U.S.: With one bad incident, Airbnb’s reputation quickly going up in smoke?
- Whoever these people were, they were living large and having one hell of a time for an entire week inside my home, unwatched, unchecked, free to do whatever destruction they wished. And damn, did they do a lot of it.
- Airbnb user “EJ” • In a blog post she wrote last month regarding a nightmarish experience she had with the fast-growing vacation rental service, where the tenants using her home (which she knew nothing about until the very last second) appeared to have ransacked every piece of her life — stealing crap, copying vital information like birth certificates and Social Security cards, punching holes in walls, setting things on fire … you get the idea. In recent days, the controversy has gotten out of hand, due in huge part to the fact that Airbnb did not offer to pay for the woman’s financial losses as a result of the incident. Only after TechCrunch wrote an article about the incident did Airbnb appear to relent. But the victim says that, despite words to the contrary, Airbnb hasn’t really been supportive — with a co-founder going so far as to push her to take down her original blog post. All in all, this looks really bad for Airbnb, which previously had a rep as a potential multibillion-dollar startup. source