No, it’s not by showing them vaguely sexual line drawings, but that’s surely gotten a smile out of at least a few travelers.

A new research paper comparing more than 600,000 AirBnB and TripAdvisor listings found that properties on the former had mostly 4.5 and 5 star ratings while comparable properties on the latter hovered around an average of 3.8. Are AirBnB accommodations really that much better than traditional hotels? Probably not.

Airbnb has a two-way review system, where people renting these accommodations also get ratings from the property renters, thus there is more incentive on both sides to stay civil, and hence positive. {Skift}

Some listings appeared on both sites, but whether it’s the more personal nature of listings that AirBnB tries to play up or the fact that AirBnB hosts can review guests, the exact same properties were consistently rated lower on TripAdvisor.

AirBnB’s horror stories have been well documented, yet whether it’s a drug addict, sex party host or squatter who just won’t leave, they’ve all been jaw dropping stories about rogue renters. Surely that doesn’t mean there are no shady slumlords renting properties, but the better publicized experiences around insane guests tipped AirBnB’s policies towards hosts fairly early on. From million dollar insurance liability policies and lobbying efforts to establish the legality of their business model (which is currently illegal for some hosts using the platform), it’s clear that happy hosts are the priority.

While hotels and other travel providers can respond to negative reviews on TripAdvisor, the less than stellar guest will never face a bad review following them the internet, even if one might be deserved.

Belonging has always been a fundamental driver of humankind. So to represent that feeling, weâ€ve created a symbol for us as a community. Itâ€s an iconic mark for our windows, our doors, and our shared values. Itâ€s a symbol that, like us, can belong wherever it happens to be. Weâ€re proud to introduce the Bélo: the universal symbol of belonging. {AirBnB}

Unfortunately, “belonging” isn’t the first thing that came to mind for most people. One of the least explicit riffs on the new logo sums up the rest pretty well. There’s already a dedicated Tumblr which spells things out further; possibly NSFW if stick figure depictions of breasts and genitals would be frowned upon by your boss. Michael K of Dlisted only sees back cleavage from a much shared People of Walmart photo. While this may not have been the reaction Airbnb was going for, the new logo does have people talking, and not about someone having their place destroyed, being surprised to find that it’s the location of a sex party or returning to the remnants of an orgy. That’s got to count for something.

You may know that Marlon Brando’s fell in love with Tahiti and his third wife while filming a movie on the island in the ’60s. You may not know of the late actor’s commitment to sustainable development.

Beginning in late 2013, visitors to Tahiti can loll about on Marlon Brando’s former private island when a luxury eco-resort called The Brando opens there…

His heirs, who sold an initial interest in the atoll to [Tahitian developer, Richard] Bailey for $2 million and will profit from yearly rent and a cut of proceeds. The goal of the resort is that its energy needs be 100 percent renewable (via solar, deep ocean-water cooling and coconut oil biofuel) and that the 35 villas be set back from the beach — not situated over the water — in accordance with the star’s wishes. {The Hollywood Reporter}

Pushing projects forward on behalf of a famous person who can no longer speak for themselves is always a delicate balance between tribute and exploitation, but the heavy sustainability focus seems to push The Brando firmly into the former category.

While much of the US is still processing the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre, Machine Guns Vegas, a Las Vegas shooting range, decided that now is the perfect time to introduce designer gun grips.

“Like Marc Jacobs putting Sponge Bob Square Pants onto LV monogrammed bags, Machine Guns Vegas has created their own Louis Vuitton accessory – a monogrammed Louis Vuitton grip for a handgun – which is legal to carry in the State of Nevada,” the press release states. ” {Fashionista}

Louis Vuitton has distanced themselves from the product, stating “Louis Vuitton is in no way associated with this company. We do not manufacture gun grips and do not condone the alteration of our creations in any way.”

While legal action wasn’t mentioned, Louis Vuitton is notoriously protective of their brand, though not always victorious (as in their recent case against Warner Brothers for the use of faux-Vuitton luggage in the Hangover 2). If the clip is indeed manufactured from an authentic disassembled handbag or other monogram item that was legally purchased, it would be difficult to stop Machine Gun Las Vegas from selling their modified accessory. There may be protections that stop Machine Gun Las Vegas from promoting it specifically as a Louis Vuitton gun or gun clip, however.

And, lest you think this is new territory, we’ll remind you of the logo clad weapons that seemed to inspire those seized from Mexican drug cartels.

Refreshingly free of kitsch. The décor is what might be called modern Hawaiian, with warm woods, woven fabrics and leafy prints inspired by native culture. Wood furnishings — ceiling fans, mirrors, headboards — are carved in shapes that recall fish hooks and canoe blades. Mickey is present, but sparingly; in my room, he was perched on a desk lamp, ukulele in hand. All rooms have balconies or ground-floor porches, with garden or ocean views. {New York Times}

Photos via Disney Resorts

Rooms start at $399/night, and wi-fi is free (as it really should be everywhere) but expect to pay extra for parking, spa treatments, excursions and just about everything else.

While Hawaii doesn’t have the same “adults only” feel of Las Vegas, the New York Times thinks the new Aulani resort provides a good “family-friendly alternative to the crowded Waikiki scene,” which undoubtedly caters more to honeymooners and tourists without kids in tow.

Four days after the fatal shooting of a man in its Tottenham neighborhood, London is still burning. As firefighters douse the flames of buildings set ablaze from gasoline bombs, the riots responsible for much of the destruction are spreading to other parts of the country. In London, even areas that haven’t been affected by rioting and violence are under a self-imposed curfew that sees stores shuttering early and normally busy streets emptied after sunset.

Four days after the initial incident that sparked the unrest, there still appears to be no definitive end to the organized violence. Some blame BlackBerry BBMs and Twitter for facilitating the organization of riots and looting, but regardless of the communication tools used to communicate, London faces a bigger problem: police can’t figure out how to quell outbursts of violence and stop them from spreading. That doesn’t lend a lot of confidence to the city’s ability to ensure safety for the 2012 Olympics.

The athlete’s village and stadiums for the 2012 Olympics will come with a $15 billion price tag. Officials have said that athlete accommodations will become community housing after the games are over, leaving the city with a net benefit. The destroyed areas of London are just a few miles away from this area. {NY Times}

Much of the destruction has been caused by groups of a few hundred people or so. At one point it was reported that 1700 police officers were on duty, compared to 5000 for the Royal Wedding. {Gawker} Granted, the Royal Wedding was a planned event, but what happens if an unexpected event occurs during the Olympic games?

Will there be a plan in place to handle simultaneous civil protests, terrorist threats and general crowd related security at the same time? Part of the current problem lies with austerity budget cuts that haven’t seen police jobs spared. There are plans to cut 9,000 of 35,000 police jobs, and emergency responders like firefighters and paramedics face staff cuts as well. When the police are busy protecting firefighters trying to extinguish fires, riots spring up in other areas where there is no police presence.

While the city surely has some sort of plan for dealing with the security challenges that come with a major public event, the lack of a tenable plan for keeping unplanned criminal behavior under control with less than 12 months til the Olympic games begin has to be of concern to residents and visitors alike.

Before and after image of  the Allied Carpets store building via the Guardian

AirBnB has been dealing with quite a bit of negative publicity as the story of a California woman, whose apartment was ransacked, robbed and trashed, circulated on popular blogs and mainstream media sites. While the investigation into that case continues, it seems the whole apartment ransacking facilitated by AirBnB thing isn’t a one off incident, as previously implied by the company.

The meth pipe found in the ransacked apartment of an AirBnB apartment owner. A suspect in a separate apartment ransacking incident was arrested for possession of meth.

TechCrunch is reporting that a man named Troy Dayton encountered similar problems when renting his apartment out via AirBnbB:

“In addition to valuables stolen, the thieves/addicts did thousands of dollars of bizarre damage to my rented home and left it littered with meth pipes. They were identity thieves, too and all my personal information was strewn about. Further investigation of my own led me to evidence that the people were not just thieves but were also dangerous. I too, feared for my own safety and would not stay at my house for some time.

I had a similar problem with haphazard communication from people at AirBnB. I gave them multiple opportunities to make me a happy customer to which they did but then retracted their offer after their was miscommunication among the team. Sometimes days went by without hearing from anyone, while I was fear-stricken, totally disoriented, and angry. It was almost the most absurd customer service crisis one could ever imagine. But I am one squeaky wheel, and we eventually found an agreeable solution that I was generally pleased with.” {TechCrunch}

While Dayton was satisfied with AirBnB’s response to the situation (after a bit of back and forth, they compensated him for bookings at other AirBnbB studios and one bedroom apartments for 3 weeks), this obviously takes the problem beyond an isolated incident to one that AirBnB will have no excuse to be unprepared for a third time (if this is, indeed, only the second time such apartment trashing has happened).

There are 3 things AirBnB has to do immediately to stop these type of incidents from permanently damaging the company.

1. Implement a 24-hour Customer Service Line

At the heart of its business model, AirBnB maintains that it’s only a marketplace for temporary and vacation rentals, but if they want to continue to charge a fee for that (as opposed to Couchsurfing, which facilitates alternative travel accommodations for free) both renters and apartment owners are going to expect more than they would from a Craigslist or Couchsurfing post gone wrong.

Both EJ, the woman who wrote the blog post that initially gained attention, and Dayton spoke about frantically trying to get in touch with someone from AirBnB, only to be left sitting in their destroyed apartments for hours at a time with no reply. After the initial response to EJ, communication was intermittent, seemingly concluding with the CEO contacting her to pressure her to update her blog post with a happier ending, though many issues remained unresolved.

With over $100 million in funding, there’s no reason AirBnB shouldn’t be able to implement some sort of 24-hour customer help line. Not only for serious cases like EJ’s and Dayton’s, but even relatively minor incidents like renters not being able to get in touch with apartment owners when problems arise.

While many travelers have smartphones that keep them in touch by email, if you’re in an unfamiliar city or location, being able to pick up the phone and reach someone – rather than waiting 14 hours for an email telling you that there’s nothing that can be done to help, could be a huge reassurance.

2. Plan for the Worst Case

So two cases out of hundreds, likely thousands, of bookings does not mean the AirBnB model doesn’t work. Troy Dayton has gone on to rent his apartment out on AirBnB again, without any other incidents like his first horror story. Even though the worst case doesn’t happen that often statistically, the fact that it’s happened twice without any measures put in place to protect against it happening in the future is a problem.

How do you plan for the worst case?

Insurance would be a good policy. No one plans on getting into a car accident, or having their home burn down, or getting sick. That’s why auto, home and health insurance exist, because in spite of our best plans, sometimes really bad things happen. Most home insurance policies wouldn’t cover subletting or damage from subletters. AirBnB could easily have a very lucrative secondary business model by creating just such an insurance policy.

That would not only pay more than lip service to the claim that these type of incidents are infrequent, and don’t happen often; but AirBnB would also have hard data to prevent future incidents.

Both apartment ransackings took place in the San Francisco Bay area, there’s evidence that drug addicts and identity thieves were involved in both (San Francisco police have a 19-year-old suspect in custody in EJ’s case, who was charged with possession of meth and stolen goods among other things). A pattern, perhaps?

If AirBnB truly took on the responsibility of paying for damages surrounding legitimate criminal incidents, they’d have an incentive well beyond good PR to ensure that the warning signs of one incident don’t lead to a second.

3. Open Up

Implement more open profiles for renters and apartment owners. Though all of the incidents we’ve heard about so far have involved the people who own apartments and rent them out, it’s only a matter of time before other stories of renters scammed or misled by apartment owners emerge. AirBnB understandably wants to keep transactions on their site, but at the minimum AirBnB needs to know more about who’s on their site if they expect users to continue to go with the “just trust us” responses. AirBnb should be able to – at a minimum – verify a user’s real name and physical address, even if they don’t pass this information on until after a booking is confirmed.

Unverified users could be allowed to use the site, but with additional fees, of restrictions on the number of nights or accommodation type that could be booked. A shared room might be allowed, but an entire apartment might not, for example.

Travel is the new fashion, it seems, judging by the number of websites jumping into the space lately. Today Groupon became the latest site to strike out into the discounted travel space with Groupon Getaways (a partnership with Expedia).

After Gilt and Hautelook demonstrated near immediate success with the daily fashion sale model, it seemed a new company following the exact same model appeared every week faster than you could say 70% off. Gilt was the first of those sites to bring travel deals into the mix with their Jetsetter website; but today there’s the American Express backed Vacationist and Exclusively.in (a Gilt style site targeted towards Indian fashion and design), who recently expanded to include Asian focused travel deals.

Unlike fashion, there’s no Vente Privee (who American Express also recently partnered with) – that is an established behemoth who’s been making money off the model for a while. That’s the good news, now the critical look.

While startups like Airbnb are having success as an un-hotel travel coordinator for the value conscious, we do have to wonder if discount travel will eventually run into some of the same issues of discount fashion: luxury fashion sales bounced back, brands got smarter about manufacturing which means less inventory to discount in the first place and a focus on full priced sales. Make no mistake, while Gilt and others continue to do brisk business in discounted apparel, the leading US flash retailer is looking for growth in retail at regular price.

According to Pegasus, a hotel reservation system provider used by 90,000 hotels around the world, hotels in the US and around the world are seeing growth in spite of regional crises.

“March global bookings and revenue reached the second highest growth pace over the last twelve month period, increasing by +10.8% and +15.5%, respectively, over prior year.” {the Pegasus View March 2011}

While we have no doubt that Groupon’s massive audience will buy into the travel deals, and those seeking travel deals will buy into Groupon’s regular offerings, we wonder how long it will be before the same discounted dates are bouncing around on the various sites. What’s wrong with that? Limited inventory plus three different options for filling it means that the discounts may get to be less attractive over time.

The one advantage Groupon may have though is their international reach. Groupon Getwaways is starting in the US, then Canada with an international rollout after that. Unlike fashion, in addition to there not being a clear behemoth there aren’t any sites outside the US who’ve successfully developed travel flash sales.

Airbnb (short for Airbed and Breakfast), a marketplace for travel room and apartment rentals is raising $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion. {TechCrunch} That’s quite some airbed.

The company, which even offered to rent out the entire country of Liechtenstein for $70,000/night at one point, has booked more than 1.6 million nightly stays to date and experienced growth of more than 800% last year. Liechtenstein is off the table now, but there’s still a charming little castle available if you want an example of how far the site’s com from its airbed roots.

TechCrunch reports that on any given night, there are more people staying in rooms via Airbnb than there are rooms available in the largest Manhattan hotel.

Unfortunately, a recently passed New York State law makes it illegal to rent apartments for less than 30 days, so some of that new money might go towards defending against lawsuits. Depending on how successful Airbnb becomes as a hotel alternative in one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, we can see those lawsuits getting quite costly.

We can see both sides of the issue. If you’re staying in a major city for more than a week, it really is more cost effective to rent a room or an apartment.  As someone who has done just that, Airbnb provides a clean, well-lit alternative to wading through the murky myriad of Craigslist postings offering 2 bedroom Soho apartments with an Ocean view for $70/night (read: the obvious scams).

On the other hand, there are some people who are obviously taking apartments strictly for the purposes of renting them on a nightly or weekly basis. If you’re looking for affordable housing in New York on a permanent basis, it’s certainly harder to compete against the potential income from rental income versus monthly income. In theory, that reduces availability and ends up driving up costs for residents. Not to mention that contrary to their reputation for being super friendly and welcoming, most New Yorkers aren’t so warm on the thought of having multiple, random neighbors. Stuytown Lux Living is particularly vocal in their dissatisfaction with the Airbnb model.

So who wins? For now, it seems Airbnb is. It’s successfully brought some order to a market that was previously unorganized for the most part; and for as disruptive as it may be to local hoteliers and apartment hunters alike, at peak times when hotels have no inventory Airbnb keeps tourist dollars coming into the local economy, and lets leasing companies continue to keep apartment rentals an owners’ market.

The Singiwana Jungle Lodge is one of the first destinations available in Exclusively.in's new travel sale section

Exclusively.in, a private style site that offers Indian fashion, jewelry and home items to US consumers, is the latest addition to the expanding list of sites applying the samples sale model to travel.

“From Palaces to Paradise,” their first travel sale, includes various luxury hotels and resorts, as well as and an Indian safari adventure at the Singiwana Jungle Lodge located in Kanha National Park, Madya Pradesh, India. Exclusively.In’s travel offerings will focus on Asian destinations, which should give the site a point of differentiation amongst current private travel sale providers like the American Express/Luxury Link Vacationist site, and Gilt’s Jetsetter, which recently announced expansion plans with invite-only social network A Small World.

“We listened to our customer base and the consistent message was an interest in finding a unique way to explore Asia with luxury accommodations but at savvy prices,” said Sunjay Guleria, CEO of Exclusively.In.

Launched in June 2010, the site says that they’ve become the largest online Indian apparel retailer in the U.S., with member growth of 50 percent month-on-month.

As the sample sale space gets more crowded in general, focusing on a specific market seems to be a good idea for growth and establishing a unique identity among the growing field of competitors. While both Jetsetter and Vacationist may feature Asian travel specials from time to time, if Exclusively.in can establish themselves as the go-to destination for travelers who already have Asia in mind as a destination it offers a good reason for travelers to sign up for one more travel sale email alert.