Airbnb Is Different Now
theatlantic.com
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But if you compare it's business with Booking, you'll see that Booking is much cheaper not only as a guest, but also as an investor, having wider revenues + net income as well.
It's long gone the times since Airbnb was cheaper than a hotel, I remember back in the days, it would be roughly 50% cheaper. Nowadays, it's about the same price as a hotel.
For some occasions, like when you want to rent a home for 4 or more, it might make sense, but I fail to see how it's going to stay competitive in the long run.
Maybe now they are targeting a different customer than me, that likes to travel on a budget. As a consumer, I like the booking has competition and hotel prices have come down since the Airbnb explosive growth.
Booking also sell flights (on priceline) and is a much wider business, not to forget, that lots of hosts sell on both platforms.
To me, Airbnb looks like a doomed business. Sure, right now it's margins are okay, they've got a good brand, but that's pretty much all they've got.
I don't get why don't they explore other markets, or the "air" part in the name.
If you hate your family, friends, and coworkers, feel free to recommend that they use the service.
I live in Edinburgh and over the last ten years I've witnessed a change that isn't something I want. The old town is more or less a filthy theme park where few residents can or would want to live. Lots of my co workers used to live there. It's a shame. I have friends who've got a lot of noise issues with an Airbnb opposite their tennement / block. Hopefully some sensible planning laws can be brought in that don't kill Airbnb in the city but limit it some how.
Edit and I wish Airbnb would include all fees in the advertised price
The area was fantastic for nightlife and dining though... which I think is something AirBNBs sometimes lack. They bring all the downsides of a hotel to residents, but they're not in a light commercial zone so the residents don't have any of the upsides of hotel district either.
I'm sure that someone in Amsterdam loves to use airbnb when they go to Edinburgh but doesn't like it when it's in their own city.
It's hypocritical.
Edit: you just ignored this sentence completely "Hopefully some sensible planning laws can be brought in that don't kill Airbnb in the city but limit it some how."
Why not?
> and the prices are way out of our range.
Apart-hotels are quite good and not super expensive, if you can find them.
It’s then up to a regulatory response associate at Airbnb to navigate the “he said-she said” between host and guest and action a response.
Sometimes they side with the host, sometimes they side with the guest. All of this happens days or weeks after you reach out to Airbnb to complain that the host has just thrown you out in the middle of the night.
Like many others, I used to really like Airbnb and had great experiences, but largely switched to Booking.com and hotels again.
For example, an associate can side with a host simply because the guest uses ALL CAPS in their dialogue. Extrapolate this to any and every other personal bias.
It was professional -- you'd get a company (either a specific one for villas, or a big package holiday company one like Thomas Cook), they would engage with local villas in the off season and sell the inventory on, presumably taking a cut. They would (at least in europe) have a nearby "rep" -- partly to deal with any complaints and issues, partly to answer questions. You would get a consistent service though. The reps would of course to try to upsell you local tours etc (which you could simply say no to when you got it).
However your villa was yours from when you arrives, and the price was the price. You had no idea who owned the villa, nor did you need to know. There was no extra fees to pay (local taxes, electricity, cleaning fees etc)
Now though the rise of airbnb and similar sites (booking/hotels.com etc) has broken that. The villa I had this year (through what used to be a legitimate professional villa company -- James Villas - a company I have used in the past) was run in the shoddiest way possible. I dealt with the owners, who seemed to actually live there, and wanted various forms and money, the property was covered in security cameras like a prison (which were fortunately easy to disable), they even turned up on the last evening and stayed in a ramshackle room.
In the past property owners knew that they were renting out a house for the season. Now it's like "helicopter landlording".
It was completely unrelaxing and I won't be doing it again, alas it seems the experience of the past is gone.
Uber had/has the same model.
Some of these VC companies are basically nothing but wealth transfer machines, they're not actually offering that much added value.
Heck, they're part of the productivity paradox: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/produ...
A lot of motion, not much action to actually improve the lives of the average person.
I can’t imagine this is limited to Europe, either. I’m not familiar with the new NYC law, but assuming it doesn’t affect bedrooms, only full apartments: it’s absolutely cheaper than a hotel. Good luck finding a hotel for less than $100 a night anywhere in the five boroughs.
It's just down to tradeoffs on what you're looking for. You can get a kitchen and a bit more space with an airbnb, but you give up on the hotel amenities of support/cleaning staff, and lounge/gym spaces. Don't get me wrong, I usually value a full kitchen over maid service. But I was able to stay at nobu for a comparable price to a 2 bedroom in Barcelona.
I do agree with your point about renting a room in someones place. But that's now a small fraction of airbnb's business compared to renting a full place.
In my experience, hosts have been about half very cool and friendly and half professional, but minimal. My guess is that the people with extremely negative experiences either didn't look at reviews before booking and/or are the type that trash hotel rooms and have issues with spending 2 minutes cleaning up after themselves. Ask anyone that's worked in hospitality: that type of person is sadly very common.
That being said i had an excellent experience in Switzerland. My host went off Airbnb soon after that and launched her own website.
It's not that everyone else, or you, are necessarily wrong about which is cheaper. I suspect you just plan your trips differently or with a different timeline than other commentors.
Booking.com has typical listings if I want to search for single rooms or number of beds. But they aren’t “trustworthy” for what actually sleeps 3,4, or 5 people.
Dont really know how the ratios here are but i would guess solo/couple is about 70% of travels?
That being said, the premium you have to pay on this now has become so high that we often reconsider.
Hotel have bars, lounges, lobbies and sometimes terraces. Where everything is catered for you and staff are there to attend to your needs.
If you have any issues or questions about the local area, a receptionist or concierge can help and advise.
Compared to my (admittedly limited) experience with AirBNB where getting any information from the "hosts" felt hostile, and the arrival experience alone often mired by instructions to effectively sneak into your place of stay because it's not supposed to be for holiday lets.
That can't compare to walking into a hotel and having your bags taken off you by a porter while simultaneously being handed a drink (if desired).
I’m a vacationer, I don’t want to deal with parking, cooking food, cleaning the place. On vacations, I just want to relax and probably spend as much time out doing things as possible. When tired and not sleepy, I rather hangout in hotel lobby or by pool.
Travelers want to experience new places like locals. So AirBnB appeals to them because they can do grocery shopping in local stores, experience different parts of city that normal tourists don’t.
Thank you! My preference is always for an AirBNB when I go skiing or want to go work someplace that isn’t my house for a week, and you sort of nailed the reason. When I was in Madrid for a buddy’s wedding, on the other hand, my preference was 5* hotel.
That dichotomy makes sense and isn’t how I’d thought about it before.
Not everyone’s travel is the same.
Strong agree.
My girlfriend and I found an airbnb out by the lake, the owners of the property have direct access to said lake. We'll generally rent it out for 4 or 5 days (friday-monday) and just relax, go fishing, etc.
So we end up using the same airbnb a couple times a year for the experience.
outside of that, however, I have to echo the sentiment that in general airbnb's are not cheaper than hotels, so what you're paying for is a "non-hotel" experience.
I wouldn't underestimate this. I recently went on holiday, and while I ended up booking on Booking.com as I have done for all my recent trips, I still described the place I stayed in as an AirBnB when asked by friends where I was staying. That will last a long time and is arguably the "hard bit", turning that into revenue won't take much. I was even doing most of my browsing on AirBnB.
I think AirBnB have just missed the budget end a bit. If you want to stay in a nice place there are some amazing places, and with their Super Host program the mid to high end is well catered for. What has been lost is the budget end where so much of the market is, and which Booking.com is excellent at. I'm a fairly budget conscious traveller and find AirBnB to be average to poor value for money now. A new budget conscious program where you still know you aren't going to get placed in a glorified hostel would be great.
Last quarter for example, Airbnb had timid growth, meanwhile Booking did much better.
For the current size Airbnb is (not as big as Booking.com), and market valuation, I'd have much higher expectations for it.
That doesn’t make it not suck. Not hiding fees doesn’t mean “we always show what’s legally required.”
As a customer I want to know how much things cost. It’s a pain to not know taxes when shopping rooms. Especially since I rarely know city taxes and some hotels have different taxes because they are “resort” or “convention” or whatever tax rules exist for a particular jurisdiction.
Overall I find Booking pretty neat, once you get past all the "449 people booked this room in the last 4 seconds" bs.
Having said that, Agoda has the lowest price most of the time, so I put with their bs even more willingly.
Europe
European Union regulations say that mandatory fees must be included in advertised prices, making hidden resort fees illegal.[118][119]
We are now in the phase where some Airbnbs really are overpriced as seen from the consumer side. But perhaps perfectly priced as seen by the owner (who perhaps wants fewer but higher priced rental days to better fit their own hassle overhead.) There is space for the prices to bounce around. And for some consumers they are still what they want: as others described, if you want more than a couple days and you want a real living place as opposed to just a place to sleep and desk.
Does it mean that AirBnB disappears? Of course not. But their business has really changed, yes. Have they adapted enough? Are they continuing to adapt enough?
What sounds more of a problem to me is that Airbnb has not solved its hassle issue: The inventices for the reviews to be effective don't seem right to me. And it has not solved its issue of relations with governments / voters: the supply of Airbnb is threatened pretty much everywhere. And while booking.com and the others seem highly diversified, perhaps not so for Airbnb.
Now it's basically: have a property and enjoy doing the backoffice of short term rentals (cleaning/basic accounting/being a host), and then you are essentially competing for customers that would typically go to a hotel/hostel.
But if you think about it rationally, Hotels, even very cheap ones should be able to offer more services for less, given that a hotel cleaner can go room after room doing the work.
The same is for other utilities like swimming pool etc, as it's shared, it's cheaper.
There used to be a time when hotels were more expensive even though you could get an apartment for yourself with a pool and all those services, as well cleaning fees were lower. Nowadays after the arbitrage happened, things are more evened out.
Anyways, I understand that for people with money or certain conditions, Airbnb is more interesting, but I can't see that model having a scale bigger than the old way, it's just a niche, and I think Airbnb at the moment fail to make that niche as profitable as the main thing.
it might be a way for Airbnb to diversify: treat these two a two different businesses. Airbnb-style hotels and rooms in a lived in apt and actually local's apts. Three separate offerings as opposed to a big pile of random stuff.
But there was NO big investment for the people who offered the original Airbnb fare: one available room, or one available apartment.
It made me use Airbnb more for a while and I had some really nice experiences, years ago. Now they seem kafka-esque and just a tricky value extraction machine of bullshit. I browse every time I plan a trip and end up choosing hotels because of price, simplicity, quality, and just predictability. The exception is Europe, but that was 4 years ago and I think they just have more of a bnb culture so I expect the culture is better and Airbnb is just the interface to the old bnb catalogs of yore.
I wonder if it was all bullshit all along. Or if they failed. Or if they don’t care any more. Or, most cynically, these found that you make more money off crappy customer service and chose to suck and not be great.
I call this the “don’t need to outrun the bear” philosophy. That’s good for survival tactics, but I don’t want to get running training from the company just trying to be the 2nd most horrible.
If I want 11 star customer service I’m just shelling out the cash for an expensive hotel. This takes a lot of research as 5-star doesn’t mean much. But I’ve had success with Park Hyatts in tokyo, Paris, Zurich and other big metros where their staff and facility was truly willing and capable.
[0] https://reid.medium.com/how-to-scale-a-magical-experience-4-...
I got stranded without a place to stay at my destination and reaching out to their support took 10h in total.
I ended up just rebooking another listing on airbnb only to learn I don't get any compensation if I rebooked myself and not through their support system.
Lesson learned.
The idea is to acknowledge that 5 stars is what we tend to rate something that goes perfectly well without complaints, and as a product design exercise it fails to be a good target.
So Chesky's idea is to figure out what would make something so absurdly good that someone would rate it more than twice the usual "no complaints" rating - and then work backwards and figure out what is in between the 5 and 11 star experiences. You're never trying to reach 11 by design, but maybe you can target 7 or 9 as an aspirational goal, and thinking through this as a design exercise can help you identify user motivations more effectively.
My point is that Airbnb is like 2 or 3 star now. We obviously aren’t going to have Elon Musk personally teach people to drive the in house Tesla. But when the listing includes use of the house car and it ends up being a motorcycle with no gas that doesn’t start once you fuel it and is shared by a 200 person condo association, it’s nowhere near 5 star.
It’s one thing when people are just stupid and don’t know what quality is or should be. It’s another when they are conscious of where they should aim and point away from it.
Most places charge ridiculous cleaning fees, but then also expect you to do all the cleaning yourself. What am I paying for, then??
Just go with a hotel, save yourself the hassle.
You only get a few weeks a year to travel if you're a salary man.
Never will I ever risk it again.
If you are somewhere more remote though there's a very limited choice, airbnb and similar have pushed the more professional options out, or forced them to sell via airbnb etc, in which case it's pot luck what you get.
Same!!! I got couple bad reviews from a people who charged me > 1 night of stay for cleaning fee but then complain I left dirty dished and crumbs on the table.
Like, WHAT?!!! you charge me $50+ dollars for cleaning fee and expect me to left place clean? this make no sense. Airbnb just ignored my request to remove this review, telling its between me and host
I ignored the contract. I called airbnb and asked them if it was cancellable and they said it was not. I ignored the additional contract. I called AirBNB and told them that I wasn't going to cancel and I'm not going to sign the additional contract. I told them I would show up and if they don't provide the accommodations as promised that I would simply dispute it with my credit card company as service not provided that was paid for.
They caved and the host didn't require me to sign the contract or perform their extensive check out procedure or sign the crazy limited liability waivers.
But why am I paying thousands of dollars to rent a townhouse for more than I'm paying for a hotel, and then I have to show up and hope they are going to give me access to the rental that costs more than a hotel? I've never sent so much money with a vendor and dealt with such hassles.
I love the idea of staying at a local house and seeing the architecture and way that people in the area live, but I really don't like the airbnb experience that comes along with it.
It is similar to when you have a startup. Cohorts when they first start are fully bought in, energetic and trying to give it their all. If you don’t foster and maintain that, people get jaded and the experience vanishes. Airbnb just like an Uber/Lyft went through the same phase. When Airbnb was brand new it was generally a beautiful experience. Uber/Lyft/sidecar were also magical experiences in the beginning. Then it became less about the experience and about the raw economics of the business. Due to many different reasons of course but I think it’s extremely hard for AirBnb to maintain the experience. You have to either pick to enforce strict requirements on hosts or you open it up to everyone and have the current situation.
Of course, in any market there are "entrepreneurs" who try to make a buck. They usually rent the place long-term and try to arbitrage through short rentals on AirBnb. The math mostly doesn't work unless your region becomes "hot" for the season and everyone wants to be there.
Airbnb will continue to exist though (and maybe grow?). The market is massive.
Airbnb is no longer consistently the best source of these, but there is definitely still big value outside what hotels can offer.
The big downside is the amount of scams and the lack of security in your booking. You book something for a few months in advance and the host randomly cancels reasonably last minute, leaving you scrambling to find somewhere when all the good options are already booked, so you end up paying more than what you had the AirBnB booked at, for a cheap budget hotel.
I like the hotels that are like semi apartments, where you get somewhere to sit, a kitchen area and a bedroom. These tend to be around the same price as an Airbnb but you get the security of booking of a hotel chain.
Who on earth isn't leaving these properties zero-star reviews?
As if that doesn’t make it less pleasant.
They seem to be orienting around sellers. I expect because there’s lots of competition with vrbo and other listing sites and sellers have hundreds of transactions a year while I only have 1-2 certifications per year.
Give it a whirl.