Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitchen is a huge plus. So for that, its really good.
I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.
Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips.
Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich.
[For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]
But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much.
Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.
It's a job, sometimes you do in the family sometimes you outsource. No need to be super-rich for it.
They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher
And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.
Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.
(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?
Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?
I don’t think you are..
What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.
How often are these people brought on holiday?
Wow this blows my mind TIL
It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.
I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.
Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.
Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.
I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.
what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me
Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.