Airbnb nightly rates shot up 36% in 3 years
thepointsguy.com
thepointsguy.com
Hosts want to show lower prices, so in search you don't see all the fees, but then when you get all the way down the funnel you finally see these completely ridiculous fees (usually around cleaning) of what you'll actual pay. I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. They need to change the UX, and it would expose so much of the BS hosts try to pull around rates. This would quickly kill the need for hosts to try to game the system like they do now.
Also in general, I refuse to use Airbnb these days when it's not only more than a hotel, but the audacity of some hosts have for checking out is hilariously dumb (cleaning, vacuuming, laundry, etc.). The reliability of hosts is all over the place, I see so many horror stories of last minute cancellations, hosts trying to pull one over on guests, and other sketchy practices they continue to allow.
Note: I could be wrong now though (maybe they do show up front pricing now/), but they already burned the bridge where I stopped even looking at them as an option.
Note (again): I just checked, and it does show a "total cost" in search, but it's still pretty deceptive. It should just be baked into the single nightly cost, and not a separate cost where you have to do the math to figure it all out. They should kill fees all together. Have it so it's just left at the hands of the host to make into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it.
Besides price, service is also worse during stay. At a hotel I can get towels, soap, whenever I want. Airbnb it’s maybe once a day the host can bring things to you.
But yeah I've only ever met one host in the USA, and that was because they lived next door.
They gave us a small tour, showed us how to use some appliances (like the heater) and showed us how to use the door code, and walked through the expectations (at that time, they were simple, was happy to accomodate).
That was it.
Every time after that, nope, never once.
My sympathy is with the host here.
The cheap fuck of a slumlord wanted to avoid paying $5/day in electric bills for the thing. This wasn't central air.
I'm back to hotels because that was the closest I came to having the quintessential perfect AirBnB experience. Any halfway decent hotel has better service, better beds, better climate control, better everything pretty much.
I don't think its the luxury you are defining it by. Its a room in somones house that comes with its pros and cons.
I stay in alot of hotels for 2-3 day stretches. The lack of daily housekeeping really bugs me. But they seem to be building better midrange properties.
AirBNB has even worse prices, but I check them both every time
I stayed in a few non-Marriott hotels in northern Japan and didn't have any trouble there beyond the normal Japanese hotel badness (they're clean, but insanely cramped, expensive, and uncomfortable)
Well, that's a good idea, but... What's the point? They don't have any rooms that are clean or sections of the hotel that are well-staffed
My SO and I stayed at a Waldorf Astoria a few weeks ago and they managed to screw up the stay so badly that we'll probably never go back to that specific location ever again -- the response that we received from the staff was so bad I was looking on LinkedIn to see if I had any friends who were still at Hilton Corporate to help me get the local property to fix their screw up (charging my credit card $10k for a $2800 stay because someone fat-fingered a $100 nightly charge into a $1000 nightly charge) because the local management just couldn't do anything.
I don't know what these cleaning fees are for if I'm doing all the cleaning! The last place I stayed had a "please, do everything" checkout policy. Take the trash to the dumpster, clean the towels, and run the dishwasher.
The disgusting thing is that they seem to take it on faith that these chores get done. Increasingly, AirBnBs are disgusting. Dirty dishes. Dirty counters. Bedding that I can't prove, but... I'm pretty sure hasn't been washed in a loooong time.
It's still something I put up with if staying for an extended period of time. Mostly for the (dirty) kitchens more than anything else. However, for short stays? Hotels all the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821620
When we leave in the spring, we pay a $110 cleaning fee and the property management company takes care of everything - cleaning, finding guests, cleaning, replenishment, maintenance, and they have a warehouse full of furniture when they need to replace everything.
True they take 48% of the proceeds + 4% escrow to handle major repairs. But I don’t have to deal with anything.
It’s in Florida so of course it’s cyclical. But since we stay there during low season, it covers its own expenses the other half.
This is investment advice. This is not an investment idea. This was a lifestyle choice to give us a place to stay during the winter.
But I would rather get two anal probes than be a traditional landlord again.
Edit: I just noticed you said it was difficult in a resort area.
Our Condotel is very much in a resort area. Three pools onsite, three restaurants, a lake for fishing, a water park, arcade, etc.
Not bragging, we downsized from our the house in the burbs in GA we had built in 2016 (3200 square feet) to a condo 2000 square feet smaller, paid the same price and we saved over $12000 a year in income taxes.
>If the guests help out the cleaning fees can in principle be much lower.
is it ever, though?
This cavalier attitude to, like, the basic overhead of running a hospitality business, is why I'm back on team hotel for most stays.
I'm fine replenishing basic sundries myself in exchange for something that is at least a studio apartment with full kitchen so I can save a bit on eating out costs, do grocery runs every 4-5 days.
Why isn't cleaning part of staying somewhere???
I think you touched on it but there is some reasonable compromise. Dirt on the floor mats and basic cleaning should be included, but if you are spraying champagne on the walls it would be reasonable not to be included. Where do you draw the line. If you want to charge for the "worst case" it will inflate your prices dramatically. If you charge for the average then people are basically incentivized to be unnecessarily messy. Of course many hosts will be unreasonable and charge extra for the very basics that should be included.
This doesn't seem that difficult? Hotels have solved this for decades already - if you trash the room they can and will charge you for cleaning it up, but you are also not expected to make the place good-as-new when you leave.
As a two-sided marketplace Airbnb obviously has no direct control over hosts and has trouble enforcing consistent standards... but at the risk of being a bit sarcastic: that's Airbnb's problem, not ours as customers. Other options (aka hotels, B&Bs, etc.) in this industry have figured this out and it's simply not a problem.
I don’t think it’s that hard. You have some reasonable cleaning procedure that you always do (quick vacuum, make the bed, tidy up, etc.) and any problems beyond that you charge the guest extra. Of course you could quibble about the exact details but it seems like a stable situation for hotels.
when it becomes damage versus expected usage would be a good line just like hotels have been doing centuries.
basic cleaning services such as cleaning linens,dishes,furniture,light dusting, basic floor sweeping ,etc.
you destroy the property or require excessive cleaning because you had a party with excessive dirtiness like spilled drinks on walls , linens thrown all over the place and stained, etc. then include an abusive charge.
At the time we suggested that they limit shipping fees to no more than 50% of the total cost of the item, but it never got implemented.
I just checked and it looks like their compromise was to set max shipping rates for different types of items: https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/maximum-shi...
If I remember correctly ebay didn't take a percentage of the shipping only the sale. So I'd sell it for $5 but charge $25 for shipping and they only took a % of the $5 so I'd keep a lot more money
The result is that bulky worthless items have lopsided price/shipping. Ebay offers the UI tools to show users the bottom line and they can make an informed decision.
And like I said I don't use eBay anymore, but back then, they didn't give the tools. You could only sort by listing price without shipping included.
If they now offer tools to include shipping in the search, then sure.
(This was for video games that would cost me like $1 to ship).
Airbnb does take a cut of them though, so it's unlikely they'll lead the push to punish the practice like eBay did.
But for whatever reason, a lot of US sellers have an aversion to int’l shipping.
Int’l shipping was a boon for business when I was actively selling.
For good reason. You could point to domestic USPS tracking information as proof of delivery (which occasionally worked in your favor) during PayPal disputes.
For international shipments, the tracking is lost as soon as the item crosses the border. Whether the item was delivered or not cannot be contested by the seller, who then has to pay out on 100% of claims brought against them.
That's variable and (often) not the case for shipments to Canada. USPS International First Class would yield a tracking number that has delivery confirmation to the destination.
https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Buyer-Central/Does-USPS-First-C...
> Electronic USPS Delivery Confirmation International service — abbreviated E-USPS DELCON INTL — is a tracking service available at no charge for First-Class Package International Service items to select destination countries (see 252.22)
Those ~50 countries listed here: https://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immc2_022.htm#ep2686878
[0]: mines through Capital One Venture but there's many ones out there, research which works for you!
Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision.
Screenshots:
It will include listings that are up to about €3/night more expensive than your filter setting, but listings that would qualify just on base price but not on total price are filtered out as you would expect.
I had completely forgotten it was even listed there. Six months and one inquiry. I promptly deleted the listing.
Glad to be done with AirBNB, but it really helped out at a bad time.
When COVID-19 travel bans proliferated in early 2020, AirBnB proactively refunded my money for a reservation that was nominally no longer cancellable.
VRBO told me to reach out to the host, which turned out to be this apartment rental agency that would ghost my emails for a few days, then offer future credit, then told me to get in line as they have many customers, and eventually processed the refund 3 months or so down the road.
Needless to say, I no longer use VRBO.
It is "solved" in usa airbnb too , infact german one seems to have more fees/line items, not less.
example: https://imgur.com/a/FJaKHvS
can someone make a PSA to all the people making this "hosts pulling shit" comment on every single airbnb thread.
And yes you can also filter by total price.
Why do you have such spl expectation for just airbnb?
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” -- Winston Churchill
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
I use it to search in the US as it’s the only way to know all in cost, which the US version always tries to obfuscate
On airbnb.com.au, the full cost is the default view, and you can change the pricing to USD very easily in the bottom floating footer.
I went to Airbnb.com just now, and got this banner: https://i.imgur.com/zasryfr.png
So it's a new thing.
The reason it makes more sense to do it for hotels is that many cities have 15+% or $$/night taxes. The highest rate is 20%.
https://hvs.com/article/8911-2020-HVS-Lodging-Tax-Report-USA
So, the PSA is “don’t listen to this bozo, it’s still shit”.
Guess how long the list is when I check out of a hotel:
1. Press the check out button on the app and leave
2. There is no number #2
That’s hard/impossible to find in hotels.
The stand alone house can have a yard or a distance to the next house.
Sometimes you can find AirBnb right near a place you need to be in the next morning whereas a hotel might need to be a long ways away and travel between the locations can be problematic.
Same happens with cell phones here. You sign up for a price and the first bill has several fees added making it quite a bit more expensive.
I wish there was a law in the US that mandated that the paid price is the advertised price.
Wow. Somehow, that seems shadier than just showing a misleading price then piling on fees for everyone.
To me it just shows that sometimes strict regulation is the right thing to avoid the tragedy of commons.
Isn't Biden literally asking for congress to make a law to that effect? (Which is a really smart move on his part tbh)
1) They artificially lower the listed price per night, causing the home to show up in more searches. This could easily be fixed by Airbnb.
2) It's used as a way to incentivize longer stays. This motivation probably won't go away. Many Airbnbs are empty during the weekdays.
3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.
Many municipalities in the U.S. tax Airbnbs as a percentage of their nightly rate, and cleaning fees aren't included in that calculation. If those savings are passed onto the guest, they would theoretically lower the effective cost per night.
Why would shifting payment from nightly cost to cleaning fee have an effect on the hosts' tax liability? If they actually pay someone that much to clean the place, they get to deduct it from their business income either way. What you call it doesn't matter.
I would be curious if Airbnb takes a cut of the cleaning fees, or only the nightly rate. I could see how that might differ, and if so that it would incentivize hosts to shift toward the cleaning fees.
And for many hosts, the main costs are the checking in/out/cleaning/laundry. So if they could charge $100 check in fee, plus $20/night, they would.
The fed should have some wheel that could introduce random 4% swings every six months that would hopefully disrupt the private equity leveraged buyout schemes, but who am I kidding, it would just lead to some ridiculous speculation/betting on what the next random modifier to the base interest rate is.
Perhaps, rather than offering good interest rates to large companies and hedge funds / private equity, there should be special low interest rates for single house owners, but businesses actually have to pay higher interest rates for commercial ventures.
Of course someone would figure out a scheme to get individuals to overprovision their mortgages and then back-assemble the excess debt with kickbacks to route it to other uses.
There has to be some way to have low interest rates to help out the "little guys" but make big biz and stock market leverage/margin buying pay a higher interest rate. If you have a high interest rate, it just benefits banks and the rich, who are the only people that have "real money", in case anyone actually does have "real money".
Legally mandated LtV < 1 based on `min(sale, appraisal)` would pretty much hinder such schemes. You can always sell your house to your child/parent and get equity back into the family anyway, but in general this would mean mortgage (real estate leveraged financing) could only be used to finance the sale.
They can however at times be slow, and frustrating, for some random things you'd need. But I can deal with it.
In contrast, my girlfriend who lived in a shared apartment with independent landlord, wouldn't fix heat, and then did a cheap replacement, which broke in few months, and refused again. And now she's out of the apartment, not giving back the amount he owes to her. I'm not sure if there any data to backup, but at-least in city, it seems like independent landlords are possibly worse.
Fees should be clear and upfront, But if a host is going to get a house cleaner after a guest leaves, it really does make sense for cleaning to be a separate lump sum fee.
Usually businesses tries to hide their pricing mechanism and give opaque "sales".
y = k*x + m
Is nicer.
[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-cla...
Lots of hotels and cities lobbied to tax Airbnb hosts like hotels (via Airbnb) and have in many cases successfully done so. Corresponding with this trend is the rise of hosting businesses (LLCs and such) that see this as a arbitrage business opportunity to compete with traditional hotel / motels but extract either higher fees / rents, or dramatically lower maintenance costs (often, in the worst examples, both) by shifting much of the responsibility to the end users, because that's how the platform culture started off.
Its quite different to reasonably keep nice and tidy a spare room or maybe guest house and you interact with the host, have a neat experience. Its quite another to get stacked with fees and poor experiences and have expectations foisted on to you. Its very clear that hosting has taken too much of an entrepreneurial edge to it. Unfortunately, i think single experience driven hosts are driven out of the market because of overhead.
The other thing Airbnb didn't do well, is when guests were really bad to hosts, they didn't do enough to compensate hosts that had real, legitimate issues. There ended up being alot of overhead in hosting an Airbnb and I think alot of people who legit thought they were going to be able to give nice, great experiences at a reasonable value with reasonable expectations got exhausted after X many bad guests.
They haven't really done enough to police and/or support the platform on both sides to incentivize the original value proposition: unique staying experiences you can't get at a hotel.
Now, the upside is, Hotels feel the heat, and price more reasonably, and really got their accommodations down. As a result, I haven't used Airbnb since 2018 or so.
It's perfectly reasonable for hosts to charge more for a single night stay than for a 2 week stay. Turning over an AirBnB between guests is a huge hassle and has real costs.
AirBnB should make the true cost per night more visible, but eliminating cleaning fees altogether would be a loss.
Not that it matters. We haven't used AirBnB in ages because the fees are exorbitant.
promising to address this "transparently" and "holistically", even though unlike the US, they already show the full price in some other countries
https://skift.com/2022/10/10/airbnb-ceo-says-fee-transparenc...
That seems disingenuous, because they've been doing it in other countries for a long time, including for logged-out viewers -- presumably because they were legally required to.
You only hear about this after your booking has been accepted -- in the case of instant booking, you have already been charged. And it's usually not too much -- maybe 20-40 EUR. Often it's explained as a mandatory city tax or something like that, and you don't know the city so....
So at this point you can choose: report the host to AirBnB, lose the booking you wanted after already going through all the stress of finding it, and wait probably a long time before you get your money back.
Or, just grumble and pay it. Because of the way reviews are incentivized, it would be a Bad Idea to complain about it in the review, which is why you didn't see anyone complain about it so far.
I'm not proud of this, but the four or five times it happened I just paid it, because in the big picture it wasn't that much. I think the highest was 100 but it was for a long stay costing over 1000.
But unlike the "cleaning fee" where you can, with a lot of imagination, picture some definition of "cleaning" that might, on average, cost that much -- maybe every third guest soils the bed? -- the cash-on-arrival thing is transparently cheating.
Follow the incentives -- five star reviews only, please!
It was advertised up-front but unsure if there was any reason they couldn’t roll it up into the fee. Maybe it is a separate city-issued POS?
Or maybe a tax thing: if the hotel collected it, they’d have to charge VAT, but not if the booker pays it direct?
If they're extremely sneaky, their next trick is to fake property damage or extra cleaning fees collected post stay, but that's not a highly repeatable trick without them getting banned, so less likely to happen and you can dispute it with Airbnb, though ymmv.
Do hosts look at the reviews the guests have left to previous hosts and that incentivizes the guests not to give bad reviews? Or am I missing something?
Additionally, I’ve heard stories of negative reviews getting “disappeared” but I’m not sure how that works.
Tangentially: this is why I read lots of reviews before booking, because you can sometimes spot rotten host behavior hiding in the five-star reviews.
Their profits should be systematically targeted if the fees are undisclosed upfront and they’re abusing it.
Why would you not report that? Airbnb would bring the hammer down on that host so quickly it wouldn't be funny. I'm serious, they would not tolerate that whatsoever and would get you compensated and moved to another property.
I've heard way too many Airbnb customer service horror stories to believe that you can count on this.
Just recently I had someone cancelling on me whilst I was in the car driving to the place. Airbnb were straight on it, instant refund, extra credit towards another place and someone rang me to try and help me book an alternative for that night (I was quicker than them and had thankfully booked the next door unit before they even rang).
I've had a few bad stays over the years (getting woken early doors by bailiffs was fun), but they've generally been sorted out really quickly.
The times I've tried the alternatives in the last few years I've come up short and regretted the lack of support.
I've used airbnb for many years (since the glory days!), but have to agree the fees are killing me now.. just give me the full price up front..
Because of this. I spend a lot of time picking the property and often, where I go, there aren’t that many good ones, nor much time left before I arrive. “Another property” might not be in the same town.
Between tolerating the BS, or losing my preferred apartment… or, I guess, antagonizing the host who already doesn’t follow the AirBnB rules… I have so far chosen to tolerate the BS.
If you make another choice, that’s fine. If you find it so outrageous lol then we just have different priorities.
Because all platforms face the temptation to become plantations. And while consumers have cash, hosts have assets and are much more likely to leverage them in the event of a dispute. The consumer goes in expecting a deal for $X, when all the fees are added on consumers feel bad, but don't want to lose the time cost they have already sunk into browsing and choosing a short-term rental property, figuring that other offerings on the platform will probably be the same. Really starting over means going to a whole new website and a whole new selection process and a whole new set of terms and conditions, and there will probably be junk fees tacked on at the end anyway.
This is 100% true. Hosts figured this out pretty fast and leaned into it. The biggest reason is that showing a cheap price on the initial search result page was very effective at getting bookings. I suspect this is even more effective in this case vs some others because rentals are not easily comparable. ie, travelers invest non-trivial time into researching a place (looking at pictures, location, description, etc) to decide that it works for them before they notice the higher price - and then don't want to throw away that "sunk cost" of their time.
>I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this.
Everything I said up there also works at the level of Google search results. If just one vendor (ABnB, Vrbo, etc) switches to up-front pricing, then all their competitors look _much_ cheaper at first glance. And once the traveler is on their site, it's unlikely that they'll back out and go to a different one. The whole industry is basically in a "Mexican standoff" situation. Or maybe Prisoner's Dilemma if you prefer.
Also, the platforms are perfectly capable of doing all-in-one pricing, because they legally have to everywhere other than the US. There's loooots of extra logic to handle doing it two different ways. At some level they'd love to get rid of that complexity, but just can't for reasons mentioned.
source: worked on pricing at Vrbo for eight years.
At one point we were sending prices to GHS, which I think were all-in. But it was a fraught relationship, which I think ended. Google was trying to take a huge cut of the fees, while offloading the hard work of managing travelers, owners, payments, complaints, etc to us. It didn't make sense to help them eat our lunch.
It's unfortunate, as they had a good thing going for a short time.
Airbnb simply makes more money and gets more bookings with the "hidden" fee structure for obvious reasons.
Don't agree with that. I get the cleaning only once, I want to pay for it only once. What sucks is that airbnb doesn't show us the full, real price from the get go, but I'm not sure why the pricing model should change, especially since there are also tons of other fees like sales taxes, airbnb fees, tourism taxes and such.
What airbnb should do is show the final price when you search.
It's pretty much the same thing as the VAT. Displaying the final price rather than the price before tax could work, as witnessed by... every country that is not in North America. But I guess showing lower prices is good for business.
I don’t do cleaning fees or any of that BS - the price is the price is the price. Cleaning is my problem - it costs me about £130 per stay in fixed overheads for cleaning, linen hire, stocking of consumables, flowers, etc., and that’s incorporated into my nightly rate and my minimum stay length.
I also don’t ask guests to do anything other than lock the door behind them when they leave.
The poor execution of Airbnb plus has been a disappointment - I signed up for it willingly, thinking that it would help boost guest confidence, but unfortunately so many hosts decide to nickel and dime and bait and switch that it’s meaningless. I’d welcome frequent inspections of what I’m doing, as unless I’m providing a stellar service, I am not content.
I have watched guests slowly become more paranoid over the years, as the crappy hosts have a corrosive effect on customer confidence across the platform - and I have had my fair share of crappy hosts when I have been a guest - demands for extra money, entirely fabricated damage claims, on and on.
It also doesn’t help that an awful lot of my competition is literally illegal - not registered with the council, not paying taxes on their revenue, not doing commercial waste collection, etc. - I have literally just responded to a Welsh government request for comment saying “yes, regulate the shit out of this and drop a big hammer on anyone who does not comply”, as again, I get guests anxiously asking if bedding and hot water are included in the price.
I agree they should kill the fees - they do nothing good for anyone in the long term.
Instead, they’re screwing around with broken categorisation which does nobody any good, and with making their search virtually unusable - they now only show you a small percentage of available properties, which is deeply frustrating both as a guest and a host.
Filtering by price is a frustrating experience when the service and cleaning fees aren’t factored into the prices I’m looking at. It’s more work than it needs to be to compare prices in areas with lots of listings.
A lot of the objections around the cleaning fee are that hosts often have long lists of chores they expect guests to do in addition to a large cleaning fee, and sometimes those chores are not spelled out until you check in.
1: https://bnbfacts.com/airbnb-cleaning-fee-how-much-hosts-char... 2: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...
In recent years, the majority of AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some guru's financial advice. The properties are barely maintained or have clearly broken features. Cleaning fees are sky high, but the houses don't feel clean when I arrive.
We showed up to one AirBnB and it didn't have any furniture. It was a completely empty house with some mattresses and blankets in the closets. All of the furniture in the photos was gone. AirBnB refunded us, but dealing with the issue consumed 1/4 of our trip and cost us extra money to find a replacement on short notice.
It's no longer the fun, personal experience of renting someone's property when they've got extra space. It's now a playground for pseudo-entrepreneurs who want to buy an investment property, hire a cleaning company, and then push the limits of what they can get away with without getting kicked off the AirBnB platform.
Airbnb encourages this, as it increases inventory for them and lets property owners engage in a race to the bottom on prices. Which as it turns out, affects the quality of the service!
Pretty much this. Most Airbnbs nowadays feel like someone trying to operate a flophouse, but with 4-star hotel pricing. Value for money is just so incredibly poor, that plus the inconsistency and uncomfortably high probability of blowing up your hard-earned vacation time, it would take a lot for me to use it again.
I do like the format of renting whole houses, or at least places sized for families with space to hang out and gather. It's unfortunate that traditional hotels haven't generally stepped in to offer something like this.
I desperately want a "Vacation Homes by Hilton" offering, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least not broadly.
The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.
[edit] I have some pretty strong suspicions that this business model will be structurally limited to low-end lodging and extreme high-end lodging. Realistically the kind of service hotels provide (and that customers expect), at hotel prices, is only possible through economies of scale. Housekeeping is vastly cheaper because you have a single crew that services hundreds of rooms rather than commuting across the city to serve a smattering of far-flung properties. Likewise maintenance and customer service is vastly cheaper because the costs are spread across many rooms.
Without exploiting economies of scale AirBnbs simply won't be able to compete in this middle tier (which is where most hotel stays are at). It's only possible to make the math work for either very-low-rent flophouse-type places where services and maintenance is poor, or very high-end vacation properties where the lack of economies of scale is sustainable.
> The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.
There's Hilton Grand Vacations properties, which are kind of like this. I really like staying in them when I'm in Las Vegas for business, because they don't contain casinos, aren't designed to encourage you to leave the room like casino hotels, and generally provide nice spaces to work and gather your team if you want to work together on a project. They're much more family-friendly in general than a typical business hotel as well. The only downside is that they have a separate status system from other Hilton properties, so your Hilton status doesn't incur any benefits and you don't get stay credits towards status.
Lately Airbnb has tried to combat this obvious degradation in quality by highlighting high-end stays at unique properties that can cost absurd amounts of money (screengrab: https://imgur.com/nDu8tpL), so it looks cool but they know actual demand is low.
Hotel chains solve this problem by punishing individual hotels for customer complaints (via fines).
I now avoid AirBnB as much as possible, and when it's the only choice the amount of research I have to do is rage inducing. This is why brands exist, so you trust that every Marriott you stay at will have towels and curtains and all those other things, even if you don't see them in the pics. Meanwhile, the AirBnB brand is looking more and more like a lemon market for short-term rentals.
Then, if you protest, they nuke your AirBNB rating and you can't book anywhere else. Ok, great - I'll go back to Marriott. It's cheaper, has on-site security, a pool, and I don't have to take out the trash.
Eventually when enough people stop using the platform someone in a boardroom will ask why rentals are down and someone in market research will say quality control of rentals at which some pea brained solution will be dreamt up.
Also want to point out superhosts might of been attempt to address this problem but I've routinely picked superhosts and many have disappointed.
Given TikTok's algorithm, it's hard to make a statement about TikTok in general. Most likely, you engage with anti-AirBnB content, so that's what you see more of.
I doubt I will get a refund. But I will certainly never use airbnb again.
I once rented a condo in a city on the east coast, and the rules mentioned that the kitchen is available but to avoid cooking anything "crazy". No further details were provided. My partner and I boiled two lobsters and sauteed a few scallops, thinking that wasn't a "crazy" thing to cook in a rental by the Atlantic ocean.
A few weeks later (one day after the review window closed), we got a DM from the owner telling us that they found the lobster shells in the garbage, and that us boiling the two lobsters was in violation of the rules. Supposedly, the odor from our cooking triggered their incredibly acute seafood allergy to the point where they could no longer live in their own condo, and they filed a complaint with Airbnb seeking $500+ in damages. There was, of course, no mention of this seafood allergy anywhere in the listing or in the rules regarding cooking.
Airbnb threw away the claim, but in an attempt to mollify the host, they allowed them to write a negative review of me (after the review window had closed) and how I permanently ruined their condo. Thankfully I don't care very much about having a spotless reputation of Airbnb anymore, but it's crazy to me that Airbnb did anything to appease someone who basically tried to extort another one of their users through their platform.
2019 - $(0.5b) (loss)
2020 - $(3.5bn) (loss)
2021 - $0.4bn (profit)
2022 - $1.8bn (profit)
Like with Uber and WeWork, these startups only look good next to market leaders when they have billions in VC capital to undercut their competitors with. Once they IPO, they're on their own, and their business practices start looking suspiciously similar to the bloated, bureaucratic incumbents they once threatened to replace.
airbnb is for people who haven't learned the lesson about airbnb yet. Hotels aren't interested in competing on price with airbnb because they dont have to.
However, it seems that their bookings are up 20% year over year, so there must be a disconnect somewhere.
Etsy was real cool when it was a bazaar of small handmade items, and such. Now it's chock full of same garbage you can get on any large ecommerce site.
Everything that made AirBNB cool at first eventually made it bad inevitably. Glad to have made friends with hosts along the way before it went sour.
The issue is Airbnb attracted recently a lot of get-rich-quick types, similar to what see for Amazon sellers or crypto bros. We are far from the savvy host who want to share travel experiences and give you a unique experience
Do people actually want this? I d rather not meet anyone when i m using the home, it's just lodging that s less restrictive than a hotel.
There is almost restaurant where you can sit down for a 2 person meal under 30 dollars now, and even fast food is hard to get under 20$.
Gatorade + snack at gas station: 10$
Car prices are through the roof
Eggs the other day, for 12 pack, 6$
Keep in mind that inflation is still at 6%, even though it is moderating, that is still pretty far away from the 2% target.
In 2019 it took me 30 minutes to scroll through a list and pick one of good places - or maybe I was just lucky.
In 2023 it takes over a week (I'm not exaggerating) of routine work every evening to find something that may somewhat match my requirements and wishes. All those filters except for price are now useless ("dedicated workspace" is a particularly bad joke), one literally has to skim over every single listing, review the photos and figure out what they really have. Honest good listings still exist but are drowned in sea of low-effort ones.
Sure, you can do this stuff in a hotel too, but sometimes the airbnb has cool stuff like a patio or a deck versus your bog standard hotel layout with too much bed and not enough floorspace for partying, not to mention a smoke detector. The lack of any staff oversight also makes it easy to party without fearing noise complaints or having staff see just how many people are staying in the unit. I'd wager airbnb has completely changed how big partying holidays like spring break works in a lot of cities for this reason.
The only alternative I know of is extended stay hotels, but those are extremely rare, especially outside the US. It used to be Airbnb was not just the only option, but also a blessing - I suppose because nomads were a major part of its guest client base. Now it feels like trying to find something tolerable in a pile of garbage.
I leave 5 star reviews for all guests and my only checklist item is for it not to look like the hotel room from the hangover. I pay cleaners good money to clean your mess.
AirBnB has been vary guest friendly IMO. I have over 200 five star reviews. A guest tried to push for a discounted stay. I pushed back and they told AirBnB my place was unsafe and I was removed from search for a week.
EDIT: TLDR. I started this 4 years ago as a side hustle but I'm ready to be out of the game. It doesn't scale to provide a nice place that I also use as a vacation home. Also, I'm constantly replacing and repairing things. The only way to win is to be a slumlord AirBnB host
You do not need to pay those rates. You need a different handyman. Even in the bay area.
Anyone can find cheap handymen. It's much harder to find one who is always available.
That handyman is also blowing off other jobs and dealing with the fallback of blowing off of those other jobs. $200 is the market rate for that
I haven’t done traditional rental property in over a decade. It’s not worth the hassle.
In many states (at least the ones that get cold) the lack of a working furnace means that the unit is not "hospitable" and the tenant is allowed to withhold rent until the unit is made hospitable. In some states, the tenant is not required to pay rent for the period of time the unit is not "hospitable." Your tenant tried to do that, but failed.
I think the thing I hated about it the most was the system of hosts rating the guests. It was always stressful especially when our ability to simply secure our next place to live was dependent on, to some degree, a hosts subjective evaluation of how they felt the stay went. For instance I have a toddler, at one location my toddler played with some toys that were in the house. We put them back where they were but they were incorrectly arranged (not damaged just put back not the way they wanted) and the host left us a negative review. We disputed it and airbnb sided us, but the whole feeling of constant judgement makes it difficult to relax in a space. I wish they had some better / more objective system as you never know when you'll encounter an unreasonable person. To me this is the single biggest negative. A sort of cloud of social credit hanging over your head.
At this point I would never use Airbnb except for long term (30 days+) type of travel. Between the extremely intense chores you're basically given plus huge cleaning fees hotels are superior in nearly every way for short term trips. The significant % reduction for staying a month too makes it a lot more palatable. I think Airbnb sees this too which is why they're leaning so heavily into the digital nomad / long term travel user segment. It's a place they can genuinely win vs a hotel. For short term stays not dealing with unreasonable hosts, not getting surprise fees, and there not being a bunch of chores makes things significantly more enjoyable. As noted on social platforms by others getting hit with a massive cleaning fee and also then being expected to do chores also feels like a slap in the face.
Dynamic range in your ratings should matter.
FWIW I use Airbnb and hotels extensively. They fill different needs for me. And sometimes I use the composites: Hilton Residences or whatever. So far mostly good. I generally don't do anything extensive. The most you'll get from me is putting the sheets in the dryer. If you want me to clean the shoe mat and stuff you need to have no cleaning fee.
The direct booking sites come free with most of the property management systems out there: Guesty, Hostaway, etc. so most hosts have them, they’re just not allowed to advertise it on the online travel agencies (Airbnb etc).
I'm not sure how this keeps getting brought up. There is a large thread started by @pitdesi on Twitter that sort of got it directly addressed.
A good example is over the summer, we had an AirBnB for my wife and my step-daughter and I in Rome for a few nights. We had so many issues that when we came back through Rome on our way back home I booked a 5-star luxury hotel. The hotel ended up being cheaper than the AirBnB when you count the tacked on fees, and had none of the issues we experienced, although there was less total square footage. It was in a better location as well, and the AirBnB was far from a luxury 5-star experience. I typically stay in 2-star or 3-star lodgings when I travel, and AirBnBs are now typically worse than a 2-star offer, but charging higher than 5-star prices. It's ridiculous.
But then, one time, trying to get check into a place and the combination padlock or whatever wasn't working to get the key inside and I couldn't get ahold of the host took another 2 hours, I was like, I don't have time for this crap. That sort of problem would NEVER happen at a hotel.
And now, 12+ years later, while some things have improved (like keyless entry and whatnot that lots of hosts have finally), the situation is worse in many other areas, including cost.
Generally speaking, hotels work better for me. No bull shit fees (except some of those resorts that throw in the ridiculous daily 'resort fee' on top of the room rate, which is not reflected when you are searching and booking the room, except in fine print). No bullshit like cleaning up the room/place before you leave (isn't that why you are paying a cleaning fee?).
Now we have people breeding cobras instead of being paid for cobras they already have so to speak. You have people building entire apartments with plans to put the entire thing on airbnb. Suddenly $50 a night doesn't cut it when you have a huge loan to pay off on that build, then if enough people in the market are operating like this prices just go up and up just like the wider landlord rental market (relative to the polite couple renting a backroom for way under market rate market, perhaps). You have people buying property and renovating it just to justify higher rental income, which only serves to feed the beast without creating any new supply in the market of course.
I recently ended up booking a 2 bed apartment for essentially the same price as a nearby hotel. I don’t like the overall Airbnb experience, but I also don’t want to pay ~2x for an additional hotel room.
Not necessarily true. The suite/long-stay brands like Residence Inn usually have kitchenettes. (Not that I usually use them other than the refrigerator.)
a. Childless
b. Vacationing in a popular/populous area where there is hotel choice
c. Not in the USA (I've gleaned from these threads that hotels with spacious suites are more common in Europe)
There are a number of issues.
1. When I come to use AirBnB again, and so to log in, I never know if I will be able to log in. AirBnB repeatedly break log in, and in ways which can be problematic - "your account has been frozen, click here to notify support, we'll email you in a few days". That's not what you want to discover when you are looking to book now.
2. Relating to that, AirBnB support is Satan's method on Earth to cause and spread screaming psychic and emotional torture amongst the human population. It is the worst. Screaming, dribbling, rabid insanity. It is unspeakable. There is no support, because you do not use it, ever.
3. AirBnB seems completely unaware, or uncaring, about the actual outcomes of the various mechanisms they have in place in their product. The "clean fee" problem is a recent example, but I've heard many more. This is classic large-company syndrome; completely oblivious to the actual experience of the end user.
4. I increasingly hear now of negative reviews being removed by AirBnB. This is putting their entire proposition at risk; if I cannot trust reviews, every booking is blind, and that's not good.
5. A long term problem is that most hosts do not know how to price their property. You can see a lot on the map, but look more closely and a lot of it is crazy money.
6. Finally of course, AirBnB keep raising their fees to landlords and tenants. They now charge monopoly rates, and they need to, because the company is I would say vast and bloated.
The big advantage AirBnB has over every other company in this space is they bake long-term stay discounts into their UI/pricing model, and so they are normally offered. I do not see that on VBRO, etc.
May be Airbnb is only bad in states?
There must be some books or trade magazines out there where they are all getting this stuff...
I've probably booked 15 airbnbs in the US, and they've all been great. No complaints of unruly hosts, or crazy checkout chores. I think if you stick with superhosts or any property with lots of reviews, you'll usually have a good time. My biggest problem with airbnb at this point is the hidden fees until checkout.
We experimented with AirBnb one time last year while we were in Florida looking at places before we bought. While the experience wasn’t bad, we really prefer hotels.
At a hotel, we always have access to a gym, the vast majority of the time we have access to a pool and we have consistency.
I know exactly how much we will be paying, we check in before we get there on the app, our digital key is usually ready and we go straight to the room and unlock the door with our phone. When we get ready to leave. We leave. We don’t have to wash anything. Clean up anything. Nothing. We just leave.
We don’t have to worry about auditioning to find a place to stay our ratings as guests and we know the exact address of the hotel.
We usually fly out on Sunday. When I land, I want to know what I’m going to get. I prepare my work setup when I land. My wife does an Instacart order.
I don’t have to worry about shady owners, renting places that aren’t zoned for short term stays etc.
If I have an issue, and the hotel can’t or won’t fix it, I can look for another hotel, cancel the reservation with no questions asked and move on.
Not to mention that I’m also getting loyalty points along the way - worth around 25-30% - of each dollar spent for future stays.
We are using the points we earned to stay free for a week this year in a San Juan, PR, Los Angeles, Niagara Falls Canada and Toronto. We stayed in downtown Savannah for a week free New years week.
[1] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-condotel-5212277
Either her or I use the carry on when we travel by ourselves - me on business trips and her to conferences.
The kitchens usually have a full refrigerator and two burner stove.
Our Condotel for the winter is a full two bedroom/two bath condo with a stove and oven.
No storage services. We threw out everything and sold our cars.
Our original plan was to move to Florida full stop. We were looking on Redfin for a condo with a view, access to pools, walking distance to restaurants and it showed up.
We called the real estate agent and she explained the concept and said we could only live there 180 days. I was initially disappointed. But then my wife said we wanted to travel anyway, so why not travel around the US the rest of the year.
BTW, I tried to find the most even handed article of the pros and cons. Most of the sites you find are by real estate agents who want you to buy. Let me be more clear.
You will lose money over the course of the year on almost all of them even if you put the required 25-30% down.
The income offsets some of the holding costs.
I had a plan going in and this was never meant to be an investment.
What I've noticed over the years is the service has very much gone downhill. Prices have super skyrocketed across the globe.
I try to use hotels as much as possible and only go for Airbnb on long stays of 1-6 months.
If it's less than a month, I now opt for a hotel.
A few days after my review went online they removed it because "checkout didn't take place". It did take place and I am out several hundred Euros. I guess they wanted me to spend the night with the scammer in unliveable place.
The whole experience was refusal of cooperation by Airbnb and protecting the scammer. I think it's very likely they are on the scam themselves. Afterall the only person who is out of money is me and I am not even allowed to warn others (being left late in the day to find emergency accomodation in the high booking season is another small problem I had to deal with).
The whole process is designed to make it as difficult as possible to win a case vs dishonest host or even leave a review (ridiculous design like max 1000 words of review, no ability to go back if you make a typo and click next, several minutes of chatting with bots before you can get disinterested human the line etc.)
If you don't want to get scammed with no recourse don't use Airbnb. The reviews you see are heavily filtered to make hosts look better. Hotels are better and cheaper. Private apartments are way better via Booking as they take customer's side regularly (which is why many Airbnb hosts find Booking hard to work with).
He said it was completely algorithmic, and outside his control. Because the place I was staying at was new, without a lot of reviews, it was a crazy good deal — he probably made $50 for my stay, which by rights should have been more like $300.
I suppose that, in that situation, the cost of those hidden fees like cleaning might be a knob hosts can turn to feel in control.
When we started, I wrote down the price of each ingredient. For the last three years I've been buying the same things at the grocery store and watching the total increase.
I know the official inflation numbers are lower than 33%, but that's about the increase I'm seeing in the grocery store.
I'm no lover of Airbnb, but I think this is just money getting worse.
Also a lot of people talk as if airbnb and hotels are interchangeable, but they are not. In my touristy european area, airbnb is everywhere and hotels can't match what people offer there. It's really about the different types and locations of accomodation that airbnb promotes in its homepage now, not for simply finding 'a place to sleep' like a hotel. Both of them have their place, but airbnb has a lot more space to expand in new types and modes of accomodation that we haven't discovered yet, and hotels cannot directly compete with those offerings.
The last straw for me was when the host refused to communicate for for 5K stay during XMAS in NYC. It took 2 days of hounding AirBNB and them also not being able to communicate with host. I also had to point out that address in question was a commercial building with no apartments in it. They went out of their way to steal my money. Finally my wife ended up getting someone who cared and when she rattled off the company values aka empathy, it changed the entire conversation and we finally got a refund. I can't and won't do that again so hotels is where it's at for me moving forward.
I can either utilize a hotel which will take care of virtually every need I have wherever I'm at, or use an AirBnB and get stuck with doing my own housekeeping for twice the price.
"Welcome to Your Airbnb, the Cleaning Fees Are $143 and You’ll Still Have to Wash the Linens":
From the above link:
>'Last month, Amanda Morari spent her sister’s bachelorette weekend at a lakefront cottage in Ontario province. The washer was out-of-order and the vacuum wouldn’t charge so the women spent their last day “wetting paper towels and wiping the floor,” she said.'
>'The host told her not to worry about it, Ms. Morari said, but then came the unexpected: she got a three-star review because the cleaning wasn’t up to the mark. Her perfect five-star rating dipped to 4.1.'
The old school vacation rental companies are still the best game in town. These are often small local businesses with names like "Tahoe Mountain Rentals". They've been doing this for years (decades?), know all the local property owners, have the best inventory, and are usually professionally-run operations that come as close to the actual hotel level of hospitality as possible.
They've had to co-list a lot of their properties on AirBNB recently, but you'll often find better rates just searching for the properties and booking directly from the management companies.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=107Zn
And ~3x the rate of inflation for 'Lodging away from home'
If you look at their chart from say, 1990 to today, they show something like 8-9% annual. 8% annual inflation for 33 years would be ~1,300% cumulative. Do Hondas that cost $15k in 1990 cost $200k today? Does a gallon of milk that cost $1.50 in 1990 cost $20 today? Even housing -- a $100k house in 1990 would cost $1.4M today based on that rate... that may be true in very specific neighborhoods but that's not inflation as much as supply:demand mismatch in Tier A cities.
But I do find it interesting that even in the face of rapidly rising price increases, companies like Airbnb and Uber are very profitable and it hasn't hit them at all. I wonder what this phenomenon is, if it's just acceptance of higher prices or a convenience factor.
In my personal opinion this was driven by the massive hiring sprees that elevated a lot of bus boys, waitresses, and other jobs to "experience officers", "diversity officers", HR positions that never existed before.
I've been applying to companies at size levels that I've worked at before that had just one HR person that was dedicated to payroll. Now there are entire teams of workers that process applications.
The average startup is operating as if it's UnitedHealth Group or something.
Now don't get me wrong, I am so glad people are getting higher paying jobs, but the pandemic causing that job rush so fast and furiously is what brought on this inflation.
Every layoff article we see where they are letting go of 15% here, 20% there, it's nothing compared to the actual 80% hiring these companies did 20-23. That 80% hiring rate IS the inflation we're seeing.
We elevated a lot of people to wages all us programmers had about 15 years ago - 90 - 120k. And of course us programmers are now asking 160 - 220k. Again, great that people are more employed and there are higher wages. However the inflation that went so fast and furiously with it - it's causing the people that aren't so lucky to quickly fall into homelessness, drug use, depression and suicide (by drug use mostly).
I just want a kitchen, a laundry machine for longer trips, and a nice place to work. I also don't want a hotel even if it has those things because then there are lots of other guests around.
AirBnB is the best way to do this especially for month + stays; but you have to carefully check host reviews and cleaning fees. Any hint of host weirdness in the reviews (I've seen some truly odd things) and I book elsewhere.
So many of the places aren't that good for the price, or they have strange rules attached.
I cancelled one place, after it turned out to be (quite a nice) shed at the end of the owners garden... with the owner present and their family - you had to walk past all the toys strewn about their garden; I don't want to wake them up because I come back late.
Similarly, others with crazy intrusive rules; only mentioned after booking.
I can’t think of a single positive thing about Airbnb anymore.
What other services are people using instead of AirBnB?
I also tried to stay with AirBnB couple of times and avoid it ever since.
Of course Airbnb has its use cases but in general, hotels are way better, and let's not talk about hidden cameras on properties, etc...
Every listing with a "fully stocked kitchen" is really just stocked with a crusty bottle of salt, dull knives, and scratched-to-heck pans.
And AirBnB is discovering what every "disruptor" is discovering: the system existed for a reason. The rules were there for a reason. Things cost what they cost for a reason. And the only way to come in under those prices is to cheat someone somewhere.
I guess the main problem is that they make so much money while diluting their brand before customers realize