But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, they will inevitably end up with hoarders and people that keep food lying around and then comes cockroaches and rats and odors, etc.
Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.
But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
The problem is that without regulation there is little incentive for business to be honest about the quality of service you're getting. It becomes a race to the bottom as they charge premium prices for cut-rate quality. It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep and arrive late at night to a room that isn't what you expect. They just have to make their dispute process hard enough to keep customer money.
And if you day that's fraud, sure it is, but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
IMO regulation isn't perfect, but we should aim to fix it instead of throwing it out the window entirely
I think this is actually how most people end up deciding to take their business elsewhere: they give a company their business once, are let down, and decide to never patronize that business or chain again. This is why customer recommendations and reviews hold weight at all -- they help give signal before your first business interaction.
> but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
I don't think almost anyone is in favor of no regulation, only the prescriptive step-by-step guideline regulations. If a hotel says "we have beds!" and then they don't have beds, that's a very different regulatory case than a hotel saying "our bed are comfortable!" and then their beds are not comfortable.
And perhaps saving money might be even more valuable to you than <what you wrote above, but every "or" being progressively replaced with an "and">!
> Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
Yes, but that "one point on a trade off curve for everyone" works as a backstop against inevitable slide downwards. If globalization of trade and e-commerce taught us anything, reputation systems are trivially gamed, most branding exists primarily to fool people who still think it means something into spending more for less.
Even without talking about potential fraud, market competition naturally turns into race to the bottom. Regulation is what sets that bottom higher than "absolute worst possible before the market segment self-destructs".
If that isn’t regulatory capture? I don’t know what is
Force people to spend X00,000$/car to enter a market and then let ride-shares ignore that requirement that’s going to push all these companies to bankruptcy simply because the newcomers don’t have to pay interest on these loans.
'Should be' yes, but you'd be surprised how many don't follow through on this, and not necessarily due to lack of policy. Cleaning staff have very tight schedules, being allocated only a few minutes to completely clean and setup the room for the new guest but if the old guest didn't follow through on the exact checkout time, then that throws of the schedule of the cleaning staff completely, meaning they often cut corners to meet their deadlines.
In practice, you can assume they do - it's a simplified but accurate model of reality when you're not researching the life of insects and rodents.
Yes, life does not appear "out of thin air", but it constantly tries to get in, will exploit any crack in your defenses or attention to chase after anything that looks or smells like food or safety. It's simpler to just assume annoying critters materialize out of thin air if you leave the right conditions, and ensure those conditions are never present.
It's kind of like thermodynamics / statistical physics: the air around you doesn't really have "pressure" or "temperature", but you may just as well assume they're a thing, since the alternative would be to talk about kinematics of air molecules.
We had no mouse problems that winter, and very few since then.
I see that as realistic, if we are talking 2D spaces. In urban environments, they live in sewers, and you have sewers under every building. In the countryside, they obviously live everywhere.
I can see that 6-metres rule broken only if going 3D, i.e. in multi-storey buildings with spotless maintenance of any nook and cranny, living on the third or fourth floor, you might be a bit further away than that.
The keyword here is "should". I don't have much faith that hotels will actually do this.
Source: a close friend works at a really bad hotel.
The people losing their minds and screaming at him is what happens when something else that isn't quite to their satisfaction happens. Like, say, the hotel requiring a deposit and a major credit card and ID to book a room.