2y ago

AirBnB Authorizes Monitoring Devices That Are Totally Not Creepy at All

www.orwell.org

AirBnB Authorizes Monitoring Devices That Are Totally Not Creepy at All::Minut – know exactly what your guests are up to 24/7 with the new and discreet telescreen.

16 comments

- There are a lot of hotels where you can get apartment-esque amenities without the bullshit. They’ve made efforts to make hotels feel more at home and it’s nice.
  
  The only thing missing from hotels is a private common area for groups. If they had more hotels with 2/3 bedrooms around a living space I would never airbnb again.
Just stay at a hotel.
Similar price, no bullshit cleaning instructions (then cleaning fees on top), no immoral monitoring, consistent experience.
AirBnB was at best a cute gimmick for a few years. Now it's a measurably worse experience.
- The idea of "I've got a spare room that I'll briefly rent out for cheap" is nice, but as all nice things, it inevitably gets ruined by twats on all sides. Likewise with ridesharing apps that could serve the use case "I'm heading that way, maybe someone needs a ride that way too", but end up a shadier version of Taxis.
And with that, I think my time using Airbnb is officially over. Don't get me wrong, this is far from the only reason, but hotels are already basically the same price (often cheaper) and come with so much less drama and privacy issues.
I've got two trips booked on Airbnb over the next year, I'll probably keep both, but I won't be booking any future trips
- how's your time officially over if you're still using it over the next year lol
  
  Not booking any new trips? It's for the solar eclipse, and bookings in the area I want to see it in are already getting scarce, so no sense in missing out on that rare experience just to screw Airbnb out of $100 (or whatever their cut is)
My partner and I both carry two phones - personal and work. Can’t wait to get kicked out of an AirBnB due to having too many phones on the premises.
- There are many problems with Airbnb, but let's be fair no one's getting kicked out for having four phones.
  It's a straw man argument to say that this is Not for the places that end up with 25 phones.
  This is an attempt to keep party houses under control. I can see how one could argue for and/or against this but let's be clear what it's about. 👍😁
  
  My dude, you're treating the slippery slope like a water park, face first
A recent pilot in Prague enabled Hosts on Airbnb to trial Minut noise sensors, and found a reminder can be all that’s needed for a potential noise issue to be quickly resolved
If a reminder is all that's needed, the device could be an offline decibel meter that lights up when the volume exceeds a threshold.
Plus I'm sure parents are going to love their phone blowing up when little Billy is a bit too cranky at bed time.
Yeah, I'm never using Airbnb again. This device is a crutch for wannabe hoteliers who don't know what hospitality is.
The prices on Airbnb aren't much different from real hotels, and there's way less of a gamble with a hotel brand that can't just delete their user profile and create a new one tomorrow after a bad review.
- Recently I've been finding hotels at a lower cost than airBNB.
  yea, I'll take the nicer room, downtown, without a load of cleaning fees

16 comments