One Year of Airbnb
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating?
> Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell. Here, the heat blasted unbidden, from which we escaped by opening the windows to winter’s coldest month. That first night, on the way to the corner store to get some food, we dodged mice scurrying between bags of trash. Back in the kitchen, Elaine fired up the stove by the bath towels, but when the pasta from the corner store hit the boiling water, a few little worms floated to the top. I skipped dinner that night.
This adds color to their story, but doesn't say much about AirBNB - opening the windows to deal with winter heat and seeing rodents in the street is pretty standard for New York. What isn't standard is having an apartment that's "silent as a padded cell" - as far as I'm concerned, that should be listed as an amenity.
It's not about having the place all to themselves.
Having stayed in a handful of Airbnbs, I've found the distribution pretty bimodal too.
There's a cold uncomfortableness to the commercial room run purely for business. Pardon my mildly overdramatic digression, but they feel like prison cells.
Especially in contrast to the familiarity and personal touch when staying with a host that actually lives there, wants to have a conversation, and cares about people. While they may appreciate the extra income, I really believe these hosts share their rooms for the greater community experience.
Prison cells furnished by Ikea. To be fair, it's quite an amazing experience to change cities and countries while encountering near-identical furniture and bedding sets.
Airbnb photographs don't reflect noise, the hardness of a mattress, and they often hide windows. Hotel reviewers are harsh, and these sorts of problems show up quick. I would venture to guess that the person to person nature of Airbnb, much like Linkedin, mean less honest reviews. Enough bad reviewers and hosts will exclude you.
> Our intent, actually, was to stay at least 30 days at each place, so our hosts would be on the right side of the law. Rental of a private room in the city for less than 30 days is legal only when a permanent resident is present during the stay, and we wanted the places to ourselves.
I read that as meaning that they chose to stay for over 30 days, because otherwise it would be illegal.
I am curious about a couple of things...
All of these experiences were in New York. How would it have been different in Athens, Tokyo, or Sydney, in terms of misrepresentation?
Also, using average apartment cost to gauge the amount to spend on the AirBnb unit is probably not apples-to-apples (for similar reasons that a regular full time salary is likely going to be significantly less than a contractor rates for the same position). I would have used hotel rates instead, which would have been much higher than $100/night in New York. It might be that had they stayed in higher priced lodging, they'd have had a better experience.
To be fair, the rooms are much smaller than a typical AirBNB, and it doesn't come with a kitchen.
I must say that a lot of "paid content" pieces are pretty good, considering that companies are paying money to place these articles.
Airbnb makes that matchmaking easier (on both parties), and in exchange takes a 9-15% cut.
Property owners who used to be forced to choose between offering 1-year lease or trying to piece together some mid-term rentals (and suffer vacancies in-between) now have an additional choice: take ~85% of the much higher daily rate people are willing to pay.
I agree it's perhaps made that specific pattern of consumption more expensive, but IMO, it's done that by making the overall market more efficient.
I don't pretend to know everything about the housing market. Just that in a time where the Internet have created opportunities to more easily work on the things you think matter with like-minded people, the housing market is going the other way in terms of flexibility. Paradoxically time and space are more important than ever. Being able to do conferences and have people hang around afterwards, as a smaller company bring some in to consult in person, even just hanging out and exchanging ideas all takes time. It's all possible now, but not only is it not equally distributed, it's somewhat getting less so.
My general sense is that merging the vacation/short term rental market with the long term home rental market puts serious upward pressure on the latter, thereby increasing scarcity of opportunity for middle income people in urban locales.
IMO, anything that puts downward pressure on the derivative of social mobility over time is ultimately putting upward pressure on the shittiness of society as a whole and really makes life pretty unpleasant regardless of socioeconomic class.
I'll take an inefficient housing market any day over that.
So I guess we agree that supply is limited.
But I ask you this: If supply is critically limited, then how on earth is it silly to complain about a "rental service" that mainstreams alternative uses of housing stock where the net effect is even more reduction of supply.
Alternate means of doing business are interesting, and new structures in society are also interesting. People can and should experiment. But if they're experimenting in areas that are already problematic and are doing so in ways that obviously make the problems worse... I'm going to heap blame on them whether you think it's silly or not.
That some people were previously benefiting from the existing inefficiency is a bug, not a feature, IMO.
It can take over a year and cost tens of thousands of dollars to evict a tenant. Throw in rent control and you have a market where it is often more attractive to not rent your vacant unit - particularly if you want to move into the unit or sell it within the decade.
All in all, I would estimate that airbnb siphons up around 1% of the units away from long term rentals.
You seem to advocate for exactly the same approach that got us into this mess. Instead of attempting to regulate supply and demand out of existence and blaming the "free market" after the fact, why can't we just build more houses?
If the entire month was peak (like July in a popular city in Europe or something..) that would still be understandable - but you could again apply that logic to a 3 month reservation and a host arguing about how the month in the middle are peak dates.
Of course, not all hosts are like that - yet. But if this is the shape of things to come, long term rentals are going to get harder just like the parent mentions.
I really admire the "hacking" of leveraging what you have (some money + a great story) to get what you want when you can't afford it in dollars.
> We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we wished to avoid.
> The central heating had apparently been broken for years and the weather forecast predicted a blizzard.
> Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell.
It's confusing and poorly written, because they compare both to Hamsterdam :/
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
Airbnb comes out looking responsive, to lack of care from certain hosts. Impressions of neighborhoods vary, as you would expect, sometimes from simply finding contaminated pasta. After gaining a few positive reviews on Airbnb, they successfully negotiate their way into spaces above their price range, while avoiding "red flags", like unmentioned fifth-floor walk-ups.
Great article, lots of tie-ins to various cultural history of the neighborhoods.
Of the 16+ places I've stayed at 5 of them have lied about their facilities where as of the 20 or so hotels I've stayed at only 1 lied about their facilities and they fixed the issue.
But, on AirBnB there's no way to really deal with the issue. Most landlords don't have some other place so you show up, suitcase in tow, what can you do except deal with lies? It's not like you can easily find another place in a few minutes. At best you have to sit there with your cellphone and try to find a nearby hotel and stay there several days until you find a new place. As far as I'm concerned the AirBnB refund guarantee is mostly useless.
I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews. Why should they take the risk of renting to someone that leaves bad reviews?
AirBnB provides almost no way to deal with these issues. There are zero repercussions for lies on the facilities and unless you actually rent the place there is no way to contact AirBnB. So for example, once I got used to the lies I started asking the landlords for specifics before I rented. Example: Two places claimed they had "free parking on premises" but when questioned, one said I could park in the street but they didn't actually have any parking on premises. Another said unless I had neighborhood sticker I'd have to park 3-5 blocks away.
There was nothing I could. I can't report them to AirBnB unless I actually rent
As far as other lies. One claimed they had Wifi. Turned out they were stealing it from a neighbor and it was only accessible from small area in the corner of the living room. Another said the apartment was a 1bedroom but it turned out to be studio. The difference? A 1bedroom has a door so I can shut out the refrigerator sounds, a studio does not so I had filtered out studios. One claimed they had free parking on premises. When got there I was told it was often blocked and I'd have to park on the street. Car was broken into there BTW. Another claimed free parking on premises. Turned out he was on vacation and left is car in the space so no parking. Another no lies I suppose but it wasn't ready to rent. No curtains on the windows and buildings all looking directly into it. Also it claimed air conditioning which was true but in a hot august in LA with it running on high it took til 4am to cool the place down.
A hack to deal with this: leave praise in the review, but end it with 'and I'll be sure to tell all my friends'.
That used to be code in hotel guestbooks that all the preceding praise should be inverted. (I think that's the codephrase - someone correct me if it's wrong please!) Not sure if it's used in AirBnb, but hey, why not start the tradition now...
Also, I think I've left that comment before in various places, and I certainly didn't intend it to mean that I hated it.
Obviously, since I've kept up with it I'd say the advantages, like the flexibility, the ability to have a more direct, and human, relationship with hosts (as opposed to the more standoff-ish business-like relationship that traditional landlords tend to favour) and the vastly greater supply and ability to choose without much pressure (as opposed to doing rental viewings with estate agents, former tenants, breathing down your neck and applying pressure on you), really outweigh the disadvantages overall.
I agree with what you say: the main disadvantage I've noticed, and by far the one which causes the most problems, is the unpredictability of the experience once you're living there, and sometimes how things differ from the description.
However I'd say for me, it's not necessarily these things per-se that are the problem, it's the intrinsic difficulty in dealing with them precisely because of the situation, and the relationship, you have with the host in the AirBnB scenario. I'm not sure reviews, AirBnB policies, or anything else can really mitigate these problems in any meaningful way, they're just part and parcel of the deal.
My favourite example of such a problem was with a place I was living in a few months ago. The apartment itself was awesome, it was just as described and the pictures gave an accurate and fair representation of the place. The host was lovely. Everything was great. There was just one problem. The lovely host happened to have a particular habit of speaking to her friends on skype, on the phone, etc, almost literally all of the time she was home. I don't exaggerate - she would come in from work and immediately go into her room, fire up the laptop and start a conversation. After that one had finished, she would take a minute's break, and then call someone else. And this would repeat, again and again, until she went to sleep. This would happen quite literally every day. It was a small apartment so her voice rang out, and she had a very animated way of speaking, lots of 'ooohs' and 'aaaahs' and 'nooooooos', etc, and you could hear every word, every expression.
Obviously this was incredibly irritating after a few days! I couldn't read, watch netflix without headphones, do any work, do anything really without hearing this and being massively distracted. But ask yourself, what can you do? If it were a hotel and it were a staff member or somebody in the room next door, of course you'd have no qualms about making a complaint, a polite but stern request, that the person please make the calls somewhere else because it's not really fair that you have to listen to this all evening every evening - you're a paying guest after all. The same fact is of course true with AirBnB but there's a very, very different social dynamic because it's not a hotel, it's the person's home. What are you supposed to do? Ask that they make calls somewhere else - when they're in their home? Ask that they please not speak to their friends, in their home, when you're in, even though it's clearly an activity that is incredibly important to them? Perhaps it's just the type of person I am, but I'd feel incredibly awkward about really saying anything at all. It's the person's home, and you're intruding on their life, their habits, their way of doing things. On paper you're a paying guest, but in the actual situation you just feel like a guest full-stop, and you feel like you don't really have the right to tell them what to do or how to behave in their own home, when what they're doing may be annoying to you but is not, under any definition of the term, aggressive or anti-social behaviour. This for me is the major, major disadvantage of AirBnB - it's a problem of the social situation you find yourself in, living in a perfect stranger's actual home, conforming to their routines, getting used to their day to day lifestyle in ways you wouldn't imagine you'd have to, and in ways you can't possibly predict in advance.
Because of this it's also not the type of thing you can really complain to AirBnB about. Are you supposed to ask for a refund because everything was perfect but there was this one thing that really annoyed you? What are they supposed to do about it? You can't really even prove it and trying to prove it would get you into an immeasurably awkward situation with the host, a person you like and respect. Also related to this, are you going to put it in the review? Again, on paper you probably should, but social pressure means you almost certainly won't, because it feels like a silly thing to bring up when everything, objectively, was perfect about the apartment. After the fact, you feel like you should just let it go. So it goes unaddressed.
I have many other stories like these, from just-occasionally noisy neighbours to the host behaving disrespectfully just once or twice, in an otherwise perfect apartment and stay. I've come to the conclusion that these are things you can't get upset about, because the risk of them happening comes bundled into the AirBnB experience and I'm quite sure there's no solution to the problem. If you want a hotel, get a hotel. If you want to live in a real person's apartment by their rules (for a lot less money, I hasten to add) choose AirBnB.
Before I started using AirBnB so much I was quite naive with my expectations of the experience - the fact is, and something I wish someone had told me before I learned and came to deal with it myself the 'hard way', you have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth, have some evenings and nights' sleep ruined with no possibility for recourse, and fold that into your assessment of whether you think AirBnB is worth it for your situation.
As an example, due to my experience, I'd be now incredibly reluctant to use AirBnB for a short holiday, because I'd much prefer to pay more for a hotel for the reduced risk of stuff going wrong, being annoying, losing sleep or not being able to just do things on my own terms. My instinct now with AirBnB is what can go wrong, you should expect to go wrong, and what does annoy you, you should expect to happen, and kind of take it as a bonus if this turns out not to be the case. Of course if you're renting and living in a place these are risks you can take, you can find a new place, you can take time to try and adapt. If you're on a short holiday, it could be the difference between enjoying your stay and not.
I hope somebody who's not had a lot of experience with AirBnB, and possibly didn't think about this perspective, found this useful!
> As far as I'm concerned the AirBnB refund guarantee is mostly useless.
I used it with success. When one host started ignore some additional questions after booking, I decided to shorten my stay there in advance (and was right about it) - host had flexible return policy and I've got my difference back without problems. AirBnB's support was helpful.
I used AirBnB for more than 10 times now and overall my experience is very positive, you usually get much more for much less money, compared to hotels. I didn't use it in USA though, mostly Europe and Asia.