With a gun, let’s be clear a rock can be a weapon. Assholes with guns are another thing entirely.
RR
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Point taken.
20202020
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I plan to be a airbnb host and I like the ban. I have a superhost hosting 2 houses on my street that allows DJs playing loud music at late hours. I can hear folks reveling few houses away. My neighbors had expressed displeasure with the noise. He’ doesn’t live there and probably doesn’t care since he’s raking in the $. I think eventually the place where we live may ban all airbnbs. He gives airbnb hosts a bad name.
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We are in the Bay Area this week moving house and all over the radio they are talking about the city of Orinda voting to ban short term rentals now (at least whole home rentals). If this happens it may start a domino effect. I’m so happy we got out of this market up here just in time. We were not one of the bad ones but I could definitely feel the neighborhood tension growing over four years. For example, getting blamed for trash or noise when we didn’t even have a booking and the trash was clearly next to a large construction house. Plus we pay extra for walk-up garbage service. At this point, I would not operate an Airbnb anywhere that didn’t have a well defined short term rental policy already in place.
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Cheskys email to staff
Here is Chesky’s entire email to employees:
Subject: In the business of trust
Hey team,
Airbnb is a business fueled by trust. When we started Airbnb in 2008, people said it would never work. “Strangers will never trust one another,” they said. But we believed that people are fundamentally good, and that we could design a system for strangers to trust one another. Our real innovation is not allowing people to book a home; it’s designing a framework to allow millions of people to trust one another. Trust is the real energy source that drives Airbnb and has enabled us to scale our platform to 191 countries and to more than 600 million members.
But recently, events by bad actors on our platform took advantage of that trust, including at a home in Orinda, California. We intend to do everything possible to learn from these incidents when they occur.
People need to feel like they can trust our community, and that they can trust Airbnb when something does go wrong. Today, we are making the most significant steps in designing trust on our platform since our original design in 2008. Our update entails four solutions.
100% Verified:
Starting now, verification of all seven million listings on Airbnb will commence. Homes will be verified for accuracy of the listing (including accuracy of photos, addresses, and listing details) and quality standards (including cleanliness, safety, and basic home amenities) and those that meet our high expectations will be clearly labeled. By December 15, 2020, every home and every host on Airbnb will be reviewed with the objective of 100% verification. We believe that trust on the Internet begins with verifying the accuracy of the information on Internet platforms, and we believe that this is an important step for our industry.
Guest Guarantee:
Beginning on December 15, 2019, if upon checking into a listing it does not meet our accuracy standards, Airbnb will rebook the guest a new listing of equal or greater value, or they will get 100% of their money back. Most hosts do a great job, but guests need to feel like Airbnb has their back, and we believe this commitment is a necessary step in giving guests peace of mind.
Airbnb Neighbor Hotline:
We are launching a new 24/7 Neighbor Hotline so that anyone can call us anytime, anywhere in the world and reach a real person at Airbnb. We will staff this hotline with a rapid response team so that neighbors can reach us directly with their concerns, and our phone number will be placed prominently on our homepage, in our app, and easily searchable on Google. We are developing a training program and protocols for our rapid response team, and we have asked Charles Ramsey, former Chief of both the Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Police Departments, and Ronald Davis, the former Chief of East Palo Alto Police Department and President Obama’s Executive Director of Community Oriented Policing Services, to advise us. This will launch in the United States by December 31, 2019, and will roll out globally over the course of 2020.
High Risk Human Review:
To address unauthorized house parties, beginning on December 15, and informed by previous pilots, we are expanding manual screening of high-risk reservations flagged by our risk detection models to all of North America, with global rollout through 2020. This will help identify suspicious reservations and stop unauthorized parties before they start. For example, we look at the duration of the stay and listing attributes such as the size of the listing, amongst hundreds of other factors. Risk scoring helps us focus our attention and find the needle in the haystack.
With these additional protections, we will work together with our community of guests and hosts to reinforce the trust platform that we have built with our community. The world moves at the speed of trust, and the more trust that exists, the more access we can all have. Airbnb is founded on trust, and our vision depends on us continuing to increase this in our community.
More than eleven years after Joe, Nate, and I started Airbnb, I have been asked what has surprised me most about the world. My answer is two things: that people are, in fact, fundamentally good, and that we are 99% the same. We still believe this, and with these changes, we hope to continue to demonstrate this to the world.
Brian.
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Thanks Deb, this post is probably worthy of it’s own thread?
I notice step one is blame the hosts. Step two is blame the hosts. Step three is report the host. Step four is blame the guest. So they really think most of the problem lies with the host. SURPRISE!
Although they said steps would be taken immediately it looks more like at least a year for anything substantial. So much for the suggestions of the “viral” facebook post which is the subject of another thread.
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Looking at the logistics.
All super hosts and Pluses get a free pass.
You would start at the lowest stars…?
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I wonder how they plan to do this?
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No I don’t think so. It clearly says all 7 million will be verified. Some hosts have verified photos and Plus hosts are “verified” in person but other hosts are not. They don’t say what constitutes verified. But if they just actually look at all 7 million, even if they use a program to screen them, that’s a start.
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As a super ho and a plus… haven’t you all ready been verified by your guests?
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Well, yes, in that sense. But the email states all 7 million. I guess they will start with a computer program but at what point will they really look at a listing with eyes? And what about the house where the shooting occurred? Weren’t they verified? I don’t see what verifying hosts has to do with preventing parties.
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I wanna be an Airbnb verifier!
Pickiest guest EVER!
Dust under the bed - FAIL!
Dud light bulb - FAIL!
Ooh look… chipped paint…
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…
My thoughts exactly!
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I’m sure Plus listings would already be considered verified. Superhosts probably not as there are ways to game the review system.
Consistently low stars (and all new listings) seems like where they should start, but this statement makes me think they may actually start with the highest stars:
He says nothing about removing listings that don’t meet expectations. He only says they’re going to label the listings that do. It seems like they’re going to put a badge on listings to let guests know it’s been verified to meet their standards (i.e., a “Superhouse” badge 
) It would make more sense to first confirm that the best listings are worthy of the badge rather than to first confirm that the worst listings are not worthy of it.
The easiest way (though not foolproof) would be to have guests do it somehow. For example, by taking a short survey asking very specific questions about the address, accuracy, cleanliness, amenities, safety, etc. or by taking photos and submitting them to a “verification system”.
They already do: “Superhost,” “Plus,” “95 reviews,” “4.92,” etc.
Yep. Now I imagine guests will see “Verified” too.
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Here you go- photos put up by an Australian real estate agent! Verify This!
Think Airbnb has verified this one?
edit to add Looks like it has a hot tub though!
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Ahhhhh,that would be a NO from me!!