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Comment by otteromkram | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb's business is to enrich the pockets of homeowners/landlords and place travelers in potentially dangerous situations with little in the way of recourse or resolution.

If you hate your family, friends, and coworkers, feel free to recommend that they use the service.

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Well I find it really useful for taking my family on holiday. Hotels are not good places to bring very young kids and the prices are way out of our range. Of course it's designed to make money for hosts.

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

Airbnb is good for travel but not where you live?

It's bad for residents but good for travelers is a perfectly coherent statement.

Right. I lived across the street from a hotel in DC. People were always drunk and rowdy, or having proms.

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.

The point is pipes likes to use airbnb when they travel to other cities, but thinks there's too much airbnb in their own city.

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.

Maybe reread what I actually wrote? Saying there is too much of something that I use is not the same as demanding a ban on what I use. You have presented a straw man version of my point.

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."

As is "I like development just not in my backyard"

That's different. Hospitality places rank very low in terms of desirability, just a tier up from highways, railways and heavy industry.

Sure, coherent does not imply meaning.

Hrm, thought I made it clear that I don't want it killed off where I live, there's middle ground to be found somewhere with sensible regulation I hope.

FYI there's a total price toggle on the home page. Mine is permanently on nowadays

> Hotels are not good places to bring very young kids

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.

Two hotels rooms often runs way more than renting an entire house on AirBNB. Hotels vs Rentals by owner seems like a hot take designed to show what sort of traveller you are. When.it was just me and my partner hotels were great. Drop your bag, run for the door, come back to sleep. Kids struggle doing 10 hours of on your feet time, which invariably means you'll be back at your acomodations for some decent chunk of the trip. Is that better or worse, hell if I know, but I love travelling with my kids, so I'ma do it no matter what concessions I have to make. And one of those is rentals-by-owner.

Wow so you see what a scourge Airbnb is but you continue to use it?

Yep. A host can come into your room in the middle of the night and kick you out of the place.

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.

And I'd guess that they will have a bias towards whichever brings them more value, usually being the host.

Like many others, I used to really like Airbnb and had great experiences, but largely switched to Booking.com and hotels again.

The bias runs even deeper. I directly know someone who worked in this role pre-pandemic. Barring any QA review of the actioned response, associates assigned to these roles are given a wide berth of discretion to action these disputes based on factors that have little to do with the evidence presented by host or guest.

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.

In years past there was a thriving holiday cottage business, both in the UK (sykes cottages etc) and villas in Europe.

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.

Airbnb's business was to sneak in some cracks in legal codes around the world, widen the cracks and hopefully establish new regulation that would favor it as the first mover, and then rake in money with this moat.

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.

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