The reason hotels are more expensive is because they have to follow a bunch of rules that makes everyone's life a bit better by having insurance for risks and zoning and so on. However you have to pay a bit more.
So, if you ever find yourself complaining "I wish people did something in a not the absolute cheapest and effortless way" so that society in general would benefit - don't stay in airbnb.
I've been looking into AirBnB for certain situations, and because people tell me they are cheaper than hotels. However, I have found that in a lot of cases, hotels end up being cheaper. The big gotcha is the prices shown are the fee for the room (or house or whatever), but then at the end they tack on exorbitant "cleaning" fees that I have found to be greater than the rental fee. They have taken to using big graphics promoting living wages as a way to justify the extensive cleaning fees. In the end, it is much less hassle for me to just book the hotel. They have dedicated staff that allows me to arrive and check-in whenever, rather than having a small window of time before the "host" goes to bed or what not.
tbf you'll see this on a lot of hotel bookings too. We just got back from a week in NYC, and most booking systems (either hotels or airbnbs) were a massive slog. Try to airbnb an okay place in the Bronx for $110/night? Click through and see an $80 cleaning fee. Try to book a hotel in Manhattan? Bam, $100 tourism tax.
Really not loving all these systems that go out of there way to confuse me into paying more money.
An example is Cologne's "Culture tax": https://www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/steuern-ge...
So you think you should be able to violate the spirit of the law? Why shouldn't you pay that tax as a tourist?
When you think about it the cleaning fee really does need to be separate because it's a one time fee. So with your scheme it's $190 for one night, but but $121 a night for a week.
That said I used AirBnB for the first time last month, and I was very confused by the different pricing on different pages. The UI did seem to be purposely confusing. It should have been listed as total price for the dates I am searching for.
But it doesn't. People are breaking the social contract by not respecting the area. If I invite friends from out of town over for the weekend, is that breaking the social contract? If I'm going away for 2 weeks, and I have friends house sit for the duration, is that breaking the social contract? Tourists and visitors existing in a space (unless it's too many) isn't inherently violating the social contract. Their selfish behavior is the issue.
I understand what you mean. I have neighbors down the road who throw a massive family gathering once per year that I'm certain breaks noise, traffic and safety ordinances[0] due to the sound system still going at 10PM and parked cars littering both sides of the streets. That's not due to Airbnb or any other hospitality broker.
If you have an issue with visitors, talk to them. It's possible that they don't even know they're being a nuisance. I have had cops called on me for a noise complaint. It would have been a better use of everyone's time to knock and let us know.
[0]: As far as I know, no one reports the reunion/gathering. I like to think that since we're all very respectful of each other's property and space, breaking the rules for a special event once in a while is no big deal.
Sadly, too many people now are afraid of conflict, even small conflict, they prefer to call the police rather than deal with others directly. They don’t want to deal with it themselves.
That anxiety I’m sure goes up with unknown Airbnbers, and so raises the likely good that people will probably call the police instead.
This is externalizing a social cost: Normally your neighbor (that you know personally, ideally, so you can discuss any matters with somebody you know) will take care of their visitors' conduct.
When we're away, we sometimes have friends over to house-sit, but we know them, we know their conduct, they know us, and they're not interested in giving us a bad reputation in the neighborhood.
With airbnb, the owner of the apartment likely doesn't know their "visitor" (otherwise, why pay a commission to airbnb?) and often they're not around to enforce standards. It's a huge diffusion of responsibility.
and
> Tourists and visitors existing in a space
are very different things.
That's different. You know your friends. You don't know your airbnb guests, and the reviews are only worth so much. I can't find the article now, but some porn company had an easy time gaming airbnb by getting good reviews in the beginning and using the place for shoots on the 10th stay or whatever.
And, as a person who had I think ~15 airbnbs from 2015-2018, the recent change I don't like is that some houseowners hire an 18 year told (who I have to call and meet outside) and have him give me a hurried 10 minute intro and then leave. I actually _was_ one of those people who enjoyed airbnbs for the reasons they publicize (the 'it's not a hotel' line, the 'feel at home with friends!' type of thing) -- but that seems to have largely disappeared. Last time I was in an airbnb, I would always get these nasty glares from the neighborhoods, who seem to be just screaming "We don't want you here, strange" with their facial expressions. Staying at a hotel is indeed now much more comfortable, and the consistency of services (while not perfect) is better than airbnbs in my recent experiences.
But the guest is not automatically breaking the social contract by staying in an AirBnB, which is what was implied by the OC.
> the owner is potentially breaking the social contract by maybe allowing someone without respect for others to stay in their home
And a person walking around the gas station with an open flame is only potentially a fire hazard, because they may very well get lucky and not set any fuel fumes on fire.
Reality doesn't work like that. You drop the "potentially" once the risk becomes predictably high. The owner is breaking the social contract by putting their neighbors at very high risk of dealing with guests who don't respect other people.
> though ratings systems are generally used exactly to allow this type of vetting in advance
Ranking systems are trivially gamed. One would think everyone knows this by now.
> But the guest is not automatically breaking the social contract by staying in an AirBnB
No, they're not. But if they behave as if they were in a hotel while in a residential-area AirBnB, they most likely are. Maybe they should know better than to behave like that. But AirBnB should know better than enabling this problem in the first place.
> Reality doesn't work like that. You drop the "potentially" once the risk becomes predictably high. The owner is breaking the social contract by putting their neighbors at very high risk of dealing with guests who don't respect other people.
A flood of legitimate complaints about poor guest behavior would likely make me stop - i.e. the pattern is now predictably high enough to make a logical conclusion. I hope that my neighbors would be courteous enough to do the same.
> But AirBnB should know better than enabling this problem in the first place.
I think someone else touched on this, but I have a feeling that the location attracts different types of guests. Beaches are a great example. The surrounding area is a good indicator if the beach is a party beach or more oriented for family vacations. The former typically has brighter lights, more bars, clubs, and places open later. Family-friendly beaches usually shut down activity around 10 or 11 save for the corner store that's open later. I bet the Airbnb guest behavior reflect this as well.
As far as I’ve ever heard, as a guest, the worst that is going to happen is you are going to be thrown out. Municipalities in general don’t want to scare away tourists or visitors, so I would be surprised to see any fines or penalties in that directions.
Some municipalities have very large and escalating fines for listing on AirBnb. Miami Beach is $20,000 for first offense and I believe doubles on the second. Search “Airbnb Miami Beach” on google, and it is going to take you a while to figure that one out. I doubt most visitors have any idea.
Like many other things (search engine rankings come to mind), quality decreases as everybody figures out how to game the system to extract maximum profit for minimum effort. The rise of "superhosts" who manage dozens of properties from afar, using keypad locks to avoid any human interaction and contracting out cleaning to the lowest bidder, has undoubtedly been bad for the AirBnB experience. Yet AirBnB not only tolerates but actually celebrates them.
This is the core of the problem. My neighbors across the hall might have a party from time to time and it's of course no big deal (espescially if they take the time to leave me a note with a way to contact them if it's causing a problem). My neighbors above me are always on their "special event once in a while" with 6 people in a 2 bedroom flat because today is their bachelorette, stag do, end of year blow out, holiday, party.
Do you charge them? I guess not. And it's one of the reasons why they'll do their best to honor your trust and reputation, aside from, obviously, your friendship, given you trust them.
I was renting a room in a flat in Soho. The other floors slowly got converted to amateur hotels for airbnb/booking. Many a night, I'd see families stuck downstairs with luggage. They would then phone a capricious property manager who would tell them to walk about two miles to the key safe. Many a time, they didn't have a phone that worked in London, and I would lend them my phone. One angry customer checked in to the 5* boutique hotel next door after waiting for an hour. The hotel was about the same price. I wonder if he got his money back. I doubt it.
I don't book airbnbs. Hospitality is not for greedy unregulated amateurs. Of course, there might be some great hosts, but I like consistency.
I avoided the tourists with luggage looking puzzled standing at the front door; if I saw some I'd use the rear door instead.
When they rang my buzzer, I'd tell them AirBnB was banned, and leave the line open so they couldn't buzz anyone else for 2-3 minutes until it disconnected.
I also reported the apartments to the building owner, and they were kicked out after a few months.
These people know where they are, what time it is, and mostly what’s expected of their surroundings. I think they just don’t care. I’m guessing it’s similar to anonymity on the Internet, where people behave differently because they don’t expect to have to face those they harm.
I suspect people who regularly “cheat” in business for example are acutely aware of the necessity of finding a constant source new interactions.
I also suspect that the stereotype of people from small towns being more naive than people from cities is also related to this.
It all seems kind of obvious to me as I write this post but I don’t think I’ve actually consciously directly thought about things on those terms until just now.
Yep, if you ever lived in a vacation destination you know.
Tourists are noisy and careless. That's to some extent forgivable - tourism is a leisure activity. Hotels and other legit tourism-oriented businesses are prepared for it and mostly take care of it (and are appropriately regulated to make sure they do). But take the same tourists doing the same things and sprinkle them around neighborhoods where regular people live and raise families - in that context, their behavior becomes disturbing and destructive to the quality of those neighborhoods. It's breaking social contract.
The sin of AirBnB is that they know they're making the world a worse place, and they don't care. They just keep doing it.
In Germany, one can openly drink any sort of alcohol one wants. But the social norms as such that jackassery by those consuming alcohol is greatly reduced. The people there are under a stronger social contract.
Both of these AirBnb offered something way better than a hotel.
I do agree that that middle ground - a whole apartment in a mixed residential building - is problematic, and I'd feel awkward staying in that setting.
However there are still the questions of things like insurance coverage and other safety related topics. Basically if anything goes wrong in a hotel, there is staff who is required to be trained to be able to deal with it. Again, the cost associated with dealing with the 0.05% corner cases is distributed to everyone in the case of a hotel room, but to the specific person to whom it happens in the airbnb case.
To be fair, if you really want to rent a whole house, the hotel industry doesn't often provide good options ....
There's a huge bicycling event in Texas every spring, and it overnights in a town that is, most of the time, very very quiet. The meager hotel inventory is sufficient 364 days of the year, but absurdly low for the weekend of the MS150.
& so, homeshare sites make a killing that weekend.
Your example is one of the few edge cases where AirBnB works. The OP is talking about an everyday situation where AirBnB has instead had a detrimental effect on residents as well as would-be residents.
Personally I don't mind AirBNB if it's only people renting out rooms in their residences. For instance here in Portland the law requires this. But it's poorly enforced.
Currently we hear it a lot regarding housing density, but it's also a factor in locating sewage treatment plants, nuclear waste disposal sites, etc.
I'm going to choose door number 2 every time. Any time I am given the choice to buy something, especially a higher-quality experience at a lower price, from a human being versus a corporation, the human gets my money.
Just like I prefer Uber to taxis, I prefer AirBNB to hotels. Even Hostels now, if I go into Amsterdam I will pay $35-$50 per night. If there are two of us, the $50 per night AirBNB is our choice.
These businesses flourish because the social contract is broken. Creating artificial scarcity will harm the community in the long run, preventing tourism and limiting the ability of home owners / tenants to make a couple of extra bucks on under-utilized resources.
Whatever this social contract is, I've never signed it, and I don't really recognize anybody else telling me I must abide by this contract upon which I was given no opportunity to vote or discuss.
One way is to say that uberized businesses are all like this: they remove costs from the sticker price and externalize them. It's the ryanair model as applied to other things. Removing insurance and offloading the costs of not having insurance onto the users, removing proper benefits for staff and externalizing the costs from that onto society, removing quality of service items and requiring users to make up the difference (like doing your own housekeeping in an airbnb, or uber drivers having to provide their own vehicles).
The other way of looking at it is these services providing a middle ground. People may not wish the "full option" service, and are prepared to pay less to get less. Someone who wants the full service can still get it, there are now just more options.
I noticed this particularly in Princeton, NJ. A cute, small, and overly expensive town. Anyway, I was visiting the university on business, and if you stay downtown it is easy to get everywhere without a car.
Except... there are few hotels downtown, and no budget hotels. For those you have to stay near the highway (and hence rent a car).
The "social contract" would require that I view my own presence as a nuisance, even though I was being quiet and going to bed early. I decided that I didn't have any qualms about renting via Airbnb/Craigslist.
So you're saying I don't have the right to want those things? That new people coming into that kind of environment should be allowed to, even though there is nearly literally anywhere else in the f-ing world they can go.
I'm not saying you, in particular, are going to bother me, you sound quiet - but why should I give up on upholding the social contracts the neighborhood has established for decades for a rowdy party animals to blast through every weekend?
But, I also believe that new people coming into that kind of environment should be allowed to. People step on each other's toes, and it can be annoying. But I still don't believe that people have the right to keep other people out.
My neighbours are much more careful at 4am, and each might only leave like this a couple of times a year. An apartment on AirBnB has this pretty much every week.
You don't of course. Anyone shouting at 4am is being exceedingly rude; if there's any social contract in place, then they certainly aren't honoring their end of it.
Under these circumstances, I certainly wouldn't blame you for advocating to your municipal government that they crack down on AirBnBs. I would just hope that that government try to find some way to simultaneously keep the needs of visitors in mind. Maybe there is not a true win-win scenario here, but the status quo doesn't seem to be working well for anyone.
They generally are. But it's not practical to enforce them in a condition of a lot of short-term rentals, where people rotate on a weekly basis. Before AirBnB, that might not have been a problem, but now that's trivially easy to become a pirate hotel anywhere in the world, people are pushing to ban such rentals in residential areas, because it's the only way to make the problem go away.
That's another negative side effect right here. Occasional vacation sublet by a thoughtful homeowner doesn't hurt anybody. But those cases become collateral damage of the effort to fight off AirBnB's pirate hotels.
You could be right. I would like to think that there is some option which would make everyone more-or-less happy, but it could be that I'm being too optimistic.
Are you implying that tourists/visitors/non-locals should have as much say in local rules/policies/etc as the people that actually own property and live in those locations? If so I 100% disagree. While airbnbs are a less extreme example, look at tourist locations all around the world and how they are being destroyed and local populations are being displaced. The "social contract" SHOULD be biased in favor of people that actually live in and contribute to the area
As much? No. (However, I do strongly believe that locals who rent should have as much say; often their interests are not aligned with those of homeowners.)
I agree that in some cases, such as locations with huge numbers of tourists where local populations are being driven out, drastic measures are required.
In general, personally, I would favor a compromise involving a lot more regulation (e.g. of AirBnBs in apartment buildings) on the one hand, and making it easier to operate hotels on the other. I support homeowners who don't want informal hotels to be operated out of their apartment buildings; less so, homeowners who don't want hotels (whether formal or not) to be opened anywhere nearby.
I didn't know I was party to this contract, and I couldn't tell you what the terms are.
I travel a lot for work and I stay almost exclusively in AirBnb because I like having my money and a nice home-like experience.
I still don't understand how society would benefit from AirBnb not existing and us being where we started with the hotel cabal.
Many of the people on this site don't see or experience the downsides, as we are privileged enough to own our own properties or have our own space not impacted by airbnb. However, consider for example a family living in inexpensive housing with parents that work and children that are in school. There have been many cases of wealthy individuals purchasing/renting blocks of cheap apartments/condos and turning them into defacto hotels with no rules leading to partying, destruction of property, increased crime, and other issues. How would you feel if where you lived was suddenly overrun with short term tenants that are having a negative impact on your way of life, and not being able to afford to move?
That is how society would benefit form AIrbnb not existing. It may not benefit engineers making 100k+, but it would positively impact many in lower socioeconomic classes
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/reader-center/airbnb-new-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/17/airbnb-nu...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/airbnb-affordable-housing-gen...
"Hotel cabal" is bullshit. Slightly less bullshit than Uber's "taxi mafia", but still a steaming pile of bovine excrement.
AirBnB is a multinational corporation. It's displacing not just large hotel chains, but also all the local legal forms of short-term accommodation - small hotels, hostels, motels, BnBs, etc.
It really bewilders me that people have fallen for the same reality-inverting marketing propaganda not once, but twice. AirBnB and Uber aren't underdogs fighting cabals, they're SV-money-pumped cabals fighting small local businesses.
Having personally made “status” in the various hotel cabal loyalty programs, and having used AirBnb/VRBO/HomeAway/etc... many many times as well. I say with confidence that the hotel chains have negative externalities that exceed those of the various short term rental sites. I’ll go so far as saying the hotel cabal is a net negative.
I can see harm in it. But the solution isn't enabling yet another single company to expand and capture even more of the hospitality market.
> I say with confidence that the hotel chains have negative externalities that exceed those of the various short term rental sites.
Name three.
2. Wages are low
3. Architectural blight/reduces walk-ability
AirBnb (of whom I’ve been very critical in the past)
1. Encourages property ownership and wealth building amongst the middle class
2. Enables the middle class to extract the maximum value from their assets
3. Offers a better product at a lower price
4. Keeps profits local
Everyone assumes the hotels are complying with all local statues and are behaving in good faith just because they pay occupancy taxes and carry insurance. Bizarre.
Local city councils can and do enact laws for short term rentals and the short term rental companies have whole departments of developers who program those laws into the system. If those laws are not being followed then the justice department should do its job.
Does your airbnb host have proper insurance? For example you flood the apartment you rented from airbnb and the downstairs apartment owner sues you. IANAL but I'm fairly sure that usually in home insurance cases short term rentals aren't covered.