The fact that people assume Airbnb was automating spam is entirely false.
At one point in our past we did have a small team of remote sales people that we contracted to acquire listings through person-to-person sales, but their efforts were largely ineffective. To set the record straight this process was never automated as purported. Our sales team emailed listings on Craigslist one-by-one and targeted only listings that they thought would be a good fit for our marketplace. At times they did contact people who did not want to be solicited to. However when alerted to these actions we ensured that they stopped immediately.
Yeah, it's just a really weird coincidence that someone who made a couple hundred thousand dollars spamming in college later used the same techniques in a new business? Well, maybe, but you're going to need to do better than say cross my heart and pinky swear.
Also, stop being a bullshit artist. Let me rewrite your second paragraph for you in a truthful fashion: "Yeah, we spammed people. Our sales team went through craigslist and emailed listings we wanted to poach, even if they'd said they didn't want to receive such emails. We're those assholes. But please, let me write about this in the passive tense and distance ourselves from it. What I'd really like is for none of you to hold our admitted conduct against us because, well, that would be really convenient. For us, that is. Further, please don't judge our current conduct by our past actions because, well, again, way more convenient if we can just say random external contractors <bullshit bullshit bullshit> and start over with a blank slate."
I'm very sorry that you had this experience on Airbnb. However, I'm very glad that it has come to our attention.
Airbnb operates as a trusted community marketplace that thrives on community engagement, not anonymity. Building trust is not an easy mission, but it is a mission to which we very are committed. We have very stringent quality and conduct control standards that we require both hosts and guests to abide by. We rely heavily on direct feedback from our users through our community support team and transaction based reviews in order to remain a trusted place for people from around the world to book, list and discover unique spaces. We find the behavior of this host to be unacceptable and have since followed up with them directly. We invite anyone who has similar experiences to reach out to us directly in these instances, which we take very seriously.
As mentioned by someone else, taking payments offline is not something we allow our hosts to do. Hosts, if they so require it, have the ability to charge cleaning fees and security deposits through our service, allowing the guest a seamless, safe and secure booking experience. Our payment process was designed to prevent fraud and scams which are rampant on other sites, where payments are often sent through the mail between strangers, with no recourse.
Instances like this remind us that we have a long way to go to making Airbnb the best place in the world for people to find the space they need. While we are disappointed that you had a bad experience, we truly appreciate your honest feedback, which challenges us to keep building to achieve our mission.
We scaled a rate that took us all by surprise. Obviously, some things are less important than others and we had to prioritize. We're getting around to updating the peripheral pages soon.
At one point in our past we did have a small team of remote sales people that we contracted to acquire listings through person-to-person sales, but their efforts were largely ineffective. To set the record straight this process was never automated as purported. Our sales team emailed listings on Craigslist one-by-one and targeted only listings that they thought would be a good fit for our marketplace. At times they did contact people who did not want to be solicited to. However when alerted to these actions we ensured that they stopped immediately.