How Airbnb A/B testing is ruining our income...

[Pete28]

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/experiments-at-airbnb-e2db3abf39e7

One of of the trends over large online websites is to make arbitrary changes and then see what happens our in the wild. In the above Airbnb suggests that these changes run for maybe 60 days in different markets. That's a long time for us who are potentially unwilling participants...

I would have no problem with this, but some of the changes (map only showing base price, price sliders, not showing full price with cleaning fee etc) have radical impacts on income and indeed on how we set our prices site wide. Back in the startup days, sure go break stuff and learn like the one below in the article.

Now Airbnb needs an ethical approach to doing this stuff. Allow us to opt in to tests, tell us you are doing tests, tell us how long tests will run, tell us potential impacts.