech unicorns like social media are kind of inbetween state actors and private businesses as we have seen from the high amount of communication between state actors and these businesses
> It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
We already have a social credit score and it's privatized now. It's background checks.
From the story:
> While she does not have a criminal record, her boyfriend does, she said, telling Motherboard it was “a white collar charge,” though she did not go into specifics.
I find it a bit odd to let private companies do background checks when this really seems more of a function of government where as a society we can have input and reform the process.
In some European countries, people don't have credit scores, but when they're applying for a mortgage, they also need a collateral which costs about the same as the house or apartment they're trying to buy.
It's not right to deride their social credit scores, when we've had them for decades, in the form of actual credit scores plus criminal records plus a no-fly list.
All these new developments are just slight changes to the system at its edges, the core of it is quite similar. But our society is myopic to its own problems.
Bollocks. This isn't a social credit score, this is one company blacklisting bad clients, and doing their best to ensure said bad clients don't game the system by using someone else's account.
Yeah I don't love the potential for ubiquitous tracking and judgment, but this isn't central government, it's AirBNB -- use VRBO, or Mariott, or Days Inn instead. Most hotels have, and have had for a long time, blacklists, too.
With the number of people who strongly advocate for stealing from Walmart, with seemingly no repercussions at all, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
People love to pretend like stealing from "big companies" is some robin hood adventure where the C-Suite is going to look at the numbers at the end of the year and decide they all need to cut their annual bonus to make up for the loss. When in fact prices go up for the paying customers, and jobs that used to help everyone (attendants who help restock, locate items, etc.) get converted to more "Security" jobs, where the worker does nothing but "look mean".
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart
Society was much more liveable when that was considered common sense.
Some variant of what you're thinking about might've been possible in a small society (say, when the shop owner in a village knew all his customers, and was able to keep an eye on the troublemakers).
But in modern world it would basically mean that you might get banned from thousands of stores across the entire country because a cousin you barely know is an idiot. Or more likely, you'll just appear on the "do not serve" list without even knowing you're on in or finding out why.
So yeah, treating these two as the same thing is dishonest.
It was more livable for the more socially acceptable and/or wealthy segments of society not for the lower segments. Someone who is poor or otherwise on the margins of society is much more likely to be associated with people society considers "the wrong sort of people".
Similarly, those in the upper levels of society are discouraged from associating with the lower levels for fear of being associated with the wrong sort of people.
It would be normal for an individual known for shoplifting or assault to be blacklisted. Not some associated with an unsavory individual, which can be involuntary - coworker, family member, neighbor.
This made a splash after conservative commentator Lauren Southern claimed her mom was banned without ever booking anything for her daughter. I'm not sure why Southern was banned though but i doubt it was because she was trashing the homes of hosts.
[Edit] Southern claims she was originally banned due to public affiliation with certain groups against Airbnb policies and community standards
I think it's objectively clear that she violated that policy, I don't think even she would deny that she engages in discriminatory behavior, bullying and harassment, and disturbing communities. It's not just about speech, she has for example been arrested in Italy for attempting to block migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean, which directly put lives at risk.
Recently a host charged me a cleaning fee, left me a negative review about not cleaning. I requested that the cleaning fee be refunded, since it was clearly fraudulent. AirBnB declined to refund the cleaning fee. I will never use them again.
I wonder what can be done to prevent companies like AirBnB, PayPal from becoming so user-hostile over time.
What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience.
Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.
The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.
Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.
And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.
AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.
I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.
I was traveling and hopping from one city to another in Europe, and when I went to rent my second Airbnb using a perfectly good American credit card, they blocked me for "fraud reasons". I booked a 5* hotel which was even cheaper than the Airbnb apartment and carried on with my trip. I suspect their anti-abuse system bites them pretty often.
I didn't get scammed but did find the service too annoying to want to use it again. Actual price is very different from quoted nightly rate. Can't tell the actual location of the place before I book, wtf. Got to the place and didn't know the combo to get in; isn't that something the booking email should say? Apparently supposed to log into the site again, go to a chat, and contact the host; it's not simply over SMS.
I get that I'm not paying the extra money for a hotel with 24/7 pro staff, but there's gotta be solid automation in place of that. To each their own, I'll just pay for the hotel.
I recently rented a house from booking.com and it was like night & day vs. airbnb. Other than a snafu on the door code (which was resolved in 5m), the place was in a quiet neighborhood, the place was very well appointed (mid-high end everything) and it was roomy. Also not a single thing to do when we left - we pre-paid a cleanup fee included in book price and there was no checkout list other than to text a number saying we had departed.
Left feeling quite impressed, almost like it was a hotel (but better, it was quiet).
I just logged into AirBNB after not using it for a few years (pandemic and all), only to find that my account was deactivated for not following their ToS and community standards. I only ever had great reviews from the places that I stayed, so I figured they just deactivated it because it was stale.
I requested that they reactivate it and got an automated response saying that they deactivated it because of information in my credit report, and until I dispute that information, their decision is final.
I went and pulled all three credit reports to find that I have no negative information in there at all. I have stellar credit, scores in the "very good" to "excellent" range, minimal debt, no collections, great ratios between available credit and current balances, no negative consumer information...so what's there to dispute?
I've asked them to reinstate my account, but as someone who reads HN and knows how these automated systems behave, I have minimal confidence that they'll do anything about it.
I also reported them to the FTC for misusing/abusing consumer credit information, and I encourage anyone who has been swept up in their Kafka-esque universe to do the same.
This is almost definitely not true. I don't particularly like Airbnb but I would be very surprised if most hotels don't use services that do the exact thing described in this article.
There are demographics where I would not want to take the risk of renting out my property to them. In the U.S. we tend to make things about race when it ought to be about class. Yes, I’m biased against certain economic classes of people (not based on race).
It's towards the bottom, but there's a good quote that shows the perfect example of when this makes sense:
> “For example, if someone is removed for a serious safety incident during an Airbnb reservation and we need to remove them and cancel their future reservations, and we then find that someone re-books the exact same future reservation with the same credit card number, we will remove the second account,” the company said.
So I can see how this is absolutely necessary in some cases, but also how there's always going to be a confusing gray area no matter where you draw the line.
It feels particularly crazy because if you travel together with a romantic partner who damages a property, and then you basically have to convince AirBNB that the two of you have broken up, and that the two of you aren't just using your account now to escape the other's ban.
I remember reading the story about Lauren Southern a few days ago, they banned her parents because they didn't like Lauren's politics (shes a very polarizing figure). I totally get bans when a guest damages property or breaks rules, but the whole reason this got kicked up in the news because that ban was just so overtly political.
They didn't ban her parents because they didn't like their daughter's politics, they likely had reason to believe Lauren attempted to circumvent her own ban by using her parents as a go-between or even through impersonating one or both of her parents (things like IPs, phone device IDs, etc can be used as signals although we all have to admit they aren't a smoking gun just hints). But due to legal risk are unable to disclose means or methods for how they did so or to comment publicly on the decision. So of course there's no way to prove this, but it would be typical of the types of systems that large tech companies' trust and safety systems use everyday. Ultimately with some situations like this they are making a judgment call and weighing brand risk if they get it wrong and retain a bad actor especially if said actor remains on the platform and does something even worse in the future VS the sort of injustice of removing a good actor due to being too careful/overly cautious. Guess which usually wins.
Source: work in Trust and Safety (not at Airbnb).
2 replies →
That's gratuitous and done for spite only. I really don't want to do business with a company that seeks revenge because of internal political activism. It's gross. Within their legal rights as it stands today, but gross nonetheless.
IIRC they banned Southern not for her politics but for being closely associated to people who had unacceptable politics, and then banned her parents for being closely associated with Southern.
1 reply →
“Very polarizing” is one way to put it, considering she’s been banned from entering the UK.
6 replies →
"Your politics hurt my feelings so you and anyone you know is banned from using my service."
How is this reasonable to anybody? Left wingers get mad when a baker pulls this on a gay couple but apparently it's ok as long as it's against someone they don't like?
22 replies →
How is this any different than with a hotel?
Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.
The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.
Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.
Hotels have support. You can actually walk into the hotel and speak to the manager if it comes to that.
AirBNB is a faceless website. If you're banned your recourse seems to be a support line or chat. Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
3 replies →
In a hotel the decisions would be made by a reasonably competent human, and can be appealed to a human if there's a problem.
In Airbnb, the decision would be made by a black-box algorithm, and appeals would be directed to an outsourced monkey who is neither given the training, nor the information, nor paid enough to give a shit, if not stonewalled directly with a canned response.
2 replies →
A hotel ban only applies to one hotel or to a chain, not every hotel. Airbnb have a monopoly.
14 replies →
How does AirBNB track the romantic relationship status of every single one of it's customers?
2 replies →
Remember that recent case where a lawyer was denied access to Madison Square Garden, because their in-house facial recognition software recognized her being an employee of a law-firm that was litigating against another subsidiary / child company of the owner of MSG Entertainment?
Between this, and that case, I can't say I'm looking forward to the future (ab)use of tech.
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart (or some subsidiary of Walmart). Or that you get checked every time you try to use their self-checkout machines.
It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
Kind of like the credit scores we already have.
Oh I'm sorry you're on the Moody's blacklist, there's nothing we can do. Corporate policy, we can't make exceptions, maybe try somewhere else.
I would prefer privatized credit scores to centrally controlled. I would prefer i was on one bad person list as opposed to the only bad person list.
This coordination already exists on some level. If you rip off a hotel they may inform their competitors and share information. Generally they don't care so much about tweets or politics as they are just trying to run a business. But if it was state controlled it runs the risk of beung used as a tool to suppress dissent or wrong think.
Large tech unicorns like social media are kind of inbetween state actors and private businesses as we have seen from the high amount of communication between state actors and these businesses
5 replies →
> It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
We already have a social credit score and it's privatized now. It's background checks.
From the story:
> While she does not have a criminal record, her boyfriend does, she said, telling Motherboard it was “a white collar charge,” though she did not go into specifics.
I find it a bit odd to let private companies do background checks when this really seems more of a function of government where as a society we can have input and reform the process.
In some European countries, people don't have credit scores, but when they're applying for a mortgage, they also need a collateral which costs about the same as the house or apartment they're trying to buy.
I'd rather have credit scores, tbh.
4 replies →
every one rightly derides china's social credit scores yet here we are implementing our own them via entirely privately owned fiefdoms
It's not right to deride their social credit scores, when we've had them for decades, in the form of actual credit scores plus criminal records plus a no-fly list.
All these new developments are just slight changes to the system at its edges, the core of it is quite similar. But our society is myopic to its own problems.
1 reply →
Bollocks. This isn't a social credit score, this is one company blacklisting bad clients, and doing their best to ensure said bad clients don't game the system by using someone else's account.
Yeah I don't love the potential for ubiquitous tracking and judgment, but this isn't central government, it's AirBNB -- use VRBO, or Mariott, or Days Inn instead. Most hotels have, and have had for a long time, blacklists, too.
With the number of people who strongly advocate for stealing from Walmart, with seemingly no repercussions at all, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
People love to pretend like stealing from "big companies" is some robin hood adventure where the C-Suite is going to look at the numbers at the end of the year and decide they all need to cut their annual bonus to make up for the loss. When in fact prices go up for the paying customers, and jobs that used to help everyone (attendants who help restock, locate items, etc.) get converted to more "Security" jobs, where the worker does nothing but "look mean".
Where do people advocate for stealing from Walmart?
1 reply →
At least all my tech skills are slowly becoming life skills. Like oh, I have to work around some random bs so I can use X service ;_;
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart
Society was much more liveable when that was considered common sense.
It was never considered common sense.
Some variant of what you're thinking about might've been possible in a small society (say, when the shop owner in a village knew all his customers, and was able to keep an eye on the troublemakers).
But in modern world it would basically mean that you might get banned from thousands of stores across the entire country because a cousin you barely know is an idiot. Or more likely, you'll just appear on the "do not serve" list without even knowing you're on in or finding out why.
So yeah, treating these two as the same thing is dishonest.
It was more livable for the more socially acceptable and/or wealthy segments of society not for the lower segments. Someone who is poor or otherwise on the margins of society is much more likely to be associated with people society considers "the wrong sort of people".
Similarly, those in the upper levels of society are discouraged from associating with the lower levels for fear of being associated with the wrong sort of people.
It would be normal for an individual known for shoplifting or assault to be blacklisted. Not some associated with an unsavory individual, which can be involuntary - coworker, family member, neighbor.
You're confusing "you" with "someone you've been associated with".
This made a splash after conservative commentator Lauren Southern claimed her mom was banned without ever booking anything for her daughter. I'm not sure why Southern was banned though but i doubt it was because she was trashing the homes of hosts.
[Edit] Southern claims she was originally banned due to public affiliation with certain groups against Airbnb policies and community standards
https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/16231034418444369...
I'm more interested in why she got banned. That's pretty creepy.
Here's an archive of the page from the time she was banned: https://web.archive.org/web/20190606075214/airbnb.com/trust/...
I think it's objectively clear that she violated that policy, I don't think even she would deny that she engages in discriminatory behavior, bullying and harassment, and disturbing communities. It's not just about speech, she has for example been arrested in Italy for attempting to block migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean, which directly put lives at risk.
3 replies →
AirBnB is a terrible platform for users.
Recently a host charged me a cleaning fee, left me a negative review about not cleaning. I requested that the cleaning fee be refunded, since it was clearly fraudulent. AirBnB declined to refund the cleaning fee. I will never use them again.
I wonder what can be done to prevent companies like AirBnB, PayPal from becoming so user-hostile over time.
What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience. Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.
The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.
Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.
And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.
AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.
I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.
I was traveling and hopping from one city to another in Europe, and when I went to rent my second Airbnb using a perfectly good American credit card, they blocked me for "fraud reasons". I booked a 5* hotel which was even cheaper than the Airbnb apartment and carried on with my trip. I suspect their anti-abuse system bites them pretty often.
I didn't get scammed but did find the service too annoying to want to use it again. Actual price is very different from quoted nightly rate. Can't tell the actual location of the place before I book, wtf. Got to the place and didn't know the combo to get in; isn't that something the booking email should say? Apparently supposed to log into the site again, go to a chat, and contact the host; it's not simply over SMS.
I get that I'm not paying the extra money for a hotel with 24/7 pro staff, but there's gotta be solid automation in place of that. To each their own, I'll just pay for the hotel.
I recently rented a house from booking.com and it was like night & day vs. airbnb. Other than a snafu on the door code (which was resolved in 5m), the place was in a quiet neighborhood, the place was very well appointed (mid-high end everything) and it was roomy. Also not a single thing to do when we left - we pre-paid a cleanup fee included in book price and there was no checkout list other than to text a number saying we had departed.
Left feeling quite impressed, almost like it was a hotel (but better, it was quiet).
Agreed had a similar horrible experience where Airbnb deleted my bad review. Just use chargebacks on your credit card, it’s there to protect you.
While chargebacks might get you your money back, won't they also get you banned for life from Airbnb?
I just logged into AirBNB after not using it for a few years (pandemic and all), only to find that my account was deactivated for not following their ToS and community standards. I only ever had great reviews from the places that I stayed, so I figured they just deactivated it because it was stale.
I requested that they reactivate it and got an automated response saying that they deactivated it because of information in my credit report, and until I dispute that information, their decision is final.
I went and pulled all three credit reports to find that I have no negative information in there at all. I have stellar credit, scores in the "very good" to "excellent" range, minimal debt, no collections, great ratios between available credit and current balances, no negative consumer information...so what's there to dispute?
I've asked them to reinstate my account, but as someone who reads HN and knows how these automated systems behave, I have minimal confidence that they'll do anything about it.
I also reported them to the FTC for misusing/abusing consumer credit information, and I encourage anyone who has been swept up in their Kafka-esque universe to do the same.
AirBnB (and youtube, and facebook and everyone else) must immediately manage it's user base MORE and LESS.
Kevin Bacon, you know what to do.
The hero we didn’t know we needed.
Never use Airbnb
You know who doesn't do this? Every hotel chain that ever existed.
This is almost definitely not true. I don't particularly like Airbnb but I would be very surprised if most hotels don't use services that do the exact thing described in this article.
15 year old article about hotels using a centralized datamining blacklist service: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25243594
Hyatt banning hate groups: https://skift.com/2018/09/27/hyatt-ceo-says-hotels-will-ban-...
I think there's a material difference between Hyatt refusing to host an event, and banning individuals for social proximity.
Hotels have stepped up their game, and AirBNB hosts have gotten so incredibly awful that I'm not sure how it's holding up.
It's almost always cheaper to stay in hotels than airbnb everytime I look. It has been this way for years.
Unless you want a whole house/cabin to yourself for the week/month (discounts) then hotels almost always end up being less fuss and cheaper.
1 reply →
Hotels can and do ban certain guests from booking if they've caused extensive problems in the past. Cruise lines do it too.
Heck, most hotels in my area have banned an entire class of people -- locals.
Locals are much more likely to trash their rooms.
Group punishment. It works great, especially the further you extend it to the point it looks like 'demographics.'
Next Airbnb will get in the concentration camp business to punish those closely related by their culture.
There are demographics where I would not want to take the risk of renting out my property to them. In the U.S. we tend to make things about race when it ought to be about class. Yes, I’m biased against certain economic classes of people (not based on race).