Hotels are pretty profitable too. If you take a hotel and remove the requirements for safety regulation, taxes, use of commercial real estate and provision of amenities, it will be more profitable.
Airbnb is great because the company turns a blind eye to many things and makes it easy.
Many of those regulations that affect hotels were pushed by the large hotel groups - regulation is simply the most cost effective way for large multinationals companies to keep out competition.
The regulation act as a floor that essentially ensures that only projects of $X millions of capitalization makes sense to pursue, which by default favors the large hotel chains.
The average mid market hotel (Holiday Inn, Hampton Inn) costs $50-75k per room to build, with the typical project costing $6-8M. Nearly all hotels like this are built from standardized components and are owned by small local or regional operators.
If you go downmarket, that cost goes in half. If you look at older, but still legally compliant hotel property, acquisition cost is probably $5-10k/room in many markets. Obviously big city hotels costs more to build/buy and operate. That's why a NYC hotel is often 2x-3x other places -- and that is being challenged by lower operating cost business models.
The large hotel chains don't own a lot of property. They are brands who license their trademarks and access to their reservation system.
Surely, as people who favor good governance rather than just arbitrary governance, we can all favor eliminating those costly and pointless regulations now? Or do we just favor arbitrary regulations just because we like regulations?
The regulatory model around hotels is good governance.
Fire safety is the most obvious example. A modern hotel is engineered to slow down the spread of fire and preserve life. Sprinklers, fire resistant doors and walls, etc.
Airbnb is an awesome thing when it does what it initially did -- handle house rentals. When that business model failed to provide growth, they pivoted to the current model where they've become the eBay of real estate by turning a blind eye to obvious fraud and abuse.
If you legally convert your property to a hotel, that use change triggers a need to become code compliant.
Also, accidents are more likely to happen with short term rentals. People tend to take care of their stuff better than someone else's.
That's what the law currently says. Since you are so worried that people might burn to death, why shouldn't we change this law?
If not, why not?
It's called building codes. We don't allow balloon frame houses anymore, for example.
With commercial property rules can be applied differently. Airbnb just dumps responsibility on others.
Unfortunately that means if you're in a wheelchair, are a victim of a crime due to lax judgement/practice by the property owner, or die in a fire because there's no lit sign pointing to the stairs, you as a "guest" and the "host" are fucked.