Airbnb Tries To Clean Up The Mess

I got an email today from the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, perhaps because I have booked rooms through Airbnb in the past. He starts by doing a long and convincing mea culpa, and states unequivocally that they screwed up, he screwed up, and they now know how bad they screwed up. And he announces a new approach to safety and security:

via email

Today we are launching a new safety section of the website (www.airbnb.com/safety) with the following offerings:

• Airbnb Guarantee
  Starting August 15th, when hosts book reservations through Airbnb their personal property will be covered for loss or damage due to vandalism or theft caused by an Airbnb guest up to $50,000 with our Airbnb Guarantee. Terms will apply to the program and may vary (e.g. by country). This program will also apply retroactively to any hosts who may have reported such property damage prior to August 1, 2011.
• 24-Hour Customer Hotline
  Beginning next week, we will have operators and customer support staff ready to provide around the clock phone and email support for anything big or small.
• 2x Customer Support Team
  Since last month we have more than doubled our Customer Support team from forty-two to eighty-eight people, and will be bringing on a 10-year veteran from eBay as our Director of Customer Support next week.
• Dedicated Trust & Safety Department
  Airbnb now has an in-house task force devoted to the manual review of suspicious activity. This team will also build new security features based on community feedback.
• Contact the CEO
  If you can’t get a hold of anyone or if you just want to contact me, email brian.chesky@airbnb.com.

We’ve also added several other safety-related features to strengthen the trust and confidence of our community:

• Safety Tips
  Suggestions for both guests and hosts on how to utilize our tools to better inform your decisions.
• Verified Profiles
  Our updated user profiles chronicle their public history on Airbnb, giving you more insight than ever about a potential host or guest. Along with standard social information, you’ll also see if a user has verified their phone number, connected to their Facebook account, and whether the majority of their reviews are positive or negative. And as always, you can read their reviews and references.
• Customized trust settings
  We now give hosts the ability to set custom trust parameters for bookings; those who don’t meet the specified requirements will be unable to make a reservation. Selections for Trust Settings include: verified phone numbers, profile descriptions, location information, with more coming soon.
• Product suggestions poll
  Have more ideas on improving safety? Now, you can submit and vote on the best ideas through our new product suggestions poll.

We’ll have to see if this is enough to turn around the PR mess they created for themselves, but it is a step in the right direction, at least.

Day Desks: Coworking Goes Hotel

Coworking is a great model for footloose (and penurious) freelancers and small startups, who need places to work but don’t want or can’t afford the overhead of getting an office.

One issue is level of commitment: most coworking spaces are organized around a monthly agreement: so much for a full-time desk, so much for full time access to shared desks, so much for one day/week access, and so on. So, even though you just want to date all over town, the coworking spaces are still looking for a monogamous tenant.

I stumbled across two sites yesterday that take out the marriage aspect of coworking, and make it seem more like dating, or renting a hotel room: Desktime and OpenDesks.

These sites allow you to search for a desk to rent by the day, based on geography. 

In the case of Desktime, you can search for other features, like a shared printer or conference room.

Desktime is only available for use in Austin, Chicago, and New York, while Opendesk seems to be more agnostic.

I can imagine using these apps frequently, especially now that I opted out of the coworking space I had signed up for. I found that I was not actually using the space one day per week, as I had planned, and I travel all over New York for meetings. Now I will be able to track down space that is located near where I am going to be, like near to Grand Central Station, where my trains come and go.

I bet that the creation of sites like these will open up the untapped option of companies renting out desks who otherwise wouldn’t, becuase of the hassles involved. These new sites could act like AirBNB, getting companies to rent space on a casual basis, that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

A side note: Yesterday, I came across Third Door, a coworking site in London, that provides day care for freelancer’s kids. I haven’t heard of that in the US at all.

Why is that? Don’t coworking types have kids?

Desktime has a box I can check looking for ‘pet friendly’ spaces, but ‘kid friendly’ isn’t an option, I guess.