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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Sure it is. There are 130K+ places in the US that you can stay at that are professionally managed and legally zoned for short term stays. You don’t pay any undisclosed fees once you get there. You don’t have to worry about cleaning anything. There is no “checklist”. I just walk out of most hotels I stay at, click a button on an app and get my receipt.

You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.

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Airbnb used to be VC subsidized and cheap. Now that it's the same cost or more than a hotel room; I don't understand why someone would prefer Airbnb.

Kids, people have kids and kids nap. It’s a nightmare trying to find a hotel that has a suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the room. Leaving you to either book adjoining rooms or calling hotels until you find one that has that. And typically at that price point it’s cheaper to stay in an Airbnb.

Embassy Suites and Homewood Suites are two that I know about. All Embassy Suites have two room suites with a separate bedroom and most have a sleeper sofa.

Another point regarding kids is it can be a lot easier to find an AirBnB and cook their favorite or required dishes (my son had bad stomach problems early in his life and needed a very bland diet) rather than try your luck 3 times a day at a random restaurant.

There are plenty of hotels with full kitchens. Homewood Suites has a full kitchen as do many other extended stays.

Not sharing a wall I guess.

We prefer to stay in houses/cottages on vacations. Two bedrooms, kitchen, dishwasher, laundry. You can't have it in most hotels.

That’s the free market working as it should. You under your own volition choose the trade offs between hotels and AirBnbs.

With externalities thrust upon the neighbors

I agree completely. AirBnb goes out of its way to allow hosts to skirt regulations.

The government’s job even with “free market capitalism” is to regulate the market to manage both positive and negative externalities.

It's like how Uber utterly murdered the taxi industry. That kind of thing simply doesn't happen to an entrenched incumbent market player who doesn't have it coming.

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.

In the Phoenix area where I stayed a couple of weeks ago, I was easily able to rent an entire house for what fairly-crappy hotel rooms are going for.

People say this a lot, but I don’t know why. Airbnbs are consistently cheaper pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled, so much so that I wouldn’t have even been able to visit many cities if I needed to pay for a hotel.

Nowadays it’s common for hotels to charge “resort fees” or “location fees”. Like airbnb’s cleaning fees, these are disclosed during checkout but often don’t appear in comparison shopping sites or advertisements.

At least they are disclosed during checkout and there isn’t a checklist of things you should do to avoid paying extra when you leave.

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