Several months ago, members of my team at work booked various Airbnbs for a large conference in San Francisco.

We booked early to get a better deal, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Airbnb hosts didn't know the conference was coming up (or was that big).

As we got closer to the conference time, pretty much all of us had our stays canceled on us by the hosts. We were then forced to rebook at significantly higher rates. In some instances, even THESE got canceled by the hosts.

We're 99% sure that the hosts were given better offers and made the deals privately.

Having used Airbnb a few times now, I'm definitely seeing the benefits of hotels for peace of mind.