Mass Shooting in Airbnb house in Orinda last night, 4 dead

[Lan1]

Breaking news:  4 dead, many injured in  an Airbnb party house in Orinda CA last night ( 10/31). The house is just few steps away from my second residence in the same street. About 10:00pm, My daughter and I were driving back to our residence, noticed that the street were full of cars. After a while, we heard police helicopters and ambulances arriving ....Neighboor next door told us there was a mass shooting in the Airbnb house few steps away.

The head of Airbnb trust and safety announced that  they will conduct serious investigation, according to the news.

My dear fellow host, I have been posting  many times regarding my concerns to Airbnb unsafe booking process.  My own house has been targeted several times for huge parties/criminal activities, but it couldn’t get enough attention from Airbnb trust and safety 

department.

 Please protect yourself and be safe!

[Cormac0]

@Susan17

I posted before on the problems exhibited in your commentary, in my opinion, it can be directly attributed to the executive management team Chesky et al.

Its time for changes at the very top of Airbnb, Microsoft lost Steve Ballmer and brought in Satya Nadella and reinvent Microsoft its time for Airbnb to do something similar.

[Susan17]

No matter who's fronting the operation though, @Cormac0, they're still only going to be the puppets for the obscenely rich, powerful, megalomaniac early backers like Jeff Bezos et al, who'll continue to pull all the strings, just as they do now, and always have done.

But yes, there are chronic issues with the C-Suite brain-drain, and have been for quite some time. All the most experienced, most talented, most proven execs have bailed over the past couple of years... Chip Conley, Global Head of Community- the only person in the company with any real hospitality creds; Jonathan Mildenhall, Chief Marketing Officer; Laurence Tosi, Chief Financial Officer and accomplished Wall St veteran (the role of CFO remained unfilled for almost the entire year of 2018); Belinda Johnson, Chesky's right-hand woman since 2011 and Chief Operating Officer, (the role Tosi reportedly had his eye on before bailing), Mike Curtis, VP of Engineering since 2013, rumoured to have left after being passed over for the CTO role; Nick Shapiro, ex-CIA Deputy Chief of Staff and Global Head of Trust and Risk Management at Airbnb (departed just weeks before the Orinda tragedies)... all flown the nest (or deserted the sinking ship, depending on one's perspective)

So in effect, Airbnb has routinely been operating with more holes in its C-Suite, than in a fisherman's net. Interestingly though, two key strategic holes that have been plugged, were by long-term Amazon execs - Greg Greeley - 18 years at Amazon, former VP of Amazon Prime, and now Airbnb President of Homes; and Dave Stephenson - 17 years at Amazon, former VP/CFO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer Business, and now Airbnb's Chief Financial Officer. 

So it's not like Airbnb ain't already got Bezos' pawprints stamped all  over it...

[Michelle53]

@Susan17   I was just thinking about how Amazon works.    Low price, fast delivery, free shipping, and return anything you want, used or unused, no questions asked. For returns, many perfectly serviceable items still in original packaging just go to landfills.  Do shoppers actually *think* about the impact of returns?  Of course not - as long as they get their money back. 

It's trained people in new shopping behavior.  The "productization" of  "homestays"   (where the vast percentage of stays is really not actually in a person's home)  is part of this new training.

Make product purchasing easy. Ignore the product information. Order the product.Get the product to the purchaser as fast as possible, for no cost.  Use the product, carefully or carelessly, no matter. Return it for refund afterwards, claiming it didn't work, or was damaged or defective on receipt,  or whatever. Money refunded, no questions asked. 

Afterthought: has anyone ever tried to reach "Customer Service" at eBay, Amazon or Paypal ?   They actually make it about as difficult as possible, because the marketplace is between the purchaser and receiver of goods and services, and not the platform itself.  Requests for "support" generally go straight to the FAQs and online "help" text. 

Another afterthought:   When one has people deliberately trashing homes as a source of pride, my guess (totally unsubstatiated), is that it's becoming a ritual which gets people recognition in their communities as "tough guys/gals" or whatever.  Like waving guns about.  They can boast about it later on social media. 

Homestays should be considered a service, not a product. 

[Susan17]

Exactly that, @Michelle53 - and we won't even get started on Amazon's ruthless dominance in forcing suppliers to play by its rules while bearing all the risks, the recent furore over the company abruptly suspending sellers without warning or explanation, its callous treatment of small suppliers, its complete lack of regard for rules and regulations, and its shocking lack of care and concern for the health, safety and security of its warehouse workers.

Amazon Stops Ordering From Many Small Suppliers, Forcing Them To Bear The Risks Instead

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-amazon-marketplace-20190307-story.html

Amazon Still Suspending Sellers Without Notification, Despite New Policy

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sellers-suspended-no-notice-policy-2019-9

Amazon Workers At High Risk Of Getting Seriously Injured On The Job

https://www.kuow.org/stories/amazon-warehouse-workers-face-higher-injury-rates

All sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it. As does this...

Amazon Poised To Unleash Purge Of Small Suppliers, Sources Say

In the next few months, bulk orders will dry up for thousands of mostly smaller suppliers, according to three people familiar with the plan. Amazon’s aim is to cut costs and focus wholesale purchasing on major brands such as Procter & Gamble, Sony and Lego, the sources said. That will ensure the company has adequate supplies of must-have merchandise and help it compete with the likes of Walmart, Target and Best Buy.

The mom-and-pops that long have relied on Amazon for a steady stream of orders will have to learn a new way of doing business on the web store. Rather than selling in bulk directly to Amazon, they will need to win sales one shopper at a time. It’s one of the biggest shifts in Amazon’s e-commerce strategy since it opened the site to independent sellers almost 20 years ago. While the plan could be changed or canceled, it is moving forward, the sources said.

https://www.ttnews.com/articles/amazon-poised-unleash-purge-small-suppliers-sources-say

Change the words "Sony, Proctor & Gamble and Lego" to "Sonder, Stay Alfred and Lyric" and "Walmart and Target" to "Booking and Expedia".. and you could almost be talking about Airbnb, rather than Amazon. 

[Michelle53]

@Susan17 I found this interesting (from that last link you posted)  :-

"The vendor purge is the latest step in Amazon’s “hands off the wheel” initiative, an effort to keep expanding product selection on its website without spending more money on managers to oversee it all. The project entails automating tasks such as forecasting demand and negotiating prices which were predominantly done by Amazon employees. It also involves pushing more Amazon suppliers to sell goods themselves so Amazon doesn’t have to pay people to do it for them."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/10/24/what-will-it-take-for-brands-to-trust-amazon-aga...

"This week CNBC reported that Amazon is shipping out-of-date perishable food items, a casualty of Amazon’s rambling marketplace of third-party sellers who seem to be mainly governed by machine learning algorithms."

[Rebecca181]

@Susan17 This sounds so familiar - We hosts have been saying this about how Airbnb treats us for years...

"...and leadership treat them like kids..."

Clearly, the dysfunction within Airbnb is systemic. And unlikely to change, unless there are changes in upper management. Including at the very top.

[Susan17]

@Rebecca181 @John1574 

And then, there's this...

Airbnb Denies A Report That It Rejected A Plan To Require Government IDs To Sign Up For The Homesharing Service Because It Might Hurt Growth

https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-resisted-employee-advice-regulating-platform-2019-12

[Pat271]

I also think that press is super-reactive about Airbnb shootings right now.

When is the last time you heard about shootings in hotels?  Well, those have happened recently and often, like these:

https://fox8.com/2019/11/02/2-killed-in-shooting-at-hotel-outside-cincinnati/

https://www.everythinglubbock.com/news/local-news/hotel-shooting-turns-fatal-with-1-dead/

https://patch.com/new-york/harlem/harlem-man-killed-new-years-eve-shooting-police-say

https://kfor.com/2019/11/29/one-killed-one-injured-in-shooting-at-oklahoma-city-hotel/

...and I found the above with a 3 minute cursory google search, and they all happened within the last couple of months!

Bottom line is, if someone wants to shoot someone, they’ll find them no matter where he/she happens to be.  We can vet and vet until we are blue in the face (and we should), but we don’t know the personal lives of these people, vendettas their friends and family might have against them, etc. All we can do is use experience, common sense, and gut feel to increase the chances of having problem-free people in our homes.

I’m hoping, though, that these incidents will force Airbnb to remove their guest-favoring rose-colored glasses, come up with practical host guidelines for avoiding trouble, remove priority search placement for Instant Book, enforce penalties if more or different guests arrive than are indicated on the reservation...and similar incentives to encourage good behavior.

I can dream, can’t I?

[Sean433]

Virtually all of my listings have a blurb in the description that if a party is thrown, it will lead to forfeiting the reservation without a refund. It has helped deter some of the party crowd but I still always scrutinize the locals. Problem is that locals are starting to realize that when they open their account, they can just select their home town as being somewhere else, thereby being accepted by local hosts.

Even when there is no party and the guest ignore your rules by parking in restricted areas or playing loud music late into the night, it still ruins our reputation with the neighborhood. So I can see why airbnb's reputation as a whole is not that great. It ultimately affects our reputation as hosts within our communities. I don't want the neighbours looking at me as being responsible for disrupting their community. But I think regardless of whether your airbnb gets bad guests or not, the neighbours will always be on a level of high alert and I understand why. With short term rentals, you will almost always have neighbours who dislike what you are doing. Most neighbours just live in their homes and are not using real estate to cash flow. They don't understand the difficulties of long term tenants and think you are just operating an airbnb because of greed. We actually don't earn much more money with short term anymore due to the over saturation. A lot of us are doing short term because we have had very bad experiences with long term tenants. But most neighbours won't understand this because they are not real estate people.

[Marg11]

Hi, All BnB hosts,

I was concerned recently when a guest complained to me he couldn't sleep because of music at a neighbour's party. We had not been disturbed despite being on site. I replied that our letter of introduction included the number to call the local city ranger if there was noise in the neighbourhood and he would deal with the problem. English was not our guest's first language so my husband said to knock on our door and we would call the ranger.

Two nights later on a significant national holiday, the neighbours, and many others in the area, had a party after the city fireworks, which our guests had attended. We went to sleep with no problem but in the morning we found our guest, instead of following our instructions had visited the neighbours and asked him to turn down the music. Luckily they turned down the music and our guest was extremely pleased with himself. Because of his nationality and limited English, our guest did not understand he could have met with aggression destroying the truce between us and our more recently arrived neighbours.

Fortunately, it was all OK but it frightened me that international guests can ignore local advice.

[Robin4]

@Marg11 

I thought local noise and colour was one of the lovely things about living in Warwick Marg.

For those who don't know Warwick is a provincial town in Queensland about 140 Kms south west of Brisbane in the Darling Downs region. Having a population of around 15,000 it is not the epicentre  of up to date culture. But like all these provincial towns the locals sure know how to make the most of their spare time. If my choice was to either live in Brisbane or live in Warwick, my choice would be Warwick....hands down!

If an overseas guest didn't want to experience local culture, how the hell did they end up in Warwick Marg?

Cheers......Rob

[Marg11]

Except like you, Rob we are in Western Australia. Used to get lots of confusing bookings till Airbnb removed us from amongst the QLD stays. Our guest, an old school friend of another neighbour was on his first visit to Aus after a whirlwind tour of NZ. Nearly suggested earplugs as there are regular Friday night gigs over the back fence. Anyway, it was also too hot and he has returned to the snow.

[Jennifer1421]

Woke up to this news this morning:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-dead-shooting-cityplace-1.5448788

From the article:

"The shooting occurred during a social gathering"; and, from a couple who live in the area, "You see these kinds of issues coming up from Airbnb, where it's people that are not regular residents of where you live and are causing violence, and it's not good for us." 

Just how are guests being screened? These units are NOT large homes - they're 1 and 2 bedroom condos, so I am pretty certain the host would've had a No Parties rule. Also, isn't it now a rule that hosts who have listings in multi-unit residential situations such as this MUST conform to the no party rule?

I am aware that intentions cannot be screened for. However, if there were consequences (especially monetary) meted out by the platform in all warranted situations, people of ill intent (ie: those who intend to have a party in a no party listing) would think twice before even signing up as members.