The modern Airbnb experience: Pay a 150 dollar "cleaning fee" and then be instructed to wash the bedsheets, vacuum the apartment, do the dishes, dust the TV and replace the candles before you leave
This is what a world without regulation could be.
The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.
Of course, we don't really have that at all in the US. We have a severely compromised free market.
For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.
It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).
Even China is not foolproof at it; look at how troubled their airliner program has been.
Like by a whole number factor.
Until we can rest assured that 100% of you will treat me better than I deserve, we will have to be on the watch for pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.
That is pretty much the world that the original Star Trek was promising--an evolved human--but we are very far away from that now.
We could also look at it through the lens of Bertrand Russell's four unquenchable desires (acquisitiveness, rivalry, pride, power).
Either way, flawed humanity needs regulations backed by overwhelming power to force us to treat each other right.
Better than a “pure” free market or the Soviet-style, centrally-planned economies.
Though the ecological disaster from short-term thinking really needs to be rethought.
You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.
The government’s job even with “free market capitalism” is to regulate the market to manage both positive and negative externalities.
As for regulations, when regulations fail to keep up with reality, well, guess who wins. If you want to tell your neighbor what she can do with her house, I guess maybe you should've outbid her when it went up for sale.
Forcing airbnb to display and sort by final price is the type of regulation that would help.
this is exactly why companies like airbnb, uber, and the other disruptors try so damn hard to not be lumped in with the exact market they are trying to disrupt. they all know that if they had to play by the same rules, there would be no disrupting. the disruption comes from them being allowed to skirt the rules and play on different playing fields. they'll all scream about corruption in the existing sytem, and some of that might very well be true, they are suggesting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. it is true that some regulations that help protect the consumer will hinder unbridled growth for the disruptor. tough!
The whole reason Ticketmaster is able to do what they're able to do is because when one company becomes large enough, it's no longer a free market.
Paul G couldn't be prouder of any other company ever from YC and it is well understood that not only are rent seeking slumlords and dirty/dangerous places a frequent problem, airbnb actively destroys communities [2],[3].
So this is what maximum startup success looks like folks.
1. https://www.failory.com/pitch-deck/airbnb
2. https://files.epi.org/pdf/157766.pdf
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307554257_Holiday_R...
https://i.imgur.com/tTsrxdF.png
Its working as intended for me. Thank god for airbnb, i 've travelled to so many places i couldn't have even dreamed of.
Outrageous fee like those you quoted happen if you rent in high demand places in peak season. Don't rent a condo in aspen in feb .
To be fair, the things those hosts asked me to do weren't anywhere near a full cleaning of the place, but I can see people who are used to doing exactly nothing when leaving a hotel being peeved that they had to do 10% of the cleaning and still pay a cleaning fee for the other 90%.
You know what, the next time I stay at an Airbnb, I’m going to just say I didn’t clean anything but I left an extra $20 on the counter to cover the work I didn’t do. Shouldn’t be a big deal right? That should be more than enough to cover the 15 minutes of labor I was asked to do, at a rate of like $80/hr.
At the Marriott?
It seems like a petty power move type thing, like a way to ensure guests don’t go too crazy or something because you make them feel like they will have to clean things up.
That's the problem. I suspect many amateur hosts have scaled operations to the point that they don't clean between stays and outsource that job to consumers as a shortcut, cost saving measure.
Which is probably a better comparison for the chore lists and cleaning fees than table service.
I haven't really used Airbnb, but it seems pretty ridiculous that people would continue to use them if there are different, annoying to understand conditions attached to each listing.
And then in some sense, a media article criticizing them is the free market.
I'm pretty sure I've been charged by airbnb for a cleaning fee when I never even stayed at the place.
Edit: yep, 40 bucks in cleaning fees without ever entering the place