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SFPD Arrests Suspect In Airbnb Rental Trashing
theodp writes "Just days after it was reported that apartment sharing startup Airbnb had raised $112MM at a $1B+ valuation from investors that included Marc Andreessen and Jeff Bezos, Airbnb user EJ's blog entry on the ransacking of her apartment by Airbnb renters went viral, creating a PR nightmare that's turning into a war of words. CNET reports San Francisco police have confirmed that a 19-year-old woman has been arrested in the case, booked on possession of stolen property, methamphetamine, fraud charges, and an outstanding warrant."
From some quick googling, it seems that that safety FAQ was only recently made available, perhaps in response to the whole EJ incident. If you go to the Wayback Machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web) and enter that page's URL (http://www.airbnb.com/home/safety) and click 'Show All', it will tell you it doesn't have it but there are other pages. Go ahead and look at what airbnb had to offer the wayback machine and you'll see a tips page. Check that one out and you'll see some very very simple safety suggestions. Except they aren't NEARLY as protective as what this new page makes out.
Should she have done more to protect herself? Sure. Would I personally ever use airbnb? No; my trust of my fellow human doesn't go that far. But don't make it appear that at the time EJ performed her transaction on the website that airbnb had posted stringent rules about staying safe and protecting yourself.
A lot of this is reading between the lines, but if you RTFA, she didn't do any due diligence because she couldn't. Airbnb explicitly demand that all communication takes place through their website - which can make it hard to get someone's email address, phone number and references.
To a lay person, this is more-or-less how traditional letting agents work. The landlord and the tenant aren't even allowed to communicate directly until contracts are signed; either tenant and/or landlord pay the agent a fee and the agent does all the checks before this happens.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
If you read a little closer, this woman didn't take any basic precautions like getting ID, photographs, references, phone numbers and so on
That's because Airbnb explicitly denies the possibility of doing such: you do not get any kind of details, not even phone number, on the rentee. Blaming it on EJ is kind of pointless then.
Whats [sic] their patent portfolio look like?
After a quick search on the USPTO web site, there are no issued patents or published patent applications assigned to "airBNB" or "Airbed and Breakfast." Of the founding team, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia, there is design patent (not utility patent, mind you) D540,097, "Portable seat cushion," listing a "Joseph Gibbia" as inventor, and assigned to "Joe Gibbia." Other than that, I couldn't find any issued patents or published patent applications associated with the founding team, either.
Of course, patent applications are published 18 months after they are filed, so it's possible they have some applications in the works of which we are not aware.
Because it's worked in the past, in various forms, successfully for many years.
There was a group you could join in the 1970s to get your name in a directory of people who would put other people up free, in exchange for reciprocity by somebody else when they were looking for a place to stay -- sort of Craigslist before computers. Great deal if you like to travel and meet people.
That's different from going off and leaving somebody to rent your house in your absence, but there are dangers in having people as guests in your own home.
When I was in college, I was renting a house that I sublet to some physics graduate students for the summer. I had to clean the place up after they left (not malicious, just lazy), but it was worth it for three months rent.
Usually, when you sublet, you check them out. My sub-tenants were students at the same school, and I got them through the school housing office, so they couldn't disapper.
One of the problems in this case is that Airbnb actually makes it more difficult or impossible for you to check the renter out. As several astute /.'rs have pointed out, what exactly is the value-added that this company offers over Craigslist?
I'd like to see a lawyer give an opinion on what liability Airbnb has to this blogger, notwithstanding their boilerplate waivers.
When you read AirBNB's current (as of 2:40pm 7/31/2011) FAQ, it's seriously frowned-upon for a host to use the "contact information" they are given to actually make a decision to NOT rent to someone. Step 5 is accept or deny request, at which point you have no information. Step 6 is AirBNB collects the payment. Step 7 sends the real contact info. Step 8 describes when payment will be released. And that's the end of their public process.
There's no step 9 -- what to do if you are unhappy with the details you received. At the end of the FAQ we find "We take host cancellations very seriously, because they pose a huge problem to guests' travel plans and they hurt the reliability of our website. When a host cancels, their ranking in search results is negatively affected." That means AirBNB is going to penalize you, as a host, if you elect not to accept a guest based on the contact information you have received.
Seems to me that AirBNB is going to have to come up with a policy for the "early period", during which time a member is considered "new". A new member should probably have a mandatory security deposit requirement, and any such reservation request should be flagged as a new member request.