The $10m OMG Fund

Their search now prominently encourages odd stays like this as well. It&#x27;s puzzling as it seems to be at the expense of other search filtering.<p>They&#x27;ve reduced useful search filters like &#x27;has a desk&#x27; and there is no filter for &#x27;not a tent or van&#x27; which is increasingly common. Some areas (Hawaii) contain vans as the majority of their listings. But no filters against them.<p>Their direction reminds me of the progress of Netflix to be less searchable and more about content they want to push. I guess it works out in the a&#x2F;b tests but likely misses the forest for the trees.<p>A tip: use airbnb.com.au instead of .com as you&#x27;ll get the real full price in the searches as they must comply with Australian law. This works all over the world.

This just makes me want to puke. My neighbors spent a couple years built a fucking chalet that took up their entire backyard, ruined my small view of the occasional sun in Portland, just so they could fuck off to Europe and Airbnb it for an obscene amount of money. This shouldn&#x27;t have been allowed, but they got away with it under the Portland code exemptions that are super friendly to covering every inch of your property if you&#x27;re building &quot;affordable housing&quot;. Now we basically live next door to a motel with constant in&#x2F;out and their hired maids shouting &quot;housekeeping&quot; at 8am. Airbnb can take their $1m and shove it up their asses. I support anything that helps bring down this model of turning neighborhoods into decentralized hotels, up to and including occasional acts of arson which unfortunately, I can&#x27;t do because it would also burn my house down.<p>One good friend of mine was a member of a Welsh group in the 80s whose name I don&#x27;t know (but maybe someone on HN does know) who literally burned down the vacation houses of English people. I always think of that every time I&#x27;m woken up too early, which is almost every single day. I live in a $500k house and Airbnb has wrecked my daily peace and my neighborhood. Sure if I were smart and also an asshole I&#x27;d just put my own place up on Airbnb and fuck off myself. Part of me just believes it would be fucked up to do that to my other neighbors, and part of me doesn&#x27;t want to accept that as the world we have to live in.

They need to sort out the issues with poor service, hosts going dark, properties not as described, cleaning fee rip-offs etc.<p>Hotels are also cheaper nowadays by the time you account for hidden fees.<p>After my last 3 attempts went bad, I&#x27;m done with AirBNB.

It has become obvious that AirBNB is now targeting the upper-end market in terms of pricing. Their homepage constantly shows ridiculously expensive properties that I have no interest in staying at. (I&#x27;ve been traveling around Europe for 5 months so far purely staying at AirBNBs).<p>None of this &quot;OMG Fund&quot; money will be going to improving the core experience the main cohort of users; it is however broadening their marketing to higher-end properties and higher-paying visitors.

&quot;Hey guys, there&#x27;s a lot of talk about the effects of our business on housing across the globe. We need something to divert attention. Any ideas?&quot;

Read the conditions, entering grants airbnb full intellectual property rights to the idea. A pretty big ask when the &quot;reward&quot; is a job running a BnB.

And here I had hoped that it was a fund for people who had a horrible experience with with an airbnb host or guest, to give them quick and easy compensation.

This feels more like a half-baked supermarket marketing campaign than an actual push for innovation. But hey, I&#x27;m all for it! It&#x27;s one of those rare market conditions that allow creative people to bring wacky new ideas to life.

You know what would be &quot;OMG&quot;?<p>Using that $10 Million to house some of the homeless and other people their company displaces.<p>This is it folks, &quot;The Society of the Spectacle&quot; in all its&#x27; glory!

There’s a lot of unfounded speculation about why AirBnB made its recent decisions. The truth is far simpler (or dumber, depending on your point of view)<p>There were no A&#x2F;B tests that caused them to take this product direction.<p>There is no quantitative model of any kind that points to this as the revenue maximizing approach.<p>They are trying to differentiate themselves from hotels as much as possible to create long term brand equity.<p>This is the opposite of what many posters are suggesting. It may or may not succeed but it’s not driven by short term thinking as many are claiming here.

Reading the comments and reflecting on my experiences, I wonder if we might ever see a backlash and a resurgence of couchsurfing - not-for-profit, people wanting to help travelers.<p>I never did couchsurfing, so maybe I have a too uninformed opinion of it, but it seems like a great idea.

You can&#x27;t do a lot of innovating in this way with only $100K.

The % of people looking for interesting places to stay vs those that just want lodging is probably very low. If I was a hotel, I would probably check which area has high demand and simply provide safe, secure, predictable lodging. It makes you wonder how sustainable is Airbnb’s business model at a specific location is over a 10 year period is. I predict that Airbnb’s business model will be hard to sustain over a long period. Hotels will always win in the long run.

More like a &#x27;WTF Fund&#x27;.

As a shareholder I really think this money is being poorly spent. Airbnb should be cutting costs, not helping people build potato homes.

One of the interesting things I heard about Brian Chesky was that at one point he decided he was going to permanently live in Airbnbs. I thought that was really interesting because that Airbnb will be run by a guy who has the experience of being a billionaire using Airbnbs. I wonder if that&#x27;s had an effect on the company&#x27;s direction.

I like the fact that they hired Cruella De Vil as a jury member.

I&#x27;d rather stay at a best western. A best western executive residency would be even better, and likely cost around the same.

OMG those places looks uncomfortable to stay in for more than an hour.