Comments on: With 5m total bookings, Airbnb plans aggressive international expansion http://gigaom.com/2012/01/26/airbnb-international-expansion/ Fri, 24 May 2013 18:34:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: jim http://gigaom.com/2012/01/26/airbnb-international-expansion/#comment-829282 Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:07:58 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=476025#comment-829282 Daniel, just enter in I hate airbnb to see many other people that have terrible experiences with the company, you can also have a look at tripadvisor. Most of the problems seem to stem from Airbnb offering 0 customer service and issues arising such as hosts not being available during the rental period when guests have a problem, for example being locked out in the middle of the night or toilets flooding. Airbnb are taking a huge commission for doing next to nothing, 12% to guests and 3% to hosts = 15%. Most local agencies offer a much higher level of service for 15% commission! Airbnb has received 120million in investment money, they are a very greedy bunch, they offer no service except advertising and they pay no local tax in anywhere except the US. You can rent peoples homes through many agencies as well as rental apartments, I would choose a small agency based in the place I was renting rather than Airbnb as I would rather not support a company that tries to disguise itself as being in support of a local community but pays no tax + offers no support if the rental goes wrong and does not have a clue about the place I have rented in. Another issue that comes to mind is what if I pay Airbnb for say 2 months rental and they transfer my cash to the host 3 days after the let starts then 2 weeks later the toilet floods and nobody fixes it, what do i do? Airbnb will not give me my money back and neither may the host, I may just have to put up with it, ok i can review the host but he or she can write a bad review about me too, fake or not.

]]> By: Daniel Cole http://gigaom.com/2012/01/26/airbnb-international-expansion/#comment-801892 Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:12:39 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=476025#comment-801892 Great to see Brian and his team doing so well. This is great news for others startups in the peer-to-peer marketplace. They had a lot of bad press when one of their guests trashed a place but really 1 in 5 million is pretty darn good. I’d bet that beats the incident rate at Hyatt any day!

My company ToolSpinner is also built on this P2P business model focused on power tool rentals.

]]> By: Kate http://gigaom.com/2012/01/26/airbnb-international-expansion/#comment-801629 Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:08:47 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=476025#comment-801629 Air bnb does not seem to pay / charge UK VAT, anyone know how they manage to do this?

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