Airbnb May 2022 Release

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:<p>* 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.<p>* Easily 90% of listings contain some kind of misrepresentation. Probably half it’s something egregious. Airbnb doesn’t seem to care.<p>Hopefully they’re trying to turn the ship here. We’ll see.

The AirCover policy looks like a game changer that elevates Airbnb basically to hotel-like level of service.<p>Just wondering if they won&#x27;t default to &quot;we will just refund you&quot; in case the host cancels (1st scenario)<p>In that situation, if I get the info 1 day before arrival and just a refund, then I am screwed anyway since the prices on the market will be sky high.

I recently had an experience where we locked ourselves out of an AirBnB by leaving my phone inside the apartment. The door code was in the AirBnB messages and protected by 2FA that required my phone - which was in the apartment.<p>I got to another computer and couldn&#x27;t log in. I tried to contact customer support - but it required an account. So I created another account and tried to message the host, but it wouldn&#x27;t let me talk to them without a booking. So I entered all my credit card information into the new account and attempted to book with the host - but they had no bookings available. So I used the new account to reach out to customer service - they were unresponsive taking 30+minutes per message to respond. Given that what I was doing looked plausibly like a phishing scheme, you can imagine this would require a lot of back and forth, which basically rendered CS useless.<p>I ended up solving the problem by checking the public records of the property to find the owners name. Then tried finding them on social media but all of their accounts were private. Luckily the AirBnB was in my (smallish) home town and I was able to find someone in my social circles that knew the host and shared their phone number.<p>It was an absolute nightmare and I&#x27;m still not sure what I would have done had I not found someone who knew them.

&gt;Check-In Guarantee If a guest can’t check into their home and the Host cannot resolve the issue, we’ll find them a similar or better home for the length of their original stay, or we’ll refund them.<p>Were they not doing this until now?! I never had such an event occur to me, but I assumed if I can&#x27;t enter the place I booked, the least I should expect is my friggin money back.

I thought &quot;AirCover&quot; was already the standard? Also this still doesn&#x27;t address the issue that host can cancel your stay at any time and then you are left without any kind of accommodation in the middle of nowhere or unknown area

We used Airbnb almost exclusively 5-10 years ago. We’re now back to nearly 100% hotels, with Airbnb as a backup option if there truly is not a suitable&#x2F;available hotel.<p>1 out of 3 airbnb stays was deficient to the point of affecting the trip in some way: didn’t match the description, overbearing rules, maintenance&#x2F;cleanliness issue that was difficult to resolve with absentee hosts, etc.<p>The costs became equal to or more than hotels once you added in fees, and the experience was guaranteed to be less consistent than just booking a familiar hotel brand.

Cool blog. I dont think the four coverages will change anything. I&#x27;ve been nomading from airbnb to airbnb across the USA for over a year now. Airbnb has been meh to poor everytime we have had to use their CS.<p>The worse case was a home that we rented in Denver for a month (during peak renting summer months) was sold less than 30 days before we were to arrive. We&#x27;d booked it 90+ days in advanced.<p>Airbnb told us they would help us find a similar or better home in the area. Very similar to their policy they just announced. But because it was summer and less than 30 days from our booking and we were looking to stay for ~35 days, there were no similar cost homes. The equivalent homes were 3k-5k more for the same time period in the same location.<p>Airbnb said okay. Here is a refund and a $200 coupon to help you find another place. A refund is great but if all other similar homes are booked you could end up spending thousands more for a similar place like we did.

Split stays? I don&#x27;t understand how that changes anything... isn&#x27;t that just bundling to stays and packaging it under one reservation?<p>Or is it that you can get shorter stays under the minimum number of days required to rent from a place? If so isn&#x27;t that just pushing the cost to the home owner who now has to pay for the turn over service?<p>Airbnb -- super interesting company, great business model out of the gate -- as we start to get to the mass adoption stage the prices keep getting silly and the quality outside of the core offerings kind of slips. I don&#x27;t see how they continue to keep growth going without some major sacrifices.

Just felt like I wanted to contribute something positive here. I have used Airbnb extensively for the past 5 years. I used to live 1 month at a time at one place and then switch. And I only had 1 singe visit (for a daily visit) where the host canceled and at this time I got back my money + 80 euro.

&gt; In the unlikely event [we can&#x27;t provide you the AirBnB you booked], we’ll find guests a similar or better home, or we’ll refund them.<p>You had me until the refund. I understand it isn&#x27;t always possible to find another place to stay last minute in a city - sometimes things are just fully booked. I get that, in that case, you&#x27;d have to issue a refund.<p>But this doesn&#x27;t give me the peace of mind they imply. It just tells me I can be stuck in a city with no shelter and left to fend for myself finding a place to stay.<p>Peace of mind is AirBnB maintaining a reserve inventory by under-booking a city or maintaining relationships with hotels. Were they can guarantee an equal-or-better home or a refund and at least a studio apartment or hotel room.

A redesign is nice but please consider a secure Airbnb app-controlled electronic door lock. Hardware is hard but it could reduce entry&#x2F;exit and check-in friction and confusion.

Aircover seems a rebranding of the current policy? They already give a refund if the host cancels (as you would expect). And they already have discretion to find you alternative accommodation (although they never have for me).<p>It’s still useless if your long term stay is cancelled at the last minute as it’s often impossible to find a replacement for a comparable price.<p>This is the risk with using Airbnb for long term stays - last minute cancellations can (and do) happen.

Of the changes while I think that the design categories are cool (who wouldn&#x27;t want to stay in a Le Corbusier designed space at least once?) the &quot;AirCover&quot; stuff is probably most impactful and mitigates a major pain that I&#x27;ve had&#x2F;been concerned about with booking (and from other threads on Airbnb sounds like others have too)

How is it possible that a website is so slow like AirBnBs?<p>Everything I do on the site makes me wait. Even when I click on the calendar, it opens the widget and then slowlay paints the day numbers one by one.

I&#x27;m a host for a cabin on airbnb and vrbo and I can say that it is remarkable that airbnb has achieved such a horrible reputation amongst hosts and guests alike. The truth is that the product is pretty great, until something goes wrong... Airbnb will refund a guest their money for seemingly any unverifiable accusation. I greatly prefer bookings from Vrbo despite their horrid tech simply because they are more reasonable when a guest sees a ladybug and wants a refund.

Categories look identical to the top-tabs they already had, no? Even their &quot;OMG&quot; tag is simply a rename of the previous &quot;Offbeat&quot;. I don&#x27;t get it.

Does anyone know if there&#x27;s a secret advanced option to search by keyword?<p>Some Airbnbs have free bicycles available, but there&#x27;s no &quot;bicycle&quot; filter (possibly for liability reasons). There&#x27;s <i>also</i> no way to search for homes that mention &quot;bicycle&quot;. Instead, I have to comb through every listing.<p>I think this used to be an option, but they took it away. This is the only feature I&#x27;ve ever wanted from Airbnb search.

I just happened to go to the website this morning ([un]ironically some friends are coming to town and their host cancelled on them).<p>At least for me this new design is unusable. All I wanted to do is enter a city&#x2F;zip and I couldn&#x27;t figure it how to do it. It feels like they are really pushing those high end lifestyle&#x2F;adventure&#x2F;experience options.

Split stays is a fantastic feature. Limiting it to just two homes seems weird though. I&#x27;d love to be able to stay in a city for 2+ months and change homes every couple weeks if I have to. At the moment finding places and timing all the dates is a nightmare.

Lmao at the example &quot;split stay&quot; - oh yeah, the average person is going to spend ~$14K for a month of travel at some national parks. Way to stay in all of those Airbnbs and see what it&#x27;s like for an &quot;average user&quot; Brian!

Looks like the transition to &quot;experiences&quot; is taking hold.<p>Also, what the hell are &quot;Grand Piano&quot; homes ?<p>Do people like to have big pianos in their vacation stays?

I am not a heavy Airbnb user. Most of what I read on AirCover aside from the 24-hour Safety Line I assumed was part of the standard service.

Airbnb experiences are cool but for every other normal vacations, I prefer hotels. Turns out regulations do matter.

I really liked the new design. It is really hard to do it this simple yet useful.

I wonder if they allow the same lifestyle to their own subcontractors?

I &#x27;d like to see airbnb move to long-term rentals.

Any category for &quot;basic but secure&quot;?

Recent thread on Airbnb here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31253306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31253306</a>