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Ripe Problem

On a recent vacation in the rural part of another country,  I recalled reading this article about Airbnb product managers or in this case their supposed demise. The place we stayed had raving reviews, the location was perfect and the hosts supposedly made a real effort to help the guests get to know the country they were visiting. That all sounded awesome. The one bit of detail that I had missed is that none of the reviews were from guests who visited this place off-season as we did. I have no doubt all that was said about the place is true but what is true of summer may not be for the dead of winter. The first night the place was freezing and the insufficient heating would not warm it up until early morning. The next night we tripped a breaker and lost power for several hours. The third and last night was largely uneventful. By then the host and I had got our relationship pretty strained and testy. I was glad to be out of there and I am sure she shared the sentiment given the high frequency of events during a short stay. 

Looking back, product managers could have done a lot to help with a situation that is fairly common in older towns without modern amenities - the house simply does not support them. The host usually has a set of rules that is longer than a car manual and the guest misses details that will prove critically important during their stay - it sours things for everyone. The host is always on alert for the next issue that will arise, the guest feels like they made a mistake believing reviews and so on. In reality the long set of rules and instructions should be converted into FAQs supported by audio and video like an e-learning program. 

While the guest is not expected to get trained the rules of the house before they check-in but it may not hurt to give them karma points that convert into discounts over time to do the diligence ahead of time - save everyone needless hassle. Once they have an issue, a natural language search should point them to the exact part of the house rules training where their question is answered. The host can and should reasonably expect that the guest did this search and looked for help before contacting them. In every negative experience I have had over a decade of using Airbnb, it has always been the lack of access to information in a way that was standard and understandable. This is an area ripe for improvement for those designers and product managers that remain with Airbnb - the problem is overdue for solving. 

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