Airbnb will up its penalty for hosts who cancel last-minute from $100 to $1k
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The experience of getting cancelled and having no repercussions to the host was extremely off putting to me. I had no idea on what to do at the time, as the site loves to not handle edge cases that completely sour your experience with the product. Why they simply couldn't have an error screen that said, "your host cancelled? please do the following and checkout these hosts who ARE available and reliable."
This was my first and last time using AirBnB. Maybe it changed now, but I tell everyone I know to just rent a hotel instead. Such a shame too because I love AirBnB when it comes to engineering but the product itself I will never use again.
This happened to me in Amsterdam once, the host cancelled a couple of days before we went (this was in 2018 or so). I contacted AirBnB support, and they gave me 150% of the value of the stay to get an alternative accommodation last-minute. Got us a nice little bed and breakfast that was more expensive and everything worked out alright. Sorry your experience was so stressful!
I just had an experience last month with a host canceling and they wouldn't give me a coupon for more then 30% of the value of the stay. But the stay that had been cancelled was a month-long and it was cancelled 8 days in.
Rebooking with just a 30% coupon was impossible, even after 20+ hours on the phone, and I ended up giving up to book my colleague a hotel for a few nights. (I still haven't been reimbursed by Airbnb either, and I will never expect to.)
I'm glad to hear that not every experience is terrible, but it's also annoying that it seems to be random based on region or the rep you get.
That is a different kind of cancellation as now it could be for cause which isn't the case for a cancellation before the stay.
The customer service agent slipped up (apparently) and confirmed there were other AirBNB guests in the unit, but when she escalated to get permission to call them, the story changed to "we cannot discuss whether there are other AirBNB customers in the unit due to privacy reasons."
I was not offered any help finding an alternative listing.
I was not offered a refund or any sort of compensation whatsoever.
I was left standing outside in winter in a cold part of the country, with nowhere to go, at midnight.
Fuck AirBNB.
You don't have to imagine. This happens quite regularly with Wizzair nowadays.
Of course even if you know, and you complain, they will make your life miserable.
With Things like these, plus all the dark patterns and scams regarding luggage, check-in, etc, I don't know why anyone would ever fly low cost.
Since the flag carrier, Malév[1], went bust -- in no small part due to the machinations of Wizz -- it's also the only airline with a direct route to many important destinations, such as Berlin.
So for the purposes of "cheap carrier screws you over" you could substitute EasyJet or RyanAir or whatever and have the same story, but with Wizzair you also have a lot of people flying it for business purposes because it's the only way to get to Berlin in under three hours.
And I've heard from a lot of friends who had their Wizz tickets unceremoniously cancelled this summer, so not surprise to see someone mention it here.
This happened to me around 2014, mere hours before my flight. I got a call with an automated voice recording that just said "This is United. Your flight has been canceled. Goodbye." and ended. I'm not even joking: that was the message. Your flight has been canceled; goodbye. It was unbelievable. And this was United, not some shady budget carrier. This was a return flight home, having checked out of the hotel, with my bags in the rental car.
Unfortunately this has happened to me on more than one occasion on major US carriers. On one occasion I had already taken the first flight, and while away on vacation they cancelled my return flight without explanation, only to offer me a flight that was taking off 3-days later.
Will wait a year or two to see if this makes airbnb reliable in any form.
The host of a friend's new year eye reservation in NYC one canceled less than 24 hours before check in as we were in transit to the city. That was an ordeal but Airbnb made it right by covering the difference for the next available comparable place which was significantly more expensive. Since everything was booked for the holiday, that turned out to be a penthouse.
We would almost all rather a hotel.
We're not going for the company, but for the price, and sometimes charm.
There should be professionals able to provide discount lodging with a bit of charm.
There is something perversely wrong with zoning in cities, it should be completely reasonable to have 'lodging' basically anywhere people live.
Literally any building could/should be used for temporary lodging with just a few parameters/adjustments.
In many cases, when traveling with my family, I'd much prefer an AirBnb/vrbo/condo. Our kids are too young to have two rooms, and getting too big to fit into a single room.
I guess a hotel suite could work, but it's generally a lot less space and less convenient. In HBO's White Lotus, the main family has a suite that looks like it would cost several thousand a night, but the teenage son is sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. In that scenario, having a 2-4 bedroom condo or home would be much preferable than an ultra luxury suite.
We've rented an Airbnb home basically on the beach in Kauai. No comparison to any hotel at any price in terms of comfort. In Italy, we've rented an Airbnb that had a bedroom hidden behind a bookshelf. For a five year old kid, it was like the coolest thing ever.
My kids broke an IKEA vase while there and the host asked for EUR 100 saying it had sentimental value. I countered EUR 50 (it probably cost 15 but it takes time and effort to replace things) and they accepted…
Another great VRBO experience was renting a house on a lake. Our friends had a house on the other side of the lake. Every morning my wife would drive around the lake with one kid, and me and another kid would row across to meet our friends. These experiences aren't possible with a hotel, at any price.
I've also stayed in an AirBnb that had cockroaches. We changed places the next day, switching to a place that was more than twice the price but infinitely better.
In short, I'd say that hotels and specific hotel brands have more consistency. Airbnbs can be amazing, and there can be horror stories. I guess it's like traveling to new places, foreign places. Much safer to stay with what you know, but you might be missing out on a lot.
Yes, lake houses will probably not be like that.
That said, I fully approve of raising the penalty on hosts who cancel. A guest who cancels is an annoying lack of income. A host who cancels could result in cancelling an entire trip, or staying in a terrible or even unsafe alternative.
Airbnb refunded the money, but their support only provided me a link to other listings. The prices 2 weeks before my trip were significantly higher than they were 3 months before, but Airbnb wouldn't make any accommodations. I repeatedly called customer support, and every time they would tell me that the case had been escalated and I would receive another call within 24 hours. They never called back, and after spending hours on the phone I eventually got a credit for $170 towards a future listing. The place I ended up booking for the trip cost $1000 more than the original listing.
I was just in the process of booking a car on Turo yesterday for the first time in a while, though, and did see a ton of listings where the owner says things like "go read these rules that are linked from my profile page; if you don't follow them to the letter I won't hesitate to cancel your booking last-minute"
Pretty offputting, honestly. If I could stomach driving automatics I'd just go to Enterprise.
The host initially accused us of causing the fire through negligence, then it was eventually revealed to be an electrical fault in the building, which had been built by the homeowner himself.
The bigger problem was that they hadn’t told their insurance company they were subletting. We eventually agreed a deal with lawyers for them to compensate us. (It probably goes without saying that AirBnB was of course no help throughout the whole process.)
It occurred to me that none of this would have occurred in a regular hotel. The hotel would have a proper fire and sprinkler system with actual fire escape routes, the electrics would not be amateur and they would have had proper insurance.
Airbnb feels like WeWork – they both desperately want to be "tech companies" but at the end of the day neither one of them really is. They should have more important things to focus on before tech. Instead of making sure their app has the nicest UI, they should first make sure all of their rentals have proper fire exits.
Using tech for your business doesn't make it a tech business.
The same business has been run for years before the internet with cork-boards.
The difference between “host” and “franchisee” seems to mostly be accountability and capital, not ownership by the brand on the booking site.
Amusingly enough, I once stayed in an Airbnb at a Wyndham.
Using technology to enable the business doesn't make the company a tech company. By that definition every company on earth is a tech company.
It's not like there's zero chance of negligence at a proper hotel, but yeah the odds should be better.
I'm reminded of an incident ages ago when I was renting a modern townhouse in a large corporate complex where they were arranged like duplexes with shared garage walls. My gf at the time had fallen asleep immediately after starting one of those Duraflame logs without opening the flue. She and our cats nearly died from smoke inhalation.
The units were all on a centralized smoke detector/fire alarm system powered by in-wall wiring that we weren't responsible for. We didn't know it at the time, but someone had unplugged all of the detectors so no alarms went off while her and the cats came dangerously close to dying in the buttoned up space. I came home to find her and the cats sitting on the front stoop, all coughing and sooty. The interior was all blackened with smoke damage.
If you're staying at the Sheraton, there may be negligence but you can be confident that there will be proper insurance.
Much more common than a fire would be theft. My friend was staying at the Shangri-La in Paris for his honeymoon. The porter took his bags while he was checking in, and their bags were stolen right out front the hotel.
The hotel apologized profusely, upgraded them to a very nice suite, and they got something like EUR 5000 for their belongings. He had a camera but mostly it was just their clothes (and suitcases) that they had to replace.
Hotels are like the opposite of Comcast or United. There is a lot of competition. They are literally called the Service Industry. AirBnb's offer a lot that hotels don't (charm, locations, potentially cost), but security and consistency is not it.
I assume that rentals without smoke detectors have other red flags. For the owner's sake, installing a smoke detector protects their investment! Pure negligence.
P.S. You definitely don't want to stay at an AirBnB in Italy!
> [For rentals allowing smoking,] the lowest prevalence of smoke detectors was among venues in Italy (2 percent) and the highest was in Scotland (83 percent). [0]
[0] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2019/multi-country-study-many-a...
100% of homes require smoke detectors here, must be positioned outside of every bedroom, and must be less than 10 years old. It's a requirement for building.
83% seems crazy low to me, let alone 2%!
I've worked on fraud, at scale, before and it is a hard problem. But when you're giving fraudsters $$$ by letting scams happen and hurting people's lives in the process... for years... it escapes understanding.
When you turn a blind eye, you're effective "creating" a world for fraudsters to thrive. As a founder, myself, I'm always thinking about what the world would look like if I am successful. At some point it's your duty as a founder to put your foot down and "be the change you want to see in the world" even if it hurts your profit margin.
But maybe this is also the difference that lets people rise to the top. It's just sobering. At least people like Bill Gates have been able to distance themselves from their ruthless business tactics and steer that influence towards promoting positive change.
This means you can tell them that you just want a comparable place nearby (due to some unforseen issue with original booking) and they can say it's too much work or too much money to book you one and just kick you a refund last minute.
- support didn't offer to find a new last-minute place for our big group, but they did say they'd cover a new place
- basically 0% availability, so only $$$$ places left, and multiply that by a big group: 5-figure bill for lodging
- vrbo explicitly agreed to cover it after going through internal approvals, so we pulled the trigger. big event and clock was ticking before we'd be sleeping on the streets, so we were relieved.
- ... and then I got shafted with a 5-figure bill because, after-the-fact, they put up bureaucratic hurdles & denied our claim
After that shockingly fraudulent experience, I did some googling, and apparently this is common practices to all big players in this space. Multiple (winning) class action lawsuits.
On the plus side, better motivation for our business: we do gpu graph visualization & graph neural networks to help companies detect & prevent this kind of behavior based on all sorts of account metadata (transactions, image forensics, IPs, clickstreams) so personally motivated to help others target the bad guys causing problems for everyone else :)
FWIW I haven't had a bad experience with AirBNB yet over the years and handful of stays I've been in. The one in Iceland smelled slightly like piss and dog odor, but it was tolerable. Aside from that, the other experiences like in Hawaii or some random off-grid cabin in Oregon were pretty good and much cheaper than the alternative.
That said, I believe AirBNB is another "too big to fail, too big to care" tech company like Amazon, Google, etc. They continue making billions while screwing over thousands if not millions of people all the time, so why invest in improving the customer experience? They have no incentive to do so until their profits take a beating.
I have a friend with a gorgeous six-bedroom that he fills for $7800 per week all summer long.
Also acceptable looking ones in the 50€-100€ range for a budget traveler, even if I wouldn't necessarily pick any of those.
1. Startup undercuts incumbents with cheap new approach.
2. Turns out the new approach was cheap because it saved money by pushing risk onto the customer or 3rd parties.
3. Turns out the extra cost of the incumbents wasn’t all profiteering.
4. Regulations and/or bad press step in, and make the startup put in some extra controls/protections/standards.
5. Startup not looking so cheap any more.
6. Startup graduates to being just another incumbent.
Both Taxi and Hotel industries are insider, regulatory capture monopoly frauds that need to be busted wide open.
Most frustratingly, our stupid governments have not effectively adapted. There has been almost 0 rational policy adjustment since this change.
Even more weird, even in cities where Uber was banned (don't agree with that, but it's the cities choice) - they just continued to operate, the effete city managers unable to do anything about it.
We should have been experimenting with different lodging models for some time now.
Utterly stupid cities could be making considerably more money with better taxi models, instead, they stay stupid, while Uber collects surpluses that could go into our civic infrastructure.
It's a shame.
Hotels can become cheaper by removing some of the services that cost more than they are worth.
It is also worth noting that larger groups might prefer an apartment where they can all stay over multiple hotel rooms.
There are also larger families and people who want to cook.
I've seen this happen in other service apps -- hailing a taxi via Uber/Lyft, and when the driver sees that I'm a little out of downtown, about 30% of the time I'll get a text message off-platform asking me to cancel the ride because "something happened to [their] car" in between them accepting the ride and them getting to my home. My only thought is that the heavy emphasis on driver/host ratings and penalty fees drives the providers off-platform, but that leaves their users stuck shouldering the burden and nobody happy.
I've gone back to hotels. The experience is streamlined. No janky lockboxes with codes that don't work, no unresponsive hosts (someone available 24/7 at most), places are cleaned on request, and other amenities are typically available right on site.
I’ve stayed in two places in the last two weeks.
First wasn’t like the pictures at all. Rammed with furniture and had no way to put garbage out.
Second stunk of mould on the first floor, AC was useless; and the washer/dryer was broken (actually dismantled causing the mould smell). We had to use a laundrette.
They both got glowing reviews because I can’t risk not being able to use the platform as they’ve swallowed the entire short term rental market.
Rip 'em a new one. They deserve it.
For example, on July 3 the the house cleaner for the AirBnB next door to my condo claimed they "kicked out" the guest on because they had more than 3(?) people over. When I asked her the eviction tactics she was vague and said "phone calls were made and AirBnB has a process". It seemed like a low bar to evict someone at a beach property during a holiday weekend and from my perspective those guests were just fine. Could a host just fabricate a violation such as "the neighbors are complaining about noise" and skip the $1000 fee ?
I will be looking at alternatives, because I'm fed up with their attitude towards hosts.
I stayed in one once, in 2018. It was a neutral experience. But certainly not better than a hotel. Unsure of the price as I didn't personally pay for it. Getting in initially was more work than a hotel, but not horribly so.
But after what they do to the housing situation, the numerous shitty hosts sometimes doing blatantly illegal things, things like the above, etc. I'd rather not have all that on my mental plate while trying to find accomodation. Book a hotel, call it a day. Hotels exist to solve the problem or temporary accommodation. They've been doing it for decades.
The only way I'd use an AirBnB is if the choices for hotels didn't exist for some reason. Like with Uber/Lyft and Taxis. Uber is still useful in some scenarios, but for the most part, take a Taxi if you're in a city.
I am willing to accept a lower standard for a lower price. The problem is some people think they deserve a 5 star experience for $100. The places I stay are old and outdated, you may see some bugs, and usually no toiletries/towels are provided.
Yes, Hotels offer a better experience. But my entire expenses for a 5 day vacation by the beach, including flights, lodging, and food is less than $1,000 with a cheap AirBnB.
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/resources/hosting-homes/a/changing-...
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/article/990/host-cancellation-...
It's plain as day, the fees are charged to the host, and thus Airbnb takes the fees.
Ie. someone gets a DUI, we don't directly pay out the fee to anyone near by who may have been affected.
However, in most cases, damages will need to be pursued civilly.
My point was, the primary goal of expensive punishments are not to make victims whole.
The Airbnb penalty goes to cushion Airbnb's pockets.
i.e., to their stock price, i.e., to investors, i.e., to pension funds both private and public (pensions are by far the largest AirBnB shareholders), i.e., it likely benefits the majority of the public (the majority of US households have stock exposure, quite often large pension funds or index funds - AirBnB is part of the Nasdaq 100, for example).
If the staff at the hotel does not abide by the walk policy, you can call the 800 number to complain, and they will send you a check for your expenses and then bill the hotel.
Obviously, exclusions to the walk policy are if you are banned at the hotel, or if you are walking in high with 3 prostitutes hanging off your arm, or any other reason that a hotel would want to refuse you because the hotel believes you will cause damage or disturb others.
Like is that a law or something? I'm not sure it is. They may choose to do this.
Compare to flights and trains, where there are laws. For example is cancelled and you've started your journey, they must get you home, by law (in the UK.) I was in a five-hour taxi ride once after a train was cancelled.
There was fresh fruit and chocolate, a kitchen, an office, a living room, and two bedrooms.
Often station staff will try their best to get rid of you and send you on to another station to make it their problem. And station managers can be hard to find. And they have sudden amnesia about the law etc
So the host can cancel, rebook at 3x , pay $1k and still come out on top?
Correct way to do this would've been start is exponential fines. Start with 100, 200 next time, 400 after that ect till an upper limit.
So they book early for a guaranteed $x. Then if they see that market rates for nearby units rose to n*$x, it makes sense for them to cancel and rebook at that rate.
Fortunately, it was still early enough that I was able to book a hotel near the finish line. Unfortunately, that hotel ended up be the host of all of the press and press conferences when someone bombed the finish area.
Bonus points if they make it so that the host can't book anything on the days on and around the cancellation date. After all, if the host cancelled, then it has to be because there's a major issue preventing the place from being use by guests, right ;). Maybe a two-week blackout period.
To me the idea that I have to do a kind of song-and-dance negotiation with a host by first introducing myself over texting chat, to see if we meet each-other's minimum standards, and then have them personally arrange for how to do the key pickup and dropoff is an enormous turn off to me. Thinking back on the marketing, Airbnb in my mind occupied the same space as a hotel, but actually it's intensely more social than that. I was shocked when I first tried it and found it was so built on a one-on-one experience.
Granted, I only ever did this once, and maybe 6 or 7 years ago at that, but I vastly prefer the idea of an impersonal hotel check-in desk that confirms my stay and then retreats into the background.
Now, AirBnB has soured and caused lots of problems while hotels are more comparable in price and more reliable.
Just my general opinions I don't really have any proof other than using the service and making the decision to switch back to hotels primarily.
AirBnB and similar is still a better choice for larger groups or vacations where you want something like an entire house: kitchen, multiple bedrooms, privacy, etc.
Usually I send a message that's says "thanks, I'm checking out" when I leave.
I usually stay at some of the cheapest places tho. If I'm going to be paying more than $120/night I'll just book a hotel.
Some aspects of the experience has worsened, and I've been using them since the beginning. Lately these business-oriented AirBNBs have taken over, one I stayed in sent a massive list of paperwork to sign that included requirements like having to send license photos of any additional guests. Having to clean the place is not technically something you do at a hotel, but many AirBNB hosts now come to expect it despite charging cleaning fees. At a hotel you hand them the CC, they hand you the keys, and that's it.
The best thing about AirBNBs still remains the fact that you can easily book a treehouse in Tennessee or a palace in Cambodia. That and staying with local hosts who have deep experience wherever you're at is always a unique joy.
Or maybe I'm just an outlier here. It wouldn't be the first time I didn't quite click with a large B2C company's product (cc facebook, instagram).
He would take our bags up but under no circumstances would he let us actually see the room or have the keys until it was "ready". Obviously it was either a scam, or an illegal sublet that he didn't want to level with us about.
Airbnb refused to refund a room that for all intents and purposes, didn't exist. Their rationale was that they hadn't been informed the same day, which is ridiculous considering how much of a timesink finding a last-minute hotel is. It should be open and shut, but they simply bought the lies the host told them, despite the fact they were never even there.
I've had >1 Uber driver call me and ask me to cancel the request on my end because he realized he couldn't get to me for X reason, and he didn't want the cancellation to negatively impact his driver account.
I've found this kind of behavior is much more common abroad than in the US.
Airbnb is simply extremely ok with leaving you stranded, alone, and homeless regardless of where you are in the world or what your other options are.
My last Airbnb went perfectly smoothy but there was still a ton of communication with the host. And that was only part of a dozen+ emails and a similar number of app notifications related to the stay. Why? At some point I just want to show up, crash, and leave.
That’s it.
Of course in the US this is impossible because in most places building anything other than single family houses is illegal.
Many years ago people would have boarders. London, for example, would have people who stayed during the week.
What AirBnB tried to do was create a system to allow Oriole to set up illegal hotels. That’s it. I never saw the attraction in that personally.
The negative externalities of AirBnB are massive: safety concerns for residents, disruption for residents, reduction in rental housing supply and reduction in the supply of houses for owner-occupiers.
The sooner it dies the better.
Booked a different place in the same "town" and it was a 10 minute drive from where it was supposed to have been. We just accepted it.
I did eventually get a refund on the first one, but only after raising a fit at AirBNB. I think I'll stay at hotels in most cases moving forward.
I'm sure many booked holidays a year ago at great rates when people couldn't travel and hosts desperately needed cash flow. Now that bookings are approaching (hotels do this as well) hosts are cancelling bookings and selling them to others who will pay a much higher price.
AirBNB’s penalties for host go to AirBNB, not the guests, and AirBNB frequently waves the host penalties without explanation. If the stay was canceled prior to booking and the fees waved, no review is allowed to be left either by the guest or automatically; the automatic cancellation reviews are only left if host gets a penalty, which again AirBNB frequently waves without explanation.
I have personally lost thousands due to AirBNB allowing host to cancel at the last second then repost and book the stay for 300% more; host even offered to allow me to rebook, so clearly cancellation was unrelated to anything to do with me.
Use AirBNB at your own risk, they will happily leave you without a place to stay if a host cancels a booking. Always have a backup plan and look into travel insurance.
My point is that guests per stay should be able to set there own policies would be viewable to a host prior to booking or in a list of pre-approved guest policies. Host is under no obligation to book a guest with a policy they are not agreeable to.
This is what people are taking issue with. Calling it the "gig economy" doesn't explain why people should be fine with it.
Of course you can. That is exactly what people in this thread are doing.
>Is it scummy? Sure.
Correct.
>Illegal? It's capitalism.
We are saying if AirBnB doesn't fix this problem, we will take our business elsewhere. That is capitalism. If you're trying to forbid us from threatening to take our business elsewhere, then you are the one who is taking anti-capitalist measures.
I don't know why so many people try to reinvent the definition of capitalism to suit their own needs. Capitalism doesn't mean we're supposed to give the "gig economy" some protected status, or whatever you're trying to suggest here.
But you wont. They are now too big. If the tech industry leaves it will just be filled with the rest of the world. Im on your side, I think its scummy. They were a scummy business to start with, skirting laws, subsidized by VC money, just like Lyft, Uber, etc.... However, this is how its done now. The gig economy is an economy built on 'what can I make right now' I dont want them protected. It's just schlepps earning a buck here and now because they cant anywhere else.
I already have, and this demonstrates how much you understand about the situation.
But this was long overdue. Some cities are rife with Airbnb scams
You can pretend only the technology matters but customer service can sink or swim a service. And I don't get why Airbnb is not apparently paying attention to those issues
1. Heavily prefer Superhost
2. Never be among the first guests at a new property unless there's a heavy discount.
3. Stay away from professionally managed hosts or hosts that have more then 3 listings. These are generally more expensive, have minimal furnishing and are overall less "homey", and are the same people contributing to rising home prices. Airbnb should be a place for homeowners to make side income, not investors turning over a considerable amount of housing into rentals.
In my experience, the prices are comparable to local hotels of the same quality - especially if you also take into account hotel amenities like room service and breakfast not included in Airbnbs. So I don't see a cost benefit.
I have never in my life had a hotel cancel a reservation on me. Never. On the other hand, in only a few months of using Airbnb regularly while traveling for work, I had three last-time minute cancellations. This makes renting through Airbnb incredibly stressful, because then I have 'will they cancel on me last minute?' in the back of my mind, and who needs that extra stress?
Finally, when something is wrong with the Airbnb there's not really anyone you can call to fix it, if the host is unresponsive. I was once in an Airbnb in Nevada where the temperature outside was higher than 110, and the air conditioner was not working. It took the host something like 12 hours to get back to me, and that was only to tell me that they've scheduled a repairman to come in a few days, when I would no longer be there. On the other hand, if you were to have broken air conditioner in a hotel, you'd be switched to another room promptly.
So I just don't get Airbnb's appeal. It's not a good deal either money-wise or stress/quality-wise.
I've booked about 20+ AirBnBs (most SuperHost and most in LATAM) and have only had hosts cancel on me 2 times. Both right after I booked them and not at last minute before my arrival.
Maybe a larger cancellation fee would make it more likely for such a reservation to be honored, but this article seems to only be referring to last-minute cancellations.
I find Airbnb while not perfect allows travelers who are on a budget to find places. If you’re looking for whole houses or apartments then it’s usually not cheaper than a hotel but I’m usually booking rooms in an apartment or house - and in those instances it’s usually cheaper.
A lot of hurt feelings would probably be mendable as long as people had some assurance that in the event of a last-minute cancellation, they at least would have someplace to stay and wouldn't be left out in the cold.
Emphasis mine. A refund doesn't help when everything else is booked out and the only option costs 5 times more than your original booking.
General statement, other than probably getting your money back, they do next to nothing to support customers when something goes wrong
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1550276733110063104
They are similar to the ones here.
The new AirCover would probably solve a lot of issues in this thread https://www.airbnb.com/aircover
If the guarantee was alternative accommodation either the same or better as what you previously booked, this would be a much better policy.
I've been digital nomading for the last 10 months over several different airbnbs and have only had good experiences
I'm guessing at this point, the savings I've made will cover the eventual problem where I need to book some super expensive hotel in an emergency.
I shouldn't have to spend 12 hours on the phone over the course of three days, having my vacation completely ruined, just to get what I deserve which was my money back.
I think the biggest issue is that the three way dynamic between guests, hosts, and AirBnB leads to weird situations where the guest needs to thread the needle between everyone else’s rules and pass through rules on a rental that represents very little margin for anyone involved above you. It’s easy to run afoul of them and get a bad rating or fine. There are the extra fees that are not shown by search results that may make the stay cost more than a hotel. And often the “it has a kitchen” remark means a bunch of single serving oats, a kettle, and a toaster. A random hotel breakfast has as much variety.
From my POV one reason to care about is because AirBnB is making it harder for the "have nots" to become "haves": those that could have afforded their starter house suddenly can't because available properties are now AirBnBs, and those that could have rented near their work must now live further away, taking hours off their free time. Meanwhile, the "haves" reap more cash with less effort.
AirBnB is one of the weapons being used to keep you as a have not, though. You're basically helping to pay for the rent increases that are keeping you as a have not.
Renting AirBnB is way more expansive than owning the home so you are the rich guy screwing with the neighbourhood not the other way around.
Never using Airbnb ever again. Hotels know how to treat people correctly.
I've used AirBnB only once exactly for these reasons. That uncertainty is killer when I'm gonna be staying in a city where I don't know anyone who lives there and can help me get out of a jam. There's a piece of mind to getting a hotel and knowing for sure that I will have somewhere to stay. If something goes wrong, there's a company policy I can review that has explicit steps for recourse.
Few weeks after that I receive racist messages from the host on my personal cellphone. I am shocked Airbnb would share my personal details just like that. I reported it to Airbnb, but they were pretty clueless as this was happening outside their messaging system. I finally had to share screenshots of the text messages, and they said they will take down the hosts account. They did for sometime, but after a couple of months that host's account is still live and his place is still accepting reservations. My review has been taken down though.
Same thing happened to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32194057
Before then I didn't know AirBnb was moderating bad reviews in such an aggressive way. Good reviews mean nothing if all the bad ones are automatically taken down. It's ridiculous, and made me very wary of ever booking again with them.
(There's an interview of Bezos somewhere where he explains that when starting Amazon, publishing houses were complaining to him about the bad book reviews, and he told them something to the effect of: it's because we let bad reviews up that people trust us. Obviously things have changed and Amazon reviews aren't what they used to be, but still. Bezos in 1997 understood something that AirBnb fails to grasp.)
The worst for me was a hotel in Paris I booked via Booking.com. It was completely different from the announced, and had several issues, such as having an outside bathroom without a lockable door. Luckily it closed during the pandemic.
Booking.com not only fought tooth and nail to charge me, claiming to my credit card that I needed to be charged since I "actually stayed at the hotel", but they then deleted my review claiming that "I didn't stay at the hotel". The key to getting a chargeback was sending the email of the deleted review to the credit card company.
Today I just search using Booking.com but make reservations via phone.
The problem is not AirBnB or Booking.com. The problem is "internet companies". They all suck.
If you book with one of the booking agencies (I will not name the two that I used), the hotel will often give you one of these rooms, off the bat. You can complain, and they'll get you another one, but that is not something that you want to do, when you just checked in at 11PM, and your first meeting is at 8AM, the next morning.
BTW: Hotels are not supposed to do that, but they do, anyway. It's hard to prove.
[1] That's because if the front-desk guy/gal has any agency in this, they will absolutely not try to put a Karen into a bad room. Because they don't want to deal with his/her freakout over the noise of the vending machine, or the elevator, or some other factor that they can't control, but will get the guest to complain to management.
However, if you search the English alphabet for the letters between "N" and "Q," you are likely to find the first letter of the name of each booking service (not hotel).
[1] Bad as in little or no natural lighting, unusually small, etc. Some of the time a tall big city hotel abuts other buildings and has a lightwell and, especially on the lower floors, things can be pretty dark.
I've currently got a month-long AirBNB booking coming up and every day I cross my fingers and pray for no surprises. I don't remember ever having this kind of uncertainty and anxiety when booking with a plain old hotel.
We got cancelled on the week before Thanksgiving in a rural area...
You're just one more weary traveler who will be near-instantly replaced by someone else, so fuck you.
This is also why I've never once booked with AirBNB, and why I've always booked a hotel wherever I travel. Yes, it's more expensive. It's also guaranteed. I also get someone to clean my room everyday. I also don't have to worry about walking into the kitchen and seeing an entire sink full of dirty dishes. I don't have to worry about a random teenager in the hotel taking up my bathroom for an hour. I don't have to worry about another teenage following me around and talking to me. I don't have to worry about the bathroom being dirty, and I don't have to worry about seeing a roach in the house.
What I just described was the experience of a former Marine buddy of mine who booked a 6 week stay in Plantation, FL. He was moving down here from Brooklyn, NY and needed a place to stay until his apartment with ready. The AirBNB provider he booked with labeled a SuperHost.
If that's what a SuperHost rental gets you, I'm totally uninterested in seeing what anything less gets you. I'd rather stay at a Motel 6.
So AirBnB has to keep allowing (and encouraging) property management companies, because no one else can bring them the volume they need to grow.
And I shouldn't jinx myself, but I've used Airbnbs on every trip I've taken, and I've yet to run into a real show stopping problem. Not saying it doesn't happen, just pointing out that it's not as frequent as you are making it out to be.
I'd rather book a proper dedicated rental flat from another platform than someone's random flat on AirBnB these days though, after all the horror stories (personally I've never had an issue).
Edit: I read another comment lower down talking about hotel rooms with a kitchen. Personally never encountered this, maybe it's a US thing, but that could be an OK solution if it included all the stuff you need to cook a basic meal.
They're usually well stocked with most of the things needed for a basic meal.
I use them versus AirBnB because they seem to look out for me very well. I've had minor hassle getting a refund only once in last twelve years, but they did come through for me. I also like the simple reward program. They've added some fees in the last few years, but it's still good.
Edit: maybe drop the "solo", it's probably not worth it if you don't travel in a group.
Hotels are fine for business travel for me, where I don't care much about the space and just need a clean, reliable place to sleep.
disclaimer: I used to work at Airbnb, so biased.
Here's a weird case where AirBNB might make more sense than a hotel:
I have a medical cannabis licence. Hotels don't seem to like the idea of me vapourising cannabis indoors, but an AirBNB host might be okay with it if I ask first (assuming otherwise legal in the area).
1. Several nights on a houseboat in Amsterdam.
2. Two weeks in Cape May, NJ in a walkable location to the beach with enough space to bring kids, laundry facilities, and a garden to entertain friends joining us.
3. Long weekend with extended family in the middle of Harper's Ferry, WV.
Finding and organizing these experiences would be harder without AirBnB. There is no way I'd use AirBnB for a regular trip though.
I suspect that, as with many other marketplaces with suppliers of widely differing quality (e.g. Amazon), there are a lot of people who optimize for price and then are surprised when they get burned on deals that seem too good to be true.
Rent a huge house (8+BR, 6+ bath, 3500-5000 ft²), bring the leadership team together to live and work together for a couple of intense days. In Monday evening, cook dinner together, work Tues/Wed, leave Thursday AM.
There’s no hotel-equivalent that I’m aware of. (And given that it covers 3 nights’ accommodations and cheaper meals for 8-ish people, it’s notably cheaper than a hotel and restaurants in almost every case.)
- Iceland, flat in Reykjavik, 5 day trip. Kitchen and more space vs hotel, similar cost. - Italy, flat in Florence, 5 day trip, part of longer trip, used hotels in Rome and Riccione. Lower cost, kitchen, more space vs hotel - Scotland, cottages in Portree and Stornaway, 5 days each, used hotels in Fort William and Inverness (1 night each). Less expensive, more space, full kitchen vs hotels in this area. - Roanoke VA, 3 night weekend, dog allowed, kitchen and more space, lower cost vs hotel - Mt Rogers VA, 7 day, no hotels nearby, plus dog - St Michaels MD, 3 day weekend, dog, kitchen, limited hotels in town (though plenty on the outskirts) - Emerald Isle, NC - house, 3 day weekend, needed 4 dogs and 2 couples, and kitchen - Cape Canaveral, FL - flat, 14 days, needed kitchen and dog alllowance - Cocoa Beach, FL - house, needed 2 couples, 1 solo, and 4 dogs, plus kitchen
Maybe I'm being naive, but filtering to Superhosts and entire home, then checking for multiple listings and high ratings seems to work ok. And for big cities, I'd probably just get a hotel, since Airbnb is likely to be a small flat anyway.
I have two typical modes of travel.
One is a short (1-2 week) trip somewhere, for some business (work or personal). A hotel is totally fine, but I still check both hotels and Airbnb for price and feature comparison. In this scenario I don't need a proper kitchen but I still want a microwave, a proper table, a decent chair, and good Internet connectivity - which sound like some basics but aren't exactly common. But, yeah, a hotel is typically a good option. Airbnb quality seem to degrade, so I'm typically looking at the hotels those days. E.g. my last trip was to San Diego, CA and Airbnb offerings I've seen were much worse (based on my personal preferences) than similarly priced hotels.
The other mode is multiple months of living somewhere else - like as in "digital nomad". Hotels typically cease to work for this purpose. For those scenario I want a full apartment (or a house) to myself, I don't need any room service (I can wipe dust and vacuum on my own, thank you), but I want something comparable to home. A full kitchen (with a dishwasher and an oven), a good working area (separate area - ideally a dedicated room, with favorable lighting conditions, normal height sturdy table, an ergonomic chair, etc.), a separate rest area (comfy non-leather couch and a correctly placed big TV with an accessible HDMI input), proximity to a grocery store, etc. It is very hard to find merely a suitable place - I spend multiple days, sometimes weeks, going through the listings, looking at the photos, checking neighborhoods etc. - but at least there's a chance to find something. I do check hotels (because why not) but most of the time they're simply not an option at all - they're tailored for very different use cases and simply don't offer this kind of service. And, well, my other alternatives are local classifieds and searching Google Maps for advertised rentals (which I do), but at least Airbnb has some standards so it's my first option. Last year I had a 2-month trip to Tbilisi, Georgia and the apartments I've found on Airbnb were almost perfect - I'm sure my experience would've been worse (and significantly costlier) if we would've stayed in a hotel.
Best kind of Airbnb is when a host had a place for themselves to live, but their circumstances had changed (e.g. they bought a second property) and now they're renting it out. Such places are simply made for living. Worst kind is a property bought specifically for renting out.
Extended Stay America. Almost every large city has one ("large" defined as more than 100,000 - 200,000 people). You can book for months at a time if necessary. They have WiFi at all locations, however...
I just donate to The Calyx Institute. My $750 pledge bought me a year of Sprint (now T-Mobile, and far more reliable) cellular access with a 5G WiFi hotspot and absolutely no data cap, ever. I ran 1.1 TiB through that access point one month and never had a moment's trouble. Long story short, Sprint bought Clearwire, Clearwire had a deal with the federal government to provide non-profits with cheap unlimited (actual unlimited) 4G / LTE hotspots and no fuckery (no slow-downs after X gigabytes transferred, no "preferred tier" customers like how MVNOs are second tier to the host provider). When Sprint bought Clearwire, the Feds only approved it with the provision Sprint had to honor the deal. Now that T-Mobile owns Sprint, they have to also honor the deal.
The third word is the key. ;)
I've added a bit to my comment after the initial posting - an example of my last long-term stay. It was in Georgia (Sakartvelo, not the US state), and it's a good but developing country - to best of my awareness they don't really have anything similar, or at least my searches hadn't found it. So I suppose it depends on a country.
But you're absolutely correct, Extended Stay America is probably a very good option. When I've immigrated to the US, it was very high on my list. I still went with an Airbnb because I needed to find a new permanent home anyway (so I was renting short-term only as I was looking for a job), and Airbnb was in a more favorable location as I needed things in a walking distance (had no never driven a car at the time, hah), and maybe that was a mistake - it was OK but not exactly great. Anyway, I do have a home in the US now (and love the country) and I'm not really exploring the country just yet - but if/when I'll have a long-term trip somewhere else here, I'll definitely consider Extended Stay America. So far my US trips were all fairly short though.
And thanks for the tip about The Calyx Internet Membership. I don't have use for this right now, but this might come in handy!
BTW, does anyone know - is there something similar in Mexico, in safe(r) areas, ideally a gated community? This is the next country life is sending me to - because of some family circumstances I'll have spend some months down there...
The first city I checked, DC, does not (listed in Google's hotel search). The suburbs have several, but that's a terrible option if don't want to "commute" during the trip. Downtown DC does have other chains that are extended stay, but I haven't found a good way to search for "hotel with a kitchen and living room" - basically requiring me to know which brands have those amenities.
Sunnyvale was a Hilton garden Inn and while uninspired, was completely fine - clean and quiet.
Maybe this will be different when I'm traveling more for the sake of traveling, but for the most part I'm traveling to see something specific in a city rather than the city at large.
Either way, I'm shocked that they would refuse to clean your room for a week. Of course, if you didn't ask, they won't.
For this reason I also have gone back to hotels unless I'm booking a place for more than 2 weeks. Airbnb often has a monthly discount so remains a decent place for long stays, although if you put in the work (and pay cash) you can usually find cheaper options.
Otherwise, I'd pick hotels without even blinking.
Include a mini-kitchen with 2 burners and a small counter. Burners are disabled but could be enabled by request, or some keypad on the wall (child proofed). You can pick up a box of kitchen supplies (pots, knives, etc) from the front desk or request room service to cart them up.
Put the supplies back in the box before you leave (box is lined with a rubbermaid dish bin).
This would offset the cost of furnishing each room with supplies, while also killing one of airbnb's value props.
I'm pretty sure some of the suite-style chains in the US do as well.
We also have serviced apartments, designed for the longer stays, but are generally only to be found on the cities.
In Spain, at least in my experience, it doesn't make much sense to get an AirBnB.
Prices are higher most of the time, and hotels can and do have better location and service.
AirBnB was supposed to be a mean for people to rent spare rooms temporarily.
Renting out just a room in your house seems ok. My cousin did this when she bought a house to help cover the expenses after she lost a job, but to book out the whole house as some sort of crappy hostel seems unbearable.
I don't share the same opinion.
This is the fault of Airbnb, they chose to operate that way, it's not a market force.
Take Uber (not a marvellous company or service, but certainly better for consumers): drivers own cars, they choose when and how long to drive, they're the money makers.
Yet, I've never experienced bullshit service from Uber as I have with Airbnb. The same for everyone I've talked about this around me.
How many hosts are in the area you're staying, open and available for your travel time range, with the same quality and amenities that you want?
Who cares what kind of uber car you get? There are thousands of them, and they just get you from point A to B.
I tried Airbnb once, only to find out just before departure that the host had booked the place for someone else on VRBO. (I only found out because I asked the host a question about parking!)
Hotels are definitely nice if you like the pampering they provide (e.g. clean your room everyday), but the value of Airbnb is getting amenities and space of a house for an affordable rate. Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc) without paying insane rates north of 1k a night. That's where Airbnb shines.
Can't speak to your experience, but there are heavy, heavy penalties for the behavior you're describing - you can't just do that carefree as a host. I would probably lose my business if I let that kind of stuff happen even just once or twice.
That being said, shitty hosts are out there. If they have extensive review history and positive remarks (over ~4.7/5.0 rating) it should be fine. I've honestly never had a bad experience as a guest over 5+ years of staying at Airbnbs with that criteria.
Isn't this the domain of extended stay hotels, like Residence Inn (Marriott), Staybridge Suites (IHG), and Homewood Suites (Hilton), and serviced apartments? They don't tend to be in the $1k/night range.
Don't even get started on how few of them clean the dishwasher filter or anything like that. Ever looked at the filter trap on one of those places? Yuk!
This seems like a huge luxury that is not needed for most travelers. If you really need the kitchen and entertainment spaces then you're going to pay a lot even with Air BnB ("alot" being super subjective).
The point is you get these amenities (or at least of them) for around the same price as a hotel room.
In some big markets (New York City or similar), it might be above a hotel room rate, but still a really good deal if you consider the value.
When I go on a vacation with the family the last thing I need is some unpredictable situation with a shady host and then fighting overseas AirBnB support for refunds.
Ummm... the fact that most people prefer Airbnb to anything else seems to directly contradict your statement.
Also, why would you say guests are not their moneymakers? It is the guest that pays the money that ultimately land in Airbnb's pockets.
https://backlinko.com/airbnb-stats https://www.statista.com/statistics/245864/us-hotel-rooms-by...
This is a fact? Could you please provide any meaningful citation or even the slightest bit of supporting evidence of this "fact"?
You're admitting you have zero experience with the service you spent several paragraphs attacking.
* Read about online
* Heard about personally from friends & family
Do you need to step in a pile of shit personally to realize it's unpleasant, or would you rather take the word of the people who already stepped in it?
When I'm traveling, if you want to entice me to use your AirBNB, you need to provide - at the minimum - an exactly equivalent or superior experience to what I can get at a hotel, and for a cheaper price. If you can't, then logically there's zero reason for me to book a stay with you. Why would I pay more for less service? That isn't logical.
Yes, I understand some things are, more or less, impossible to do with an AirBNB (I don't expect turndown service, or room service for instance). However, most other things that a hotel could offer, I would expect, such as a coffee maker, a mini-fridge, a microwave, Internet connectively, and perhaps printer access (after all, a color laser printer isn't prohibitively expensive, and the toner makes usage cheap).
Everything I mentioned I can get at an Extended Stay America, or a Residence Inn, or some other long-term hotel-like setting. As for actual hotels, I can frequently get either better service, or a more extensive suite of services, many of which are complimentary, some of which are available for small fees and which no AirBNB could ever realistically offer.
Now having said all this...
I'm only interested in unpleasant stories. I only want to hear about when things go wrong. Because just like a good site reliability manager, I'm looking for 99.999999% uptime. I expect everything to go smoothly, always. And when it doesn't, I expect, at the minimum, steps taken to rectify the situation, and if the situation becomes an inconvenience to me bordering on a disruption of stay, then I expect a refund. These are all areas where AirBNB is significantly worse than large hotel chains - even the modest hotel chains like Holiday Inn or Microtel or Motel 6.
This reminds me of Ron White's bit about staying at The Ritz Carlton in Atlanta...
"I get to Atlanta and I check into the Ritz Carlton Hotel. And, uh, the next morning I go to take a shower and there's no hot water. And I called the front desk and I tell the girl at the front desk, I said, 'There's no hot water.' The girl at the front desk said, 'Sometimes there's no hot water.' Didn't I just tell you that? I said, 'I've stayed at $20 a night motels. The water was so hot you could cook your nuts with it.' She goes, 'Well, every once in a while, everybody will wake up at the same time and they all take a shower at the same time and we run smack outta hot water.' You guys didn't think about that? They thought about it at the Motel 6. But that whole concept of people wake up in the morning with shit to do got right by the Ritz Carlton Hotel?"
This is why I'm interested in hearing where it all goes wrong, when, and why. No hot water in a $500 a night hotel is completely unacceptable, anywhere, anytime, ever. There's nothing you could say to me that will change my mind.
"Power went out, sir." Well where the fuck is your backup generator and why isn't it running?
"There's something wrong with the natural gas lines, sir." Well why don't you have an on-site backup tank for these situations?
"Everyone woke up and took a shower at the same time!" Well why the fuck don't you have secondary boilers that monitor the primary ones and anticipate and correct for that?
"Internet access is down sir." Why the fuck don't you have multiple connections with failover to ensure connectivity is maintained?
This is why I want a hotel and not an AirBNB. AirBNB doesn't have the scale to deal with these kinds of issues because it's essentially Hotel Uber. I understand not everyone is this exacting. That's fine. That's more than fine. More power to you, book on AirBNB all day every day if you want to. But I'm not going to, because I've heard enough of these stories.
Sometimes I prefer Airbnb, sometimes I prefer a hotel, it all depends on the kind of travel experience I'm looking for.
I disagree. The marketplace is the moneymaker. It would be like saying that app makers are the moneymakers, and not the iOS/Android store as a whole marketplace.
It’s a moot point really anyway, because the important thing is it’s definitely not the users who are valued by the parent company in either case.
For some reason AirBnb is very protective of their hosts. I had a bad experience a few months ago with a so-called "Superhost" where the property didn't match the description or the reviews. After my stay I left a negative review (my first ever; always left very nice reviews before then).
Well... AirBnB simply removed the review, for completely bogus and irrelevant reasons.
Made me extremely suspicious of any listing; it will probably be a long time before I book again.
The host is Airbnb's customer, listings are non-exclusive (e.g. VRBO), and switching costs for hosts are low. The hosts bring an extraordinarily valuable asset (real estate) and without the hosts, Airbnb has no business.
You are the hosts' customer. You might argue that without the renter, there is no business, but that's true irrespective of the platform. Those hosts will list somewhere and get renters, as long as there's a market.
Presumably, bad hosts (not Airbnb) would take the hit of offering a poor experience over time, and better hosts would prevail. So, Airbnb's goal is to stay out of that fray and keep as many hosts as possible on their platform in order to capture as much revenue as possible from the good hosts, as well as any revenue available from hosts on the descent.
Oh yeah, quite possibly.
One solution might be for all listing platforms to outsource reviews to the same third-party, and get out of the business of moderating reviews. It's really a conflict of interest, so this would eliminate the pressure and incentive to whitewash.
There's always another fool who has yet to be burned bad enough ready to roll the AirBnB dice. Guest churn is expected. But no hosts in an area means AirBnB has nothing to offer in the area.
I have used Airbnb once. And it was quite pleasant. In a tourist area where the hotels were really pricey and this was somewhat cheaper (though not cheap)/likely better. So it worked out. But I'm aware it's probably a bit of a crapshoot.
Exactly. Landing in a new city with the family, taking time off work and then gambling on some random guy with a house coming through and not ripping us off is just too much risk.
AirBnB might even “fix it” but then we’re running around at night, with suitcases, to a new part of time and then spending days on the phone getting refunds.
Maybe that sounds adventurous and exciting for someone else but just doesn’t work for us.
Hotels are nicer in almost every single way.
Host came after 30 mins to tell me he double booked me and that I had to leave. He could barely make eye contact with me.
!
The only thing airbnb did for me was to give me a coupon for my next booking. It was small, and expired before I was able to use it.
I still use it.
When the only other option is $300+/night for a hotel, a $100/night airbnb is mighty nice. And I often stay for 1week to 1month, and Airbnb's give a nice discount which I'm not sure hotels would. So often the comparison is.. $2000/month for airbnb, or more like $9000 for a hotel for a month?
That gap is closing in larger cities though. In Toronto it's hard to find an Airbnb where i get the whole place that isn't a basement for under $150/night, so creeping into hotel territory.
Then I realized that the entire travel industry just tries to rip everyone off as much as possible since they know you’re probably only coming to that one destination one time anyway, so they might as well slaughter the cow instead of milking it.
Once the pandemic hit and I couldn’t travel, I realized how much I actually don’t need to travel to have a relaxing vacation. Between airlines packing you in like cattle (if you can even get on a flight on time that hasn’t been delayed/cancelled 7 times first), the TSA, being treated like a drug lord at every border crossing, tourist trap shitty restaurants and hotels manipulating their reviews and every other business in the tourism industry trying to swindle you as much as possible, no thank you. I would need to take additional time off just to recover from the stress of that “vacation.”
Now I just spend travel money on home projects to make my house so good I never want to leave, and couldn’t be happier.
"between resort fees, $30/day slow wifi, rooms that look nothing like the pics" This is 100% because you are staying in "luxury" hotels. Less expensive hotels don't have any of these.
https://www.marketplace.org/2014/01/27/why-do-luxury-hotels-...
The one “screw job” I got was in Vegas staying in a sub-$40 place for one night waiting for my family to join me. Place had no running water. AirBnB support asked me if that was a problem. “Yeah, it’s 100°F outside and I’m going to need to shower and probably going to use the toilet at some point.” Got asked to wait about 15 minutes while they tried to reach the host and then got a refund with no fuss. Was no problem to find a crappy casino hotel room in Vegas in July.
But plenty of the AirBnBs are places that I couldn’t find an equivalent. Two nights in a tree house in Costa Rica. Two massive houses on Martha’s Vineyard. A cabin backing up to a nature preserve in Belize.
All this said, my personal Airbnb experience was positive. Surely beats rental classifieds or searching Google Maps, and I'm not aware about any serious general-purpose alternatives. My issue is that hotels are simply conceptually (and practically) different - there's a huge difference between a proper rental house/apartment and a hotel room (though Airbnb goes there, it used to be good but today many listings aren't better if not worse than a hotel room now). Sure, hotel brands had realized this and started to offer some curated properties, but this is very uncommon.
But it is a risk/reward proposition, and a hotel is always going to be the lower risk option. But I like the "reward" that you can sometimes find in the form of unusual locations, interesting living spaces or just a cheap place to stay.