Airbnb reviews

Airbnb design culture resembles a college design course, which isn't completely surprising because this was the founder's first job and success out of a design school. There's very little looking at real data, qualitative user feedback or real user empathy. Airbnb has forced out all of the best people who think deeply and holistically about interaction problems. The designers who are most successful are the ones who can quickly create multiple iterations of visually compelling ideas. As the result the design is beautiful but still disjointed, unintuitive and arguably results in a much less successful bottom line for the company.

when the senior-management had stated a parameter of quality Airbnb accommodations, without knowing how much of the said accommodations exist in the market, unrealistic targets were doled out to contractors, which were very very hard to achieve. No specifics were provided in terms of quality. There was a budget provided for educating potential hosts about how to use Airbnb, but since it is supposed to be a community-oriented platform and as such, communities interact periodically, this budget was used sparingly, and barely one meetup was organised, when in fact there was a need of atleast 2 meetups a month. But such ideas were always shot down citing budgets and lack of achieving the objective. The objective which somehow changed during every planning session. The micromanagement, and the doublespeak in terms of acquiring new hosts was demotivating. It is as if the independence that was promised at the beginning of the job was not there at all. If you are a contractor here, you are going to be a contractor only.