Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.
Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos.
Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
If you are wildly successful (oh, to be so lucky), what will your company be forced to optimize?
Mid-years Amazon's radically generous customer service refunds and Etsy's seller revolt yanked their courses away from volume optimization for a few years... but it's their inevitable end state for boosting revenue. No public company can resist maximizing revenue by any means available, and especially when no other plausible alternatives are available.
So think really hard on how to set up a marketplace / platform with a business model that mixes in more user-aligned and sustainable goals? Looking at you, Apple...
As a consumer of B2B services, I’m always amazed by the awful deals companies make to show revenue growth. One in particular a few years ago was particularly amazing. The sales dude was getting paid on revenue, and pushed through a deal that cost the company fortune. The entire sales chain of command retired and bought boats.
And of course, while the grift is going, the execs and shareholders get rich. But everyone knows when the gig is up. Evidence: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/uber-doordash-plunge-as-labo...
btw. I'm all for interruption but please... it shouldn't be through these means (at least not on this scale).
Never forget "skirting consumer product safety regulations and trademark protections". Their entire retail business at this point is no more subject to regulation than buying "designer" handbags off some dude's street stand.
No, they hire the authorities, and the shit-show goes on forever. The gig is only up when they've passed their overvalued business on to late investors, who demand to be paid through strategic neglect of core functions, price rises to rational market values (or higher), and moonshot PR.
I imagine that it could have pivoted in many directions. That’s really the tragedy of AirBnb. It seems like a platform that could have been more.
It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like destroy the world if it became a paper clip maximizer?
It all went horribly wrong.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Well, clearly it doesn't.
The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.
To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that works on this scale.
Absolutely. That's where bitcoin could help a new platform, as a decentralized trust protocol. The bisq.network protocol requires people to put up significant bonds to perform roles that are trusted, and then if they fail to perform well, they can loose some or all of their bond. The bisq token holders (bisq tokens are simply colored satoshis, i.e. they've built functional governance directly on bitcoin) vote monthly on various governance proposals, and can thus hold people doing bonded roles accountable.
The tough question is whether such a system could make to individual apartment rentals in the real world. Its an oracle question: how to you establish the truth of competing claimed about the state if an apartment? Not an easy problem to solve, but if its solveable it could provide an amazing new marketplace.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
i.e. price their beds the same as hotels, or higher?
Anyone who charges lower then the minimum viable will simply never break even, given that the money spent to accumulate trust has an opportunity cost.
The cheapest hotels will be priced about the same.
Low or zero trust hosts can't compete against high trust folks without a huge discount as already discussed.
That's different from jacking up the price "to compensate" for the losses at the start. They just have to eat the initial costs, and it will take a while for normal market profits to put them in the black.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
I knew someone whose family ran a small bed-and-breakfast (pre-web).
I don’t think they cooked all 3 meals but they did at least provide breakfast and brownbag lunch.
I hate staying in hotels, but one benefit is getting a nice hot breakfast served to you.
Edit: If you weren't on that trip then please accept my apologies.
To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
Or for any getaway kind of situation where the point is mainly to be at the place that you are staying, not necessarily to get out a ton. Hotels are terrible for that, aside, perhaps, from ultra-expensive huge suites (I wouldn't know, I've never tried one, too pricey and I have a suspicion it'd still feel like being in a hotel room).
They're also great in rural areas. Often you can get an AirBnB much closer to some 2nd- or 3rd-rate way-off-the-interstate attraction you're interested in, than a hotel. Otherwise your only options would be camping or an RV.
Her last one was incredible. A lovely little 3 bed home with a hot tub in the garden room.
So I got a huge TV, a kitchenette, a double bedroom with another huge TV, a bathroom with his-and-hers basins, and a single bedroom. The next morning I discovered a second bathroom, like the first; and a utility room with a washer and a dryer.
The problem was they didn't have a bar, so I couldn't get a bottle of wine. But not a big problem; the suite hotel shared a lift with the regular hotel next door. So I would ring the barman at the regular hotel, and he'd meet me on the second floor with my wine.
You got to be kidding?
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
> and you get breakfast!
Ok, now I see that you’ve got me.
Did you even read the article? The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
But generally speaking midrange business hotels are utterly unexciting--which is to say they're predictable which is what I'm looking for from my hotel in general when I travel. I'm probably not there for the hotel experience.
I do not know how you’ve managed to extract that insight from my post. The experience I’ve described with AirBnb is not possible with any hotel, Hyatt included.
> The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
Take a look at Hyatt San Francisco, for example. See that the ground floor is occupied by some public areas exclusively? So I should either leave my bike in the place where it can be stolen, or to put it into my room via an elevator. Now it’s starting from $285, and $295 give you are a cottage in San Francisco on AirBnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6523507?check_in=2022-11-29&che...
So to be more precise:
- hotels, I can survive then, no prob. I can even survive Hyatt SF with my bicycle.
- AirBnbs give me pleasure. Get up, open the door to the garden, birds chirping, the creek floating, my favorite turnovers in the stove ready in 20 minutes, my laptop connected to Ethernet, my bicycle ready nearby - I can just jump on it and ride… Which of you “nicely regulated” hotels can give me all that?
To be fair, I’ve managed to get some pleasure from a hotel too. Now and then. A different pleasures though. And all of these hotels were in Japan.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
That said, we've used about two dozen Airbnbs over the years, all in the U.S., and have never stayed in a place that was not exactly what we expected based on the listing.
I just find a good 4 person room and we make do - or I Airbnb/VRBO.
Really? I don't know that this was ever guaranteed, and post-COVID it's definitely not. The ones I've seen are paltry compared to 10 years ago.
Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
- Large friends and family network, rotate through other peoples homes
- Own a series of apartment buildings, rotate through addresses
- Unoccupied buildings with accessible mail drops (pick up mail from outside)
Similar tricks exist for non-residential address requirements.
Never underestimate the creativity of scammers.
And these types of scammers are and know the "right" people.
There is a reason why stolen passports are so valuable.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
Inn!
Express!
Breakfast!
Clean!
Rooms!
Holiday Inn Express might have beds fit for a Baggins, but everything down to the fold of the sheets and the pen/notepad is the same every time, and I cansure appreciate that.
Last AirBNB I was at told me to just not smoke all the 'courtesy items' on the shelf left by previous tenants.
Nice people, but just not what everyone might have in mind as far as accommodations go. Or maybe it is, who knows.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I've been staying at the same a hotel every few months for the last four years, even during 2020. The last time I checked in instead of saying "let us know when you want housekeeping" like they have for the last 3 years; they started saying "what's your preferred housekeeping interval?" I think that's a better system to ask than question.
The only slight downside for me is that if I'm in a room for a while the toilet paper can start to run low, but that's fixed with a text to the front desk.
Interestingly when I was looking up the info on the Doubletree, they mentioned something about housekeeping every X days (not every day), but when I arrived, it was daily. I didn't make any request for it, it could be that the website is just out of date, as I suspect this is more about staffing than anything else.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.
The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels. There's a huge demand for what AirBnB provides (Serviced and short term accommodation). Hotels are inadequate for longer stays or where you just want the comforts of home, a good middle ground is the "serviced apartment" concept found in some places (entire apartment blocks reserved for short term rentals) however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.
> The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels.
This is a werid entitlement. Tourists aren't entitled to overrun and impose a serious negative impact upon a town/city's housing supply because they feel like they 'deserve' to vacation there.
What about a middle ground. If I go somewhere for 2-4 weeks? For that length of time I kind of want a proper kitchen, which I won't get in a hotel, but obviously it is not long enough to actually rent/buy a home.
Not everywhere but at least in the US suite hotels with small kitchens are pretty common. Most of the big chains have one or more suite hotel brands. (Though honestly I not infrequently travel for 2-3 weeks and, while I definitely appreciate a refrigerator I pretty much never find I need a full kitchen.)
$300 or more a day is beyond the pale IMO.
I'm guessing you're a high income individual with no kids then?
Sheesh, jamie. I typically eschew using this term, but someone taking a 2-4 week vacation is already highly privileged to be able to do so. Tourism is a privilege. Not a right.
1. I am not saying the market/residents have to accommodate anything, I am simply stating my preference that if I have to travel for 5+ days I would rather have a full kitchen. If the residents don’t want to provide it, fine. If many other people feel as I do, then that’s kind of what markets are for.
2. I don’t typically take 2-4 week vacations, but I sometimes do travel for work for extended periods.
I recognise being able to travel at all is a privilege but having a personal preference for a full kitchen I don’t really think warrants such a judgemental response.
Following your logic, going to the bakery to buy bread instead of making it myself is "entitled" and disregards the baker's quality of life since he'd be much more comfortable sleeping than waking up at 5am to start preparing the bread.
Many markets have demand, but society prevents their legal existence. For example, organ trades. I'm sure a lot of alcoholics would love just being able to go get a new liver whenever they want or when theirs fails. However, the... issues that creates have been deemed unacceptable and therefore, it's not allowed (obviously, it still happens illegally).
Some people want AirBnBs so they can have all the accoutrements of a home wherever they travel. Other people do not want such a market to exist, for a variety of reasons. I don't think that simply because an economic opportunity exists, it should be serviced or be allowed to be serviced. Obviously, advertisers want to increased the amount and effectiveness of their ads. FaceBook and Google would block out the sky and plaster it with ads if they could. Should they be allowed to?
Now, should there maybe be an area of the city explicitly for short-term rentals, included in city planning? That's a different question; but it shouldn't be mixed in normal residential area, as all it does is make life worse for the actual residents.
I lived in a Homewood Suites for three months. It was fine.
Alternatively, tourists are unhappy that people in some areas don't want unlimited numbers of them and account for them properly with zoning restrictions.
> however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
It's not your home, why should you deserve a house over someone who lives there?
The cleaning and service fees are being universally complained about. It definitely reduced some demand, especially since some of it seemed to have started recently - last year ?
For long weekends, it becomes a very bad deal: the overhead of big service fees that are usually more than 1 day's rental, then you tack on the cleaning which can be 125-225 typically. You put those numbers together and sure, while there's demand, the demand is mitigated by the high cost. There's a demand for all sorts of consumer items in the world but people hit their limits.
And fundamentally, Airbnb competes with hotels. Their niche is to provide a better hotel experience: a bigger space, maybe a backyard, and definitely a kitchen. But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
That's the thing with a lot of VC-subsidized services. There are a lot of services that consumers would be happy to, well, consume if they were cheap enough. Drivers, personal chefs, weekly housekeepers, lawn services, laundry pickup, etc. Even people with an upper middle class income are pretty selective about that sort of thing.
>But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
Kitchens are not a big deal for me when I travel. A fridge is nice but you get a small one you can use a lot of the time in hotels these days and minibars seem to have mostly gone out of fashion.
For me this is true if I'm traveling for < 1 week If I'm gone for more than that i don't want to eat every meal out and want to have some food + drink stored in my accommodation.
I agree with your point. Cleaning fees tend to make it hard to consider AirBnB for a weekend. That said, assuming the host doesn't just do it themselves, they're going to get a housekeeper in, rates are up for that sort of service, and that's about what it costs.
It's a bait and switch by selecting which UI components are displayed in that search screen, and hiding the added costs ("service fee" and "cleaning fee").
Also, unlike a hotel an Airbnb host will give you a list of items to do upon leaving. And often passive-aggressively, "And it would be appreciated if you could put the towels and sheets in the washing machine for one wash as you leave so it's less work for the cleaning person" type commentary.
Ah yes, and then you read in the notes that you also have to do the laundry and wash the dishes.
Like at a cafe, it's socially accepted that you put away (bus) your finished utensils.
I haven’t encountered this before.
I’m way down in New Zealand.
(That said, fining somebody hundreds of dollars for not doing that is unreasonable for the same reason that the request is reasonable; because it's an easy thing to do.)
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
They can slap vacation ads on it and now they have a stable source of income!
Could Airbnb challenge it legally though?
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
Interestingly their dispute process is very buyer-friendly, though. When a seller demands money in compensation for damage they often lose. I believe this is because Airbnb is on the hook if they can't collect from the buyer.
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
1. The incentives of the platform
2. The incentives of the individual
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
See "We become what we behold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 and https://ncase.me/trust/ from the first comment. A high trust society, or marketplace, is an opportunity for the defectors to extract value. Unless they can be punished somehow ...
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.