Mirrors my experience to a T. There are so many issues with AirBNB (bidding process, calendar, cost model, trust model) that it strikes me as being created by some naive suburban kids. The amount of work that they do to prevent out of band messaging makes any sort of meaningful discourse or authentication impossible.
I have used it 5 times (some whole apt, some rooms). In _general_ it works o.k I travel a lot and the amount of work that one has to do (back and forth with host, broken calendaring, shady host) etc only makes sense for longer stays. If I am only going to be at place for a weekend, I'll book a hotel and be done with it.
It isn't feedback against bad hosts, it is the amount of work that it takes to _not_ get a bad host which isn't comparable to weeding out bad hotels.
