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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

This was really short sighted given Airbnb have claimed since the beginning to regulators, local authorities and the public that they exist only to provide a platform for people to rent out their spare rooms when it's convenient for them. Their core claim is that they are not a hotel company, which is how they manage to skirt so many hotel regulations. Built into these claims is the assumption that the owners of the properties offered on the platform can afford to keep them without renting then out full time, since it's supposed to be their primary home.

In reality, Airbnb is a glorified hotel room broker but with added facilitation of discrimination, normalisation of the charging of extra fees such as for "cleaning" (how have hotels managed to get by since time immemorial without charging one!?), rating obfuscation and a huge negative impact on local rental prices with landlords assembling empires of dozens of Airbnb properties. The fact Airbnb were so tone deaf to all this, asking the public to offset the losses made by landlords in times like these is really incredible.

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I have somewhat of a 'not in my backyard' opinion of Airbnb. I have admittedly used the service multiple times, but since I moved into a new house I've changed my view on the business model.

Our neighbour Airbnbs multiple rooms in his house full time. He barely has parking for 3 cars, 2 cars if you don't want to be boxed in. However he rents out room for 6 people. He constantly has business moving through his house, occasionally his guests encroach on our driveway which is adjacent to his.

The city has not been able to catch up with the modern world and has no policy or licensing for Airbnb style businesses.

The pandemic has had zero impact on his ability to rent out rooms, it's always full.

TLDNR: I wish I had a neighbour and not a business next to me in a residentially zoned street.

/rant

In my country the city is playing catchup on policy level.

Currently you can only allow 30 days of AirBnB for a property.

Over here the demand for AirBnB is pretty much non existant now, though. The Coronavirus lockdown has put an end to all travel and tourism for now. Many properties are now returning to normal, long term rental units.

Have you looked into reporting a zoning violation? The operation may violate existing laws relating to rental permitting or commercial use.

We've called the city and consulted with a friend who worked in planning. Basically they said they have no structure of vetting and dealing with Airbnb. I don't think it's even on their agenda.

Have you tried talking to your neighbour about the issue or adding a small A4 print saying "No Parking"?

Using AirBnB sometimes doesn't automatically make you a NIMBY, IMO. If an ordinary family of four stays in a secluded single family home for a weekend, that's not really the incarnation of AirBnB that many people have a problem with. It's the modern flophouse in the middle of a regular neighborhood that is really driving problems.

Their cars partly block your driveway? Do they make a lot of noise? What are the other impacts on you?

Cars do not block our driveway, they just take up space. This happens especially when the owner does not plow snow on his driveway. Guests basically cannot park on his driveway.

Noise is not a problem, fortunately.

What needs to happen is to realize this before your neighbour started his Airbnb business.

And how exactly do you do that when an existing neighbour can start his business after the fact?

By putting oneself in other people's shoes.

I don't really see how this bothers you. If they're parking on your driveway, just call a tow truck. If they're on the street, you're SOL unless you can pitch the city to make your street "residential parking only" with decals (but this is no different from your neighbour just owning 8 cars and street parking them).

I'd have to put up a sign notifying cars will be towed. I simply don't want to have to deal with the problem. Why should I have to deal with this in a residential neighbourhood where my expectation is to have an actual neighbour who understands his property line?

Putting the onus on me to deal with his guests is a problem that bothers me in of itself.

If you had the same situation I am sure you'd grow tired of it pretty quick.

Is this fundamentally different than your next door neighbor replacing their SFH with a 4 story apartment building? One could say Airbnb rentals are based on want and traditional rental housing is based on need, but the residents of the theoretical apartment building don’t “need” to live on your street.

> Is this fundamentally different than your next door neighbor replacing their SFH with a 4 story apartment building?

Yes, with actual long-term neighbours I only have to tell them once where the property line is and how to deal with trash pickup. Also there is zoning and bylaws regulating multiple occupancy homes, and I can look that up before purchasing my house.

I think the important distinction is the side effects of having a neighbor that rents out on AirBnB. In your case it's "occasionally his guests encroach on our driveway which is adjacent to his" which I think is unacceptable. I have rented ~10 AirBnB's with friends over the years and in every case we either flew into the location and used Uber/Lyft to get around or carpooled there resulting in us only using the allowed number of parking spaces.

A family or group of people occupying a residence that would be occupied by a similarly size group is not a problem in my mind. It's only when there is noise at all hours, trash left around the property or on yours, or parking in your parking area that I would really start to mind.

Maybe that's easy for me to say as someone who doesn't (that I know of) live near someone who rents out on AirBnB. That said, I do live next to 1 house that has ~6 (I honestly can't be sure) people that live there (all adults) and on the other side have a house that is often vacant and the owners have their parents live there sometimes I think and none of that bothers me. That's mainly because they keep to themselves, don't make lots of noise, leave trash laying around, or take up extra parking. So knowing all that I don't think I'd mind an AirBnB as long as all those factors didn't change.

I'd like an actual neighbour, not rotating guests who never get to know you. Half the year the owner lives in abroad and when he's gone the guests don't know how to put trash out, don't plow snow, don't know where to park etc.

It's these small things that chip away at the otherwise close-nit neighbourhood.

Have a chat with the owner and failing that see if you can setup a clamping company and do a deal with one to clamp anybody that encroaches on your property. May as well make some money from it.

Already spoken to him. He has converted an out building into another dwelling and promised he would not add more guests. He deceived us by saying he wouldn't, and then moved into his outbuilding and freed up space in the house. Up to 10 guests can now stay at his house.

Not disagreeing with you except about the cleaning fee. Hotels usually clean every room every day and have an on-site cleaning staff. The marginal cost to clean one room is pretty low, and it happens every day while you’re there, so it’s baked into the price. On Airbnb, typically your place is cleaned once after you leave whether you stayed one night or two weeks, and it’s more expensive than just cleaning a hotel room, so it’s a separate charge, as it should be.

...which is baked into their room rates? It’s predatory to advertise a lower rate and then inflate it after the fact with all kinds of tacked on fees. People (rightfully) go nuts at hotels that try to do this.

What is being inflated after the fact? When you book on Airbnb it shows you all the fees including cleaning fee before you book...

Go look at an Airbnb listing, it will be advertised at a lower, per night rate, but when you go to book, it can jump up as much as 50% with tacked on fees. Hotels don’t do this.

I just went on the site and looked at an advertised $80 per night listing. On booking it became $137, with the $40 cleaning and $17 service fees. That’s a $137 room not an $80 one and I doubt it costs $40 to clean it.

Hotels absolutely do this. Most egregiously in Las Vegas with 'resort fees', but try to book any hotel and you will get charged more than the advertised price due to 'taxes and fees'.

I always just prepay through third party sites like Expedia and never have this issue. Sometimes the the advertised rate is for a smaller room than I need, but I’ve learned to check that and the difference is rarely on the order of Airbnb’s fee/price inflation.

This doesn't happen in Europe. I assume we have consumer protections against this the same way as with flight prices.

Maybe it only applies to users from Europe but when I try to book a hotel room in Europe right now it happens.

airbnb makes a lot more sense for long term stays. I'm a nomad and hop between cities and countries so I book for a minimum of two weeks with a norm of one to two months.

The one time Cleaning fee is minimal compared to the total cost and I would not be able to afford my lifestyle if hotels were my only option.

Hotels do this all the time. Resort fees. Taxes. Surcharges. Amenities.

Only airlines publish full fares and that’s because of a federal law. I remember back in the day when it wasn’t the case and you had to click through to the final pricing page to do any serious fare comparison.

No hotel I've ever stayed at has done this. At least not the big names. At most you'll get a different price for halfboard/fullboard. And a price bump for an extra bed.

Also, in my encounters, resort fees are in lieu of being a boarder. The resorts by me, Miami Beach, charge visitors for access to the pools and spas, not their guests.

Go to hotels.com or any other hotel aggregator. Look at any hotel in New York City or Hawaii. Almost every hotel does this and all of the major chains do this.

Many hotels have started charging resort/amenity fees for guests as well. Traditionally commissions were only calculated on base room rate, so making up a mandatory fee and shifting some of the rate over acted as a super handy "tax dodge", artificially lowering the commission owed to all their booking partners. The same applies to pre-negotiated corporate and event-block rates – they can win business with an artificially low price, then pad the actual margin of stays via an ambiguously defined and undisclosed but "industry standard" destination/resort/amenity/urban fee.

Between that too-easy-to-pass-up profit optimization, and the marketing benefits of deceptively low list price, it's become pretty pervasive. And isn't limited to actual resorts – I've had bog-standard business hotels in the suburbs tack on a $30/night non-waivable "destination fee". Luckily it got to a ridiculous level recently, triggering a lot of media backlash and class action lawsuits last year[1][2].

It's also losing effectiveness, as things like online booking websites start displaying all-inclusive pricing and renegotiate their commission structures to be inclusive of mandatory, non-governmental fees. Between that, all the negative sentiment, the spate of lawsuits and legislation its triggered, the fees are hopefully on their way out.

[1] http://killresortfees.com/

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/resort-fees-being-addressed-...

This is actually not the case in the UK. If you put in dates, then it will add the fees then average them over the days and show you a day price which includes the fees. Though as others have commented, this may well be EU-specific.

It actually doesn’t always. If Airbnb doesn’t support your local taxes system, you will have to submit a request for payment to your guest for more money. For instance in Hawaii until a few months ago, there was no way to add the 14% hotel tax to the listing. We had to put a note in the description that said they would be charged an extra 14% after booking. I think many hosts simple don’t charge/pay the hotel tax because of the friction it adds to the transaction. We could ad it in the nightly rate, but then a service fee will be paid on it from the guest and the host.

Oh please. That's a complete excuse. One is more than capable of rending out the room then keeping price/1.14 for themselves. These fine print notes for taxes were such malarky.

That’s a pretty harsh response given that we went through lots of work to inform our Airbnb guests about the tax and provide local municipalities their hotel tax. It’s hurtful to here that called an excuse. Do you have rentals? Are you familiar with what the hotel tax can and cannot be applied to? We’ve been asking Airbnb for to natively support hotel tax in HI for years. Vrbo supported hotel tax from the beginning. You can’t just add 1.14 to the total and call it good. The taxes isn’t on the cleaning fee or service fee from Airbnb. They need to be separate. Are you implying that we preferred something unethical, but we had no choice for HI taxes. Most states had been supported for a while, but not all.

Are you saying that the law requires you to advertise the minus-tax amount? You can't work out what the hotel tax would be and include it in the price?

I understand that showing prices without the sales tax is commonplace in the USA. I find that practice quite dodgy and "everyone does it" is a poor excuse.

you actually can’t just multiply the total by the tax rate. typically only non-negotiatable items can have the hotel tax, so mid-stay cleanings, early/late check ins, and other charges cannot be taxed.

For condos rentals through realtors cleaning fees are often a norm - although they often have a baseline level of cleanliness where you don't have to pay a surcharge if it is to a certain standard such as all of the dishes either cleaned and put away or in the dishwasher cleaning while you check out and all trash cans emptied.

That sort of thing is a legitimate reason for a separate fee. I guess pedantically it is "non-baked in unconditional cleaning fees" essentially.

I personally would rather hotels separate a per cleaning fee and allow me to choose not to have it done every day.

Lucky for you, hotels don’t clean every day anymore because of covid. They didn’t drop prices though. In fact Marriott added a new covid cleaning fee!

Some places will clean every 4 days, some won’t clean at all during your stay. I suspect this may be the new normal, even post-covid.

The last hotel I stayed in did not clean during your stay, and also left the room vacant for 24 hours after checkout before they allowed the cleaning staff into the room. I don’t know if the regulations required that, but I was pretty happy for the cleaning staff that their health was being looked after.

What does that change for the hotel at the end of the day? Cleaning a room that's been dirty for a week is the same (if not more) effort than cleaning it every day, considering they can't just hire staff for one day of the week.

I think there's two things missing here. One is that not everyone leaves on the same day, so cleaning would still be distributed throughout the week. Secondly. They could still require something like once every 3 days. My room is always spotless when I stay, I don't understand how cleaning it for most people would take much longer.

I've stayed in a few hotels that gave drink coupons or other perks for skipping cleaning during your stay. I greatly prefer that as well.

Extended Stay America cleans rooms once or twice a week while you are staying there, you can ask for fresh linens and toiletries at the front desk. But it’s a budget hotel, you get what you pay for.

Although, many hotels have managed to wedge a mandatory “resort fee” into the final bill (and I’d like to see this nationally prohibited).

Resort fees are annoying especially when someone else prepaid your hotel bill but you are still asked to pay extra on checkin, even when it provide no resort amenities and is obviously just a business hotel.

> Not disagreeing with you except about the cleaning fee.

Having different fees is fine. What is troublesome is that AirBNB doesn't immediately show the total price (including all surcharges). I think recently they finally were forced to do that in the EU (before that I used a browser addon). That the initial price includes all the additional surcharges has been mandatory for quite a while due to companies using this to trick customers (e.g. advertising 200 EUR for renting 1 week; practically you need to pay 700 EUR).

Note that various companies still try to skirt that bit (surcharges only shown at a later stage). E.g. mandatory "booking fees" and so on.

Hotels are as bad about this or worse. At least the cleaning fee is only paid once for the booking. Lots of hotels now charge nightly resort or destination fees. There is no excuse for that not being part of the nightly rate.

> how have hotels managed to get by since time immemorial without charging one!?

Because I suppose hotels have to actually clean their rooms well, so the housekeeping expense is probably a significant fraction of the daily charge. But Airbnbs definition of cleaning is at best changing the sheets (if you're lucky) and make sure that there are no streaks in the toilet. So they charge a pittance and get away with it.

Eh, hotels have "resort fees" now. Same scam.

Hotel regulations are by and large rent-seeking behavior (irony?). For example, OTA's have created several rules that only exist to protect their profits. Hotels have to have the same price on all listing websites including their own, so it doesn't matter if one OTA charges 40% as their cut. You're not allowed to bake their overhead into your bottom line.

Despite the wild-west nature of vacation rentals like this, people often prefer it over traditional hotels. Maybe it's the free market saying all this regulation meant to entrench the incumbents has hit its critical mass.

Does anyone know of an alternative to Airbnb that's somewhat more ethical/sustainable? I strongly dislike hotels and I've really enjoyed the home feeling of some Airbnbs I've stayed at. If there was some alternative that didn't promote the rental property culture that'd be great.

You might try VRBO.

What makes VRBO more ethical/sustainable than AirBNB?

I don’t know that it is, but it is an alternative.

> Built into these claims is the assumption that the owners of the properties offered on the platform can afford to keep them without renting then out full time, since it's supposed to be their primary home.

It's not because they are supposed to be able to afford it that you didn't assumed you would get that revenue.

We do pet sitting, we don't need that revenue, in fact, we would nearly do it for the cost (food and cat litter) if the platform allowed it, simply because we like having pets, but can't afford the long-term responsibility of owning one right now (it's also incredibly rewarding to allow people to know their cats are well taken care of during their travel). For obvious reason, that revenue wen't down to nearly 0 during the pandemic. We don't need that cash, but it did change our plans quite a bit, because we expected that revenue. In our case it wasn't too bad, but I have no doubt it can be worst for others (I can easily see people that paid for renovations expecting to keep getting that revenue).

That's also completely ignoring the fact that it's not only the loss of revenue from Airbnb that can be the issue. The pandemic had impact much greater than Airbnb. It's not because someone didn't even expected any revenue from Airbnb, that they aren't in need right now.

You don't want to help someone? Don't, I'm not either right now, can't afford that, but that doesn't means there isn't people in needs and that you will never want to help them. Airbnb added that feature on their platform... that's all...

> (how have hotels managed to get by since time immemorial without charging one!?)

Hotel staff aren't paid? You pay the fee, it's just not itemized...

Would it be better if it weren't itemized? The total cost is shown before clicking on any offer... it wouldn't change a thing to hide it better.

Cleaning fee is actually a discount on longer stays. Hotels offer such discounts too.

I fully agree with most criticisms, but fees for the final cleaning of the room (usually only once per 1 or 2 week stay) are oftentimes separate from the room (or apartment) price, but they have to be advertised

When you searched Airbnb for prices they wouldn't include cleaning or additional services. For my first few years using Airbnb, this wasn't a problem, but then folks began hacking the search algorithm and charging huge cleaning fees to get included in more searches. You'd select a place for $500 and find it was $700 when checking out. I started going back to hotels cause they were cheaper than Airbnb.

This sounds like very much the same class of problem as "absurd shipping fees on eBay". When the fees are not actually guaranteed to go to the thing they purport to go into, but are just ways of moving money into line items the sorting algorithms don't see, I think it amounts to false advertising.

thank you for the clarification, I really thought it was normal business practice (which it can be), but this sounds much more like a scam

”You'd select a place for $500 and find it was $700 when checking out”

Noticed that too lately. It’s become pretty difficult to search for something by price because a lot of places almost double the price after cleaning fees.

Agree with all.

"Airbnb is a glorified hotel room broker but with..."

Still want phrasing which is more critical. Something along the lines of profiting from cheating.

It's a truly end-of-capitalism† move to shift the risk burden of property ownership from the center to the periphery. I guess McDonalds does this too with its franchises, but this is so much more pure: you own the property, you figure out all the property management work, and AirBnB takes the cut. McDonalds at least sends its franchises frozen hamburgers. AirBnB is just pure toll-bridge-as-a-service.

† Not sure if capitalism will actually end any time soon, but stuff like this is what makes radicals try their best to end it.

> Not sure if capitalism will actually end any time soon

It can't because any change or evolution keeps the name.

The only way to end it would be to revert back to a pre-capitalist economy that's not been retroactively deemed one (either by fans or detractors).

Yes, people call China “capitalist” now, but I don’t think that’s a very good label for what they’re doing. It’s a bad label because the category is not well defined.

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