Living and Dying on Airbnb: Pitfalls of: "The Sharing Economy"

[KoKo]

My dad died in an Airbnb rental, and he’s not the only one. What can the company do to improve safety?

t’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Since the incident, I’ve felt isolated by the burden of this story and my sense of obligation to go public with it, but with an unclear aim. Am I “raising awareness,” in the familiar path of the victim speaking out? And if so, to what end? What will sharing my story really mean for Airbnb? Could the company, with its reportedly $24 billion valuation and plans to go public, do more to ensure the safety of the properties where millions of guests stay each year? As Airbnb rises into a global hospitality behemoth — reinventing not just how we travel but how we value private space — what responsibility does the company have to those who have given it their dollars and trust?

Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind. While my family may be the first guests to speak out about a wrongful death at an Airbnb rental, it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. Staying with a stranger or inviting one into your home is an inherently dicey proposition. Hotel rooms are standardized for safety, monitored by staff, and often quite expensive. Airbnb rentals, on the other hand, are unregulated, eclectic, and affordable, and the safety standards are only slowly materializing.

To be fair, Airbnb has always put basic safeguards in place, like user reviews. But its general approach to safety is consistent with Silicon Valley’s “build it first, mend it later” philosophy. When an early product produces negative outcomes and bad press, apologize. Then, fix it; make it better. “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. (About that incident, Airbnb told me, “Our initial response didn’t measure up, and we’re constantly auditing our customer service team to ensure these kinds of errors don’t happen. In this case, we worked with the guest to help cover his medical and other expenses, and we provided a full refund of his booking costs.”) Home safety tips were not incorporated into the sign-up process for new properties until after my father’s incident.

Even so, nothing is currently done to make sure hosts actually comply with safety guidelines (or even read them), which is a problem particularly for newer properties on the platform, which Airbnb’s customers, as opposed to employees, are left to vet for safety. Should the company demand more from aspiring hosts — submitting an application, passing a safety quiz, hopping on the phone with an Airbnb safety rep, or undergoing a home inspection (an idea which Chesky himself has suggested) — they’d burden the seamlessness of the minutes-long sign-up process and deter new registrations.

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An Interesting Read....poses questions about some of the downside of the new "Sharing Economy" at...

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

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. Freak accident

[KoKo]

2. The Reporter of this makes it clear!

The family didn't get money from anything but the Insurance Company of the Property Owner! The family never sued "Airbnb," for any restitution. The Reporter actually did positive articles for "Airbnb" before his father's death which he makes clear in the first paragraphs of his article.

I think his "cautions" are well worth the read. We jump into the latest, these days, without thinking of what might happen...even if what we are jumping into seems like such a good cause to move society forward. We forget what we learned when "lack of regulation" caused such terrible problems in the past.

[Gormy Cuss]

3. A dead tree with a swing attached to a branch at a rental property is negligent.

It's not an accident.

[KoKo]

4. The Homeowners paid for it...but, it's not clear as to Fair Responsibility...

The tree limb still had the swing attached and maybe no one used it for years or didn't think that an adult Rental Guest would go out and try the swing. You can't always tell if a large enough tree limb to support a tire swing is fragile, either. Maybe a little kid wouldn't have been enough weight to bring it down, but an adult would. It's a terrible thing whether it was a little kid or the reporters father who wanted a taste of his youth.

I think the Reporter of the Article is pointing out what the "unknowns" are when one rents from this service and that going with a "New Online Site" that doesn't inspect properties for possible hazards like smoke alarms, exits in case of fire (for Apartments) and things like hazards on property grounds( like a leaving a swing tied to a tree limb), without thinking the limb could be faulty, are concerns that those who rent might want to think about before leaving themselves open to insurance claims or law suits if they rent in the future.

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Yes, the point was that this rental wasn't inspected the way a licensed hotel would have been

and it's far less likely that there would be a dead tree with a swing in it at a regulated establishment because of liability. As he pointed out, most homeowners policies wouldn't have paid for this "accident" while the owners were using the place as a commercial property.

As for no one thinking that an adult would have used the swing, that's the kind of naive thinking that homeowners can indulge in but there is nothing in the article that even suggests that it wouldn't have fallen had one or two kids used the swing instead.

[shrike]

6. The writer's pain is palpable

I suspect he blames himself. If you read the article, he was the one who introduced his parents on to the Air BnB concept. I hope he finds peace.

As for Airbnb, I have no problem with people renting out their property if they so choose. But in a fairer economy we would not have people needing to do so in order to make rent payments or stay out of foreclosure.