Hacker News Reader

Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

What’s funny is that in France we had various alternatives to Airbnb for so long before Airbnb that Americans are completely baffled by the choice when they learn of them.

Actual upscale bnb? Gîtes de France.

I’m coming with 20-30 friends -> gîtes pour groupes, you’ll get an industrial kitchen and dormitories.

Those things existed long before the internet.

View on HN

(As someone whose family has often hired gites for holidays) Airbnb just offers simplicity and centralisation over the previous offerings. Less regular gite-hirers might not know of the precise businesses to go to, to hire a gite.

Taxis existed before Uber; but it was the app (handling location, real-time updates, and seamless payment) that changed things.

> Taxis existed before Uber; but it was the app (handling location, real-time updates, and seamless payment) that changed things.

I disagree - the game changer vs previous minicab offerings is the centralisation. Instead of ringing 4 companies and being given different waiting times by each etc, a single source tells me (initially, before the inevitable split into lyft et al) what the next available cab time is.

In the same way that early netflix felt like a game changer because I had loads of stuff in one place. A lot of the utility drains away as soon as competition appears again and you're back where you started.

In Brazil's delivery market what happened was first there was a company centralizing all delivery phones in a single phone number, but their web interface was very bad and there was no app. The company that went on to first centralize the whole thing using advanced user interfaces won, and eventually bought the first company.

Let's not forget the value of a reputation system. Both parties have an incentive to be reasonable & avoid getting kicked out of the platform.

Yeah, it's not perfect, and some bad actors abuse the rating system: "the driver wants me to wear a mask? I'll report him for unsafe driving" was one that I heard before.

But ultimately, knowing there's a record of whose car I went into makes me feel safer than riding with an unvetted driver that no one else knows I'm with.

One contributor to Airbnb's success was making things like this accessible to international travelers. It's that whole "live like a local" vibe.

"live like a local" while actively helping to destroy local communities. Such a great vibe!

It's the American dream!

Oh no! Xenophobia!

I take it you've never lived next to an AirBnB, or in a city that has housing issues in part because of AirBnB. It's horrible.

I have friends who lived next to one for a while, and the noise at all hours of the night from guests who don't care because they'll be gone in a week was awful. Likewise, I currently live in a city where the housing supply doubled once AirBnBs were put back onto the long-term rental market during the pandemic. It's also a city with one of the worst housing crises in Europe.

AirBnB directly harms the local people of a city, often causing rents to raise, rowdy neighbors who don't give a damn about quiet time, and forcing actual locals out of the city so tourists can feel "at home". Not to mention AirBnBs are not considered in urban planning the way hotels are, since they mostly exist in areas that are planned for residential (for, y'know, the residents of the city) use. It has nothing to do with xenophobia. Tourists are welcome, but can stay in hotels and stop taking up the housing supply of the areas they visit.

How is that the travelers' fault? It is the residents of the city themselves who are making the rentals available.

I think a lot of them are not on Airbnb, that's the trick. American people might be a bit chocked, but a lot of those places are not really made to make money, or their owners are not trying to grow that business.

I always disappointed there wasn't a site called GiteHub.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com