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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you. The host has the property, the host sets the price, the host assumes all responsibility (even if they often do not live up to those responsibilities).

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.

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AirBNB is now almost as expensive as a hotel in the city centre. There are some very nice properties, but increasingly a lot of crappy properties - flats converted into multiple airbnb 'apartments', bare minimum furniture, often in dodgy areas, and your neighbours are also airbnb tenants so expect lots of noise.

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.

Yep, that's why more and more countries or cities are banning short-term rentals. Imagime living in an avrage apartment building, and your neighbor decides to rent out the apartment to airbnbers, every few days, a new group of people, partying all day and night long, not caring about neighbors, and in the meantime, the property prices are rising sky high, becuase every apartment in remotly touristy areas is bought up immediatly to serve as an airbnb rental property.

The only reason I use Airbnb is because I like to have a full featured kitchen when I'm traveling to cook my own food a few times.

Otherwise, I'd pick hotels without even blinking.

Here in spain there are a lot of "apart-hotels" with kitchens equipped like a summer apartment.

This. IDK if this exists in other countries.

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.

I was curious about these. Is there brand of aparthotels in Spain that has a good reputation or that you or someone else would recommend?

Hawaii is like that too. Most of the hotels have a full kitchen and washer and dryer. Or at least the places I've stayed.

I wonder how hotels could do this effectively and safely.

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.

Extended Stay America locations have a "fully equipped kitchen" in every room so it's certainly possible and already happening.

The place I've stayed at in London a fair number of times calls itself a "serviced apartment" and includes a kitchenette. I don't really use it much other than the refrigerator but it's there and I've stayed there with a friend who would cook eggs in the morning.

I'm pretty sure some of the suite-style chains in the US do as well.

In Oz, you can often and easily find rooms in an ordinary motel that has pots and pans, a little 2 element cooktop/oven combo & a sink. They're more expensive to rent of course, but they're very widely available.

We also have serviced apartments, designed for the longer stays, but are generally only to be found on the cities.

This exist in Spain, it's called apartahotel. It's basically an hotel made of apartments.

Lots of places have a mini kitchen suite.

I was looking for long term stays in an Airbnb while waiting for my apartment to be ready in a cross state move. I was baffled at the amount of listing that looked like duplicates - until I realized that they were massive houses carved up into multiple “rent a room” offers. I can’t imagine traveling and renting just a room and finding a bunch of travelers living there too.

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.

My girlfriend went to Italy a couple of years back with her kid, kid's friend and kid's friend's mom. They rented something they thought would be nice (according to reviews) in Italy. Two women, two girls - it was worse than a hostel. I ended up having to use booking.com to find them somewhere reasonable yet nice because they didn't feel safe. Airbnb ended up crediting them back the stay.

Eh. As an Airbnb host, honestly I've never been given any slack by Airbnb. Maybe they've made some recent changes, but in my experience they pretty much always side with the guest even over minor things and I'm the one that has to fight tooth and nail for fair treatment when a guest abuses my house or breaks the rules.

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.

> Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc) without paying insane rates north of 1k a night.

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.

Yeah but those aren't as commonplace. And I'd still say good Airbnbs would have much better amenities (and charm for that matter).

It really depends. They may have a lot of charm, but also cut every damn corner with basic things like forks and knives. I've been in a few places that I swear must have purchased their cutlery from some aliexpress outlet for $5 or something. The edges of the forks were razor sharp.

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!

> Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc)

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).

For 1-2 nights? Probably not. I don't think having access to a kitchen or sitting area is a "massive luxury" for someone staying a week or longer for a vacation, work, etc. though.

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.

I just feel like there is an adequate "middle option" where you get a hotel room with a den and rely on the breakfast bar / hotel and local restaurants, to plug the gap while still paying the average hotel room price. I could see marginal cost savings cooking, but even the price of groceries (especially when not local-savvy) is quite high.

This is the common scenario if you have multiple family members who want to jointly rent a house. A hotel doesn't quite cut it for that. Granted you can all book at the same hotel but it isn't the same as renting a whole house for a week.

Recently stayed in hotels in Seattle and Sunnyvale, CA for a few nights. The one in Seattle greeted us at the reception with "we don't do room service", even though we were staying for a week and it was about 300/night. Ridiculous.

Sunnyvale was a Hilton garden Inn and while uninspired, was completely fine - clean and quiet.

Are you talking about daily housekeeping or actual room service (food delivery)? In all my life, I've never ordered room service as it is criminally expensive.

Housekeeping.

The last few hotels I've stayed at, including one in Seattle, didn't do housekeeping unless you were staying more than 2 nights and then only on request. They would happily send up more towels or whatever you need but were limiting the number of rooms they actually entered each day. Covid was the excuse but really I think it was short staffing.

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.

I didn't ask, given what they told me on arrival. Anyway the reception was often unstaffed, too.

Partly why I just stick with the chains, at least for now. Very very predictable, and while you won't get the best experience at the hotel, you get a lot of guarantees that it at least won't be a bad experience.

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.

When I was in a hotel last time, there was no room service either, but that's fine for me as long as clean towels and bed sheets are provided at the lobby whenever I need.

What hotel? Whenever I've stayed in Seattle $300 a night will get you room service.

I haven't been staying in a lot of hotels recently but not servicing rooms has been pretty common over the past year in my experience. (Ostensibly because of COVID.)

Staybridge lake union

"SuperHost" is such a joke because most of them are professional airbnb managers who don't actually own the properties. If they're good at their jobs maybe they would only accept properties that meet some standard, but from what I've seen they will work with anyone who will pay them.

They should really make it more clear what places are owned by property management companies vs people.

This is the Amazon quandary: your core product is ostensibly "quality" (from an end user perspective), but at some point you've consumed the total available market of quality sellers...

So AirBnB has to keep allowing (and encouraging) property management companies, because no one else can bring them the volume they need to grow.

"This is also why I've never once booked with AirBNB"

You're admitting you have zero experience with the service you spent several paragraphs attacking.

Yes... because this is just one in a litany of horror stories that I have:

* 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?

I have used AirBnB on at least 20 different occasions and had almost entirely fantastic experiences (and maybe 3 sub par ones). So you can add that to your anecdotal evidence.

I'll be honest, I'm not interested in hearing about entirely fantastic experiences; indulge me while I explain why.

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.

I guess some people don't enjoy a little adventure. I commented in this thread elsewhere that AirBnB is a risk/reward proposition. The rewards can be awesome for those who take the (carefully calculated) risk.

One person's "adventure" is another person's $10,000 a day loss in revenue.

> The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you.

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.

Cars are way more fungible.

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 aren’t necessarily more expensive for short travels unless you are booking some of the bottom end airbnbs. For long stays though airbnb almost always wins out.

I can't confirm this from my experience over the last 8 years. Customer service was great from Airbnb.

Sometimes I prefer Airbnb, sometimes I prefer a hotel, it all depends on the kind of travel experience I'm looking for.

> The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you. The host has the property, the host sets the price, the host assumes all responsibility (even if they often do not live up to those responsibilities).

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.

But what is the app store without the apps? What is AirBnB without the hosts?

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.

> The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you.

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.

But most people don't appear to prefer Airbnb to anything else? Hotels are still a far larger market than airbnb, 5-10x as big in revenue, in number of rooms that exist, in almost any metric - and that doesn't even take into account that there are tons of hotels listed on airbnb now.

https://backlinko.com/airbnb-stats https://www.statista.com/statistics/245864/us-hotel-rooms-by...

>"Ummm... the fact that most people prefer Airbnb to anything else seems to directly contradict your statement."

This is a fact? Could you please provide any meaningful citation or even the slightest bit of supporting evidence of this "fact"?

I am in the same boat. Never booked with them and probably never will. I will pay more for hotel chains to get predictable service, and a help desk to talk to.

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.

The only use case where AirBNB sort of makes sense is for poor young solo travelers (like backpackers) as an alternative to hostels. I can't understand why anyone would even consider it for a business trip or family vacation. What are those travelers thinking? Like I seriously don't understand why anyone would take that kind of risk instead of making a reservation with a real hotel. Caveat emptor.

As a parent, an Airbnb (or any vacation rental) is 100x better than a hotel. We've got 3 young kids, so multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, and a separate common space where adults can hang out after kids are down is absolutely crucial. The thought of cramming the whole fam into a hotel room, or having little kids sleeping in a separate room (and freaking out alone in the middle of the night) sounds like hell to me.

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.

But hotels have all of those options. "Hotels" I've stayed at include a place in Ireland with standalone 3 bedroom houses, two bedroom extended stay suites with kitchens and living rooms around America, etc.

In the contrary, AirBnb only makes sense for a larger group of people. For solo travel, hostels or hotels offer much better value. But for a group of 3-5 friends, it's often significantly less expensive to book an apartment then multiple hotel rooms, and you get a kitchen to cook in to boot.

If you pick the least expensive option then you can expect some problems. Marriott Residence Inn hotels are located near most major US destinations, and can accommodate groups of 5 in a suite with a kitchen. This may be slightly more expensive than an AirBNB, but they won't randomly cancel your reservation and there are trained staff on the property to resolve issues.

I should have mentioned, I don't have any experience with the USA. In Europe, I don't think you have any realistic chance of finding a hotel offering a room for 5 people, except ultra-luxury suites. At least nowhere that is actually inside a city.

5 people gets tricky, but up to 4 people is definitely doable in Western Europe where I've travelled.

I'd say one thing in favour of an AirBnB type rental is having a kitchen where you can cook your own food... I find on holiday sometimes it's quite nice to just have some "normal" food at home rather than eating out all the time.

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.

Responding to your edit comment: I've found hotels and apartment-hotels with kitchen or kitchenettes through Expedia and their subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, Mexico, and Brazil. Agoda offers similar features, but I've not tried it out yet.

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.

Ah yeah good point, I forgot about “aparthotels”. They’re a pretty good in between, a nice Airbnb can be nicer but an aparthotel is probably more reliable.

I book AirBnBs (and VRBOs) for work retreats fairly regularly. Going to one next month, in fact.

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.)

I think can explain one possible reason. tl;dr: For long stays, as hotels typically don't offer home-like experience.

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.

So here's how I attack these issues you've mentioned:

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.

> Extended Stay America

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...

Almost every large city has one...

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.

I've used Airbnb in the following places, usually traveling as a couple for vacation. Domestically, with our dog as well. We like Airbnb for more space (proper living room, sofa, etc) and a kitchen during extended stays.

- 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.

To me a hotel and an airbnb are 2 totally different products. I prefer using airbnb (or vrbo) because I can get an entire house (yes I know this is technically possible with a hotel, but typically not) with a kitchen, multiple bedrooms, etc.

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.

If you think about it, that's more or less the original idea. Affordable accommodation for young solo travelers. People that do not have the time and energy to face the inconveniences of Airbnb's are better off in a hotel after all. When I book an airbnb I do not expect to get hotel like service.

Edit: maybe drop the "solo", it's probably not worth it if you don't travel in a group.

AirBnB makes sense from my experience for a very select set of experiences which require considerable research. In these situations, I wasn't optimizing for lower costs which most travelers are probably doing. Examples:

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 wasn't optimizing for lower costs which most travelers are probably doing

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.

> The only use case where AirBNB sort of makes sense

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).

Just don’t ask. They won’t hit you with a cleaning fee because vaping doesn’t leave the stink that cigs do. And vaping is basically not only socially acceptable but most likely socially encouraged by your average hotel worker.

Airbnb puts you in a local neighbourhood (not the city centre) and gives you a full apartment and a kitchen so your trip feels a bit more like living in the country. That's the reason I used it, anyway. There are definitely advantages to hotels too.

AirBNB is terrible as a place to stay, but it's great for destination vacations. If you are having a family vacation with 10 people it's a lot more fun to be in a big house than in 4 hotel rooms.

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