AirBnB May be Starting to Compromise Safety for Growth

On AirBnB, while there are a few features of the site that help hosts feel safe, the Company appears to be lowering the barriers of safety in an effort to improve conversions.  For example, customers were asked to complete a verification process before they could actually book anything.  Although now, this can be as simple as verifying your email address which really doesn't verify anything at all.  Of even greater concern is the addition of street names on listing maps.

Until recently, AirBnB would only show potential guests a blue circle around the general vicinity of the listing.  Now in an attempt to increase conversions and provide more detailed information to customers, they have added a white box which indicates the street name of the listing.  While this may seem like a subtle change, it makes it much easier for anonymous users to scan listings and easily locate the home based on the map, the street name, and the photos.

When we first created our AirBnB listings, we purposely adjusted the blue circle so that our listings would appear within the circle but not right in the center, in an attempt to deter anyone with malicious intentions from easily locating our home without booking first.  Unfortunately with the addition of the street name to the map significantly reduces the ambiguity of the listing's exact location.

Recently we had an inquiry from a user who had just registered with the site, with no profile photo and no verifications.  After receiving a communication from them that seemed strange we decided not to approve the booking.  30 minutes later, the user appeared on our doorstep and rang our doorbell.  Since there are only about 20 homes on our street, they were able to easily identify our home by putting our street name into their GPS and matching the photos on the site to our house.

Luckily in this case, it was a case of inexperienced AirBnB users and a complete lack of common sense about societal norms.  But this experience led me to investigate how this user had pinpointed our house without actually booking through the site.  It's only a matter of time before people realize that now, AirBnB can now be used as a virtual catalog for home burglars. We are superhosts on AirBnB and love using the site, but they will lose a lot of hosts if they do not remove the street names from the listing maps.  In general if AirBnB wants to continue to grow, they must put the safety of their hosts above the convenience for their guests.

UPDATE October 23, 2015

Within 3 days of this incident occurring (and the publishing of this post), AirBnB has worked with me to update the maps on our listings to provide the name of our neighborhood rather than our street name.  I have been continually impressed with their level of customer support and attention to the needs of their hosts.  I still think that they need to review this practice in general, but apparently if any hosts have a concern about it, they will change it for you.