I'm not jumping on the conspiracy theory bandwagon and think that the idea is nonsense, but hypotheticall, if I were trying to make Airbnb look bad (and had had spare cash to do it with), I wouldn't just pay someone to say it happened, I'd also per someone to rent the appartment, and actually do this stuff, so that any checks show the crime did indeed happen.
Sure...but the more people you bring into the conspiracy, the more likely it is to be found out. Of course airbnb will call the cops into investigating this. If this were a setup, EJ and her fellow perpetrators made it MUCH more complicated than it needed to be. The alleged homewrecking occurred over a lengthy time period and involved not only simple burglary, but destruction of walls and bizarre behavior (such as the picture moving). Moreover, they apparently left a lengthy e-paper trail. If EJ faked all of that, she gave the cops and airbnb a lot of avenues to poke holes in the story, such as checking timestamps, IP addresses, even the linguistics in these alleged email exchanges.
What would the hotel industry have to gain? The beatdown of a website that has yet to reach mainstream consciousness...Airbnb is a long ways from being the Netflix to the hotel industry's Blockbuster Video. What do they have to lose? Hmmm...millions, maybe a billion in liability and legal fees, nevermind prison sentences for the numerous people involved in such a scheme.
June 29. I only found out about this through HN a day ago, and that seems like when this all went viral.
Maybe I'm underestimating the hotel industry's savviness and patience here...but why would it wait for a viral campaign to serendipitously happen, as opposed to going through their considerable resources of outreach and media contacts? EJ could've easily made a sincere-in-appearance call out to a Bay Area publication...hell, even Patch...instead, she apparently left only a blogpost.
And hell, her blogpost is terrible SEO: "Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned" One thing I would expect of big-calcified-industry folks to have at least down is their SEO bulls*.
If a major hotel company were clever and innovative enough to pull this off without being exposed (which would include not only faking the fake crime emails, but hiding the emails they used to internally discuss all of this...something that no business, such as the financial giants, have yet done successfully) it's far, far more likely they would've come up with a better Internet business model by now.
