Re:Another Airbnb Victim Tells His Story: “There Were Meth P...
by gojomo on Sunday July 31, 2011 @05:26PM
(#2829663)
Paradoxically, these incidents could solidify AirBnb's lead. If they've been clumsy in the past; they can't afford to anymore. They have the money to implement a leading solution, and they have to become synonymous with the best protections to get the most listings/searches.
And, the components of a potential solution – costly one-time background checks, longer reputation histories, insurance pooling, deep experience with all abuse variants – all benefit from scale. Participant fear enhances the winner-take-all nature of the market... if the leader can best assuage that fear.
Re:Another Airbnb Victim Tells His Story: “There Were Meth P...
by moonlighter on Sunday July 31, 2011 @05:58PM
(#2829762)
"costly one-time background checks" and "all benefit from scale" sound like an oxymoron to me. Implementing all the suggestions you listed would significantly cut into their revenues and make their business model obsolete.
Re:Another Airbnb Victim Tells His Story: “There Were Meth P...
by gojomo on Sunday July 31, 2011 @06:05PM
(#2829782)
High-fixed setup costs, low marginal costs make a defensible moat. That's the classic case of a returns-to-scale monopoly.
Background checks are a one-time cost per new participant.
It may be costly (in money or time) to set up your initial account, and acquire a positive reputation via a long history of mutual reviews... but then you're part of a large pre-vetted community.
Do you then want to go through that procedure many times with every new upstart? Or just once with the largest market?
Exactly this. The first blogger to go public with a report of a place being trashed by an Airbnb guest pointed out that with Craigslist, it is EASIER to contact the guest individually beforehand. Airbnb subtracts value from the typical transaction that would be arranged on Craigslist. That's because Craigslist makes its money from help-wanted ads and a few other ad categories, and doesn't need to monetize transactions for short-term stays in people's homes to keep right on making money.
Airbnb claims to be a force for disintermediating the short-term rental industry, but it desires to be market-leading intermediary. It isn't offering a market-leading level of customer service after a problem happens. Nor is Airbnb doing as much to prevent problems as other startup companies in the same space--several of those companies take much greater care to verify guest identities before setting up the transaction. What Airbnb appears to want, compared to other market participants, is to be paid as an intermediary without providing any particular value as an intermediary. That's nice work if you can get it, but that's a business model that is ripe for disruption and not a business model that I would invest in.
After edit: I hope everyone is reading the newly submitted article here for the details of what the Airbnb autoresponder message replying to the "urgent" help email address at Airbnb looked like not long ago. As the host thought after his place was trashed, "This freaked me out when I was frazzled. Hundreds of millions in venture financing, millions of dollars in fees, and no 24-hour help desk for emergencies? What am I paying them the exorbitant fees for?"