This is reminding me of the Soutwest Air response to the mistreatment they put Kevin Smith thru. When he went public, it was obvious they didn't give a damn about him and they were totally in damage control mode. Rather than apologize and recognize the error, they tried to turn it into a debate about whether fat people should fly, and they misrepresented the situation further.
I saw that comment on tech crunch and felt that Chesky was begin dishonest (based solely on having ready he previous blog post from ej) and now we see that AirBnB tried to get her to shut up!
As a frequent AirBnB customer (staying in a place rented via AirBnB at the moment, in fact) I'm finding that I'm having less and less faith in the company as these incidents unfold. (I'm not just talking about this, but Kutchner, the Craigslist, the fact that they keep their customers in the dark, etc.)
Frankly, as someone who has been online for two decades now, talking to people I can get a good feeling for how trustworthy they are. AirBnB inhibits this because it inhibits communication-- it can only happen thru their service which is not conducive to having a dialog.
The sole purpose of restricting this communication and restricting customer's ability to assess the risk in any of these transactions is AirBnB's desire to prevent the possibility that a deal might happen off of their site.
Reality is, this is silly. We found an apartment on AirBnB once and then found it on the internet (wasn't hard given knowledge of the details of the apartment.) We could have booked it that way and saved the AirBnB commission... but we booked it thru AirBnB anyway because we wanted them to escrow the funds. (Little did we know how little protection AirBnB provides in that regard.) But we were able to find out more about that apartment by looking at its website compared to the info on AirBnB.
And more importantly, having the owner's email address allowed us to discuss a lot of possible issues about the situation, and assess their trustworthiness... something impossible or difficult to do thru AirBnB.
I saw that comment on tech crunch and felt that Chesky was begin dishonest (based solely on having ready he previous blog post from ej) and now we see that AirBnB tried to get her to shut up!
As a frequent AirBnB customer (staying in a place rented via AirBnB at the moment, in fact) I'm finding that I'm having less and less faith in the company as these incidents unfold. (I'm not just talking about this, but Kutchner, the Craigslist, the fact that they keep their customers in the dark, etc.)
Frankly, as someone who has been online for two decades now, talking to people I can get a good feeling for how trustworthy they are. AirBnB inhibits this because it inhibits communication-- it can only happen thru their service which is not conducive to having a dialog.
The sole purpose of restricting this communication and restricting customer's ability to assess the risk in any of these transactions is AirBnB's desire to prevent the possibility that a deal might happen off of their site.
Reality is, this is silly. We found an apartment on AirBnB once and then found it on the internet (wasn't hard given knowledge of the details of the apartment.) We could have booked it that way and saved the AirBnB commission... but we booked it thru AirBnB anyway because we wanted them to escrow the funds. (Little did we know how little protection AirBnB provides in that regard.) But we were able to find out more about that apartment by looking at its website compared to the info on AirBnB.
And more importantly, having the owner's email address allowed us to discuss a lot of possible issues about the situation, and assess their trustworthiness... something impossible or difficult to do thru AirBnB.