The Chaser Report - UnfAir BNB

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

While Charles is staying at an expensive hotel in Brisbane, he's increasingly thankful to not be using AirBNB, which is about to have a massive modern upgrade. And by modern upgrade, of course we mean utter enshittification. ---Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] our caviar addiction: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Live from Brisbane, Vegas. Charles, you're in my favourite place in Australia. Congratulations on making it back to Brisbane. So sorry I can't join you. Things to do here at home in Sydney.

The not nearly is hot. A non-Olympian city That I live in Yes, yes Oh no, this is This is where it's at Can I say We're staying in this place

called New Farm Which has to be the richest place On Earth, I think I just went and tried to buy a croissant Oh no From the local baker here On the corner Gives how much for one croissant

Ah, ten dollars Eleven! No 11 dollars Like a plain croissant A plain croissant Oh yeah you got You know, you know why that is, don't you?

Because they look fucking amazing. They look like works of art. You know why New Farm is super fancy? Oh, is it Clive Palmer or something? No, no, no, much better than Clive Palmer. I'll tell you after this. Hello, Bluey. You're in Bluey country.

That's where Bluey lives. Yeah, it's... I'm pretty short. Yeah, okay. Well, that explains why there's all these cartoon characters walking around the streets all the time. Well, it might be that Bluey lives in, maybe what's it called, Red Leaf or something? No, that would have been the acid that I scored from Fortitude Valley to stop there. Oh, perfect.

No, anyway, New Farm does feature. It is very posh and very nice. Did you go up Mount Kutthai, whatever you call it? No, I come here to work, Dom. Did you go to the weird beach on the river? You know, there's a beach on the Brisbane River? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, over on South Bank. Yeah, yeah.

Completely artificial. I think it's called the Streets Beach. It's Street's Beach, yeah, yeah. Streets TM Beach. Yeah, yep. No, I'll do that this afternoon. Although it's raining here. Did you go out in the valley?

Because I must say, I've never felt closer to being randomly killed by a random drunk person than in the valley. Not so much lately, but in the 90s, my goodness. It does remind you of what Kings Cross used to be like back when it was the subject of lots of Channel 9. When people promote gentrification, Charles. At our advanced age, we can see the advantage of gentrification. The lack of a sense of women at death. I haven't been stabbed this month in Fortitude Valley. Anyway, I want to talk today about the future, future, future of the internet, basically.

Of the internet? Yes, because, you know, you might think that Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or whatever. Or Steve Bannon, if we're doing steves. Are going to, you know, come up with the future of the internet. But no, no, no, no, no. There's a new kid on the block. Oh, yeah. And it's going to completely transform everything.

Dom, you know how years ago when you traveled somewhere, you wanted to do something like, say you wanted a place to stay for the night. What you would do is you go to a hotel, right? Yes. You have to ring and book in advance and, yeah, it was very complicated. Yes, yes. And what would happen, you go to the hotel, You'd sleep in the hotel.

They'll tell you how much that it costs. And then you'd pay that price and then you'd leave, right? Yeah, there'd be a rate that you'd know what it was going to be and you'd pay that amount and it would all be fairly transparent. That's right. I remember that. And then what happened is Silicon Valley disrupted the hotel space. Yeah.

And in particular, Brian Chesky from Airbnb interrupted that space. Oh, absolutely goodness. And they came up with an innovative new way to house people, which you want a place, you turn up, You think you're going to play one price and then you pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars more in various fees that don't seem at all fair because there's things like cleaning fees but you've got to clean up after yourself.

Yeah, I think that's why it's called Airbnb because the money that you have vanishes into the air. Into the air. And also, Charles, actually this makes another point. I haven't ever thought of this before. We should accept the names of things. B&B in the hospitality industry, Charles, for many, many, many, many decades has meant bed and breakfast.

Yes. Airbnb's manifestly do not offer breakfast. Yes. What does the name mean? They're built on a lie. Well, this is, it's strange you should say that because this is where Brian Chesky is coming in. Because what he's proposing, and he's just spent $200 million at Airbnb coming up with this new plan, he's completely rewritten the app.

And, you know, when people completely rewrite an app, we know how smoothly that you should. Ask Sonos. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So what he's done is it's not just going to be about hotels anymore. Airbnb is going to be the everything app. Brian Chesky is coming to ruin everything, right? Well, turn everything into an Airbnb.

To give the same painful, annoying service from Airbnb on every other part of life. So, for example, say you're staying in an Airbnb and you go, oh, well, this is a bit shit because I was expecting breakfast because of B&B. Maybe I need some breakfast. You could go on the Airbnb app and look up someone who is an amateur breakfast maker in your region. And then what you do is that, you know, you'd see the price of how much breakfast is. Yeah. And then they'd bring you the breakfast. And then there'd be all these unexpected charges on top of that.

And that will be the revolution. Right. So you don't, you no longer have to either get up and make breakfast yourself or use, one of the many, many, many other apps that do that service. You can just do it all from within Airbnb. How incredibly convenient? Yes. Didn't Uber already do this, Charles, when they had,

I just didn't remember them having Uber, which had the same sort of idea. Remember when everyone was going about the sharing economy and how exciting it was, that apps were serving as kind of online middlemen to get in between individual contractors getting paid very little and the consumer getting paid way too much? And it was Airbnb and Uber. And then Uber had Uber Eats as well. Yes. And so hasn't this already been done, Charles, a little bit?

No, but the difference is that Airbnb wasn't making 15% out of every transaction. Oh, but also. In any of those other apps, right? Whereas this one. Airbreeds gets you to like regular restaurants and actually have a, I don't know, food standard rating and so on. No. And so, yeah, so the key difference here is that Airbnb doesn't want people who know how to do things properly, right? But they don't want, you know, because that's the whole, the whole spirit behind Airbnb is, you know, they don't get you into hotels.

They get you into people who are pretending to be hotels. Yeah, you pay the same amount for something objectively shit that's not often on a professional basis. To say you want a haircut, right, you could go to a hairdresser, right? Or you could ask Airbnb to provide you with somebody who's pretending to be a hairdresser. What a great idea. Yeah. But the whole thing is, so Brian Chesky's thought long and hard about this. And apparently he had this brainwave at the end of the pandemic that this is how he was obviously going to pump the value of his stock next.

And he wrote a 10,000 word document in Evernote. It's very bizarre. This is all coming from a Wired article, by the way. So he, because he did an interview with WIRE, where he compares himself to Steve Jobs. You know, like he says, the way I do feedback is very. Steve Jobsian. Wow, that's a sense of nobody should ever say. Incoherent 10,000 word document about how he's going to get involved in everything.

And the whole basic idea is that Airbnb is going to get very good at verifying that you actually exist. Oh, okay. And their stretch goal is that it will even become almost like a government ID of your existence. Right. So they're not after whether you know how to. cut hair, they're just, they're going, well, the problem to solve in terms of being served amateur hairdressing services, is that we have to know that this person actually exists.

And that will be our seal of approval. This will be, this will be the reason why you pay 15% to Airbnb every time you want a hair cut. To know that it's a real incompetent human provider for service rather. Because otherwise you risk, I mean, imagine if you just walked into a barber and got a haircut, how do you know that barber exists? There's a huge problem there The Airbnb is solving The spinning red pole system is so out of date

Charles, do you think that he actually Brian Chesky wrote this article Or do you think he went on the internet And used a service like Airbnb Like Air Tasker or something To find someone who didn't know how to write a business plan This is the funny thing right Because Fiverr and Air Tasker

Already TaskRabbit And they're not like none of those abs Which like absolutely do this And I've used Fiver I've used fibre quite a bit, right? The one thing that I don't care about, you know, fibre is whether the person exists or not. What I care about is, is the job done well? That's quite funny.

I mean, it's true because, I mean, I used Air Tasker in my recent move. I realised I needed someone to quickly sort of sort of sort out the garden who was better at gardening than me and had time, do the weeding or whatever. So I posted an ad, weeding needed this afternoon in my suburb. Pay it a little bit more than you normally would just to get someone to hurry up and come and do it. A guy turned up from out of nowhere, did the weeding, did a really nice job. I could see that he'd done it before because he had, you know, a couple hundred reviews positive about him before. And here's the key point, Charles. I didn't have to pay him till he'd done the job.

The funds were held in escrow and I didn't have to release the funds to him until he'd finished. Thereby, Charles, ensuring he was not an AI bot to come to do my weeding. So, in other words, they've already solved this problem. But was there a huge number of... you get charged a cleaning fee after you do the weeding? No, they did take 15% or something with the amount and that their tasker people always want to try and get you to hire them off the platform. Curiously enough, it's a little bit of a game.

But no, there was no cleaning fee I wasn't expecting. And also, you know how the stereotype is you go to Airbnb and it ends up, it's not what it's described. And it's usually like it's a closet in a brothel or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mind you, you did search for closet in a brothel, don't know. I mean, if that's what you're looking for. Sure.

Enjoy. That's why you paid extra. Well, the cleaning food is quite a sped. The Chaser Report. News you know you can't trust. Anyway, okay, so this is his big dream is to invent something that already exists using the unreliability and disappointment associated with the Airbnb brand. But, Dom, the difference is that you get the Airbnb experience.

Right. Right. Although, actually, why I'd showed what the new app is going to look like, right? And it's that hideous thing. I don't know. I've seen this ruin other apps recently as well, where instead of having a menu system, it asks you what you want to do. Oh, no. You know that?

I hate that. There was this really great app until a few months ago called Curio. Did you ever use Curio? No, I never used Curio. Yeah, right. And all it was was just basically news articles from all around the world from really good newspapers and magazines and they'd just read them out for you, right? Why did you never bring any of that content to this podcast?

I do. I just pretend that it's mine. Oh, okay. But then instead of sort of listing the articles, because you don't know what you want to read about until you've sort of seen the headlines. That's how news has been done for generations, right? It just had a little bar of what do you want to listen to? And you go, I don't know.

I don't know what the fucking news is. The whole point is. That's why I came to you to tell me what the fucking news is, you fuck with. Well, I mean, it's the same problem, Charles, in the world today. People, people, it's the confirmation bias filter bubble thing. People know what news they want to hear before they log on. They want to hear news about, I don't know, immigrants being terrible or right-wing corporations. I should have just said, I'd need some racist bile.

Yeah. And it would have given me all the sky news articles. That's what the, that's what, how. The other news, no one can tell you what's important. You impose your values. Ignore anything, doesn't accord with that. Okay, so that was my mistake. So then the other thing is,

so you ask sort of why Airbnb would be doing this anyway? Like, what's the whole point? Oh, I've got an answer for you on that, because it's always the same answer. Oh, what? Which is that? Isn't it the case that any app in order to try and make their shareholders happy, they've got to keep, like any tech business,

they've got to try and keep delivering outside profits. Yes. And so they keep having to add new features in and try and conquer entire new markets. Yes. Thereby destroying the old markets. It's the insidification of apps. It's like our old friend Corey Docturo said, you know,

about social media platforms. And this is actually what they try and do is to become wide-reaching social media platforms and thereby destroying their core function and being crap. Yeah, no, so that's the real reason, right? But what's the reason that Brian Chesky gives in this article? Oh. Like, what's the, why, like, and remember, he's Steve Jobs, right?

Like, there's a whole session where the journalist goes in and watches him give feedback on the app. And his feedback's all very Steve Jobs in. It's things like, I don't like the look of that A, you know, oh, can we, can we move the cursor? Is it blinking too much? Isn't the article, isn't the answer then if it's Steve Jobs, because I'm dead inside and I want my daughter to love me? me? No, strangely, it's not that, Tom. No, no, what it is is it's magic, right? Oh, I was going to say undiagnosed psychopathy was my second. Magic. No, magic. So you know how Steve Jobs always talked about that the technology can be

magic? Like it just looks as though it creates things. Brian Chesky saying, no, no, no. Steve Jobs got it wrong. What I'm delivering is actually metric because I've realized that actually it's not the technology that provides the magic. It's the experiences you have. have using the technology and that's why if you go onto the Airbnb app and you want to meet a Mexican bullfighter for example is one of his examples you can you can just do that and that will be an experience you take to the grave presumably because it's an amateur bullfighter who's pretending to be trained something you're in the middle of the Australian pap fighter where the guy doesn't know what he's doing and your last lines are your last line is

star for Airbnb this guy is terrible oh my god we are part of the iconoclast network and look if you have an experience with Airbnb we'd love to hear from you podcast at chaser.com at u yeah and also we should offer the chance to talk with us on airbebe being a podcast guest yeah we could we could be like talk to a list professionals broadcast professionals yeah yeah yeah except people who don't know what we're doing Although, or I could just Airbnb my closet, you know, I've heard that's very... That's a good idea. Yeah, there's a market for that.

Yeah, there's a market. Just make sure you charge at least $1,000 for cleaning.