Talk:Airbnb/Archives/2020

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Deaths Caused by Airbnb Rentals

I'm surprised these two deaths caused by Airbnb rentals are not listed on the Controversies section. Potential users of the Airbnb service should be aware of past incidents leading to death, and Airbnb's response to the incidents. I also find it suspicious that there are seven full-window Airbnb advertisements on that Medium.com page, perhaps as their way of monitoring how many visits the page gets.

• https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on-airbnb-6bff8d600c04

“The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity."

"I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face-to-face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath."

"..."

"We let her down, and for that we are very sorry,” CEO Brian Chesky wrote in 2011, after a San Francisco woman, “EJ,” returned home to find her apartment destroyed, her possessions burned, and her family heirlooms stolen. When her blog post documenting the ordeal went viral, they changed their policy to guarantee $50,000, then $1 million, in property damages and hired enough customer service reps to man the phones 24–7."

"Less has been done to protect guests against hosts, presumably because fewer horror stories have gone public. When an American man was bit by a dog left behind at a homeshare in Argentina this March, Airbnb refused to cover his medical expenses until after The New York Times began inquiring."

• https://www.wired.com/2017/01/how-airbnb-stopped-playing-nice/

"On December 30, 2013, only a day before a six-year-old girl named Sophia Liu was hit and killed by an Uber driver in San Francisco, Elizabeth Eun-chung Yuh, a 35-year-old South Korean native from Ontario, Canada, died of carbon monoxide poisoning at an Airbnb in Taipei. She had traveled there with friends for a wedding and checked into an apartment downtown, where the landlord had recently enclosed an outdoor porch without properly venting the water heater or installing a carbon monoxide alarm. According to a report in the China Post, her four friends in adjacent rooms were admitted to a local hospital and treated for carbon monoxide inhalation, but Yuh was found dead at the scene."

"The Yuh family, which did not respond to my attempts to reach them, contacted San Francisco personal injury attorney William B. Smith, who advised them to file a wrongful death suit and challenge Airbnb’s 14-page terms-of-service agreement, which stated that hosts and guests assumed all risks and were responsible for adhering to local laws. But soon after, Smith told me, the Yuh family informed him that Airbnb had offered them two million dollars to resolve the matter. They decided to accept instead of filing a lawsuit."

"According to a legal paper Smith later published on his law firm’s website, Airbnb denied liability for the incident and specified that the settlement was “offered only for humanitarian reasons.” One attorney who worked for Airbnb later told me that Airbnb didn’t have to settle the case but that, in such situations, Chesky focused intently on the right thing to do. To Smith, though, any hint of benevolence rang false. “People might pay money for humanitarian reasons, but corporations don’t. They pay because of legal liabilities,” he says."

"..."

"In a joint interview with all three Airbnb co-founders, I asked about such tragedies. “There is a certain statistical probability that extremely unlikely things will happen from time to time, given enough scale,” Nate Blecharczyk answered. “It can be an opportunity actually to come out stronger. When something bad happens, we really look deep within and try to think hard about . . . what it is we can do going forward to make the service better.”"

"Indeed, in the United States in 2014, Airbnb started giving away carbon monoxide detectors as well as first-aid kits, smoke detectors, and safety cards that advised hosts on emergency preparedness. It also said that by the end of the year, hosts had to have smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes, though there was no way to determine whether the hosts had actually installed them." — Preceding unsigned comment added by LetterOpener (talk • contribs) 17:42, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Sourcing quality concerns

I have tagged the article as I have source quality concerns to encourage discussion. There are questionable sources peppered throughout the article, such as medium.com, businessinsider.com and even CRUNCHBASE. Those three, you can see their evaluation on WP:RSP. There are other self-published and blog sources like https://maphappy.org/ that don't necessarily appear on that list, but questionable nonetheless. Graywalls (talk) 07:20, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

@Graywalls: I support removing and/or replacing lower quality sourcing. You've mentioned Business Insider, CrunchBase, and Medium are possibly unreliable. If you can confirm specifically which sources and text are problematic, can I help by trying to find replacement sources? I'd like to be proactive about addressing the warning banner at the top of the page if possible. Thanks! AK Airbnb (talk) 02:09, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

The particular Medium source is especially bad. "class notes"? come on. If you could find sources that are green in that RSP list, it would be great. If not, at least make sure they're reputable and not marked as yellow/red in that list. (not everything is in there). @AK Airbnb: Graywalls (talk) 02:11, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

@Graywalls: This CNBC source does not confirm the exact wording of the current article but does have information about the company's early history and involvement by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk. Would you be willing to take a look and replace bad sourcing and update wording appropriately in the first paragraph of the history section? The Crunchbase source is grouped with two other citations, so can this citation just be removed from the page? AK Airbnb (talk) 03:38, 8 December 2020 (UTC)