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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Well AirBnb banning in New York is alot different than in other cities just by virtue of the type of accommodations that are available in New York.

If you ask most people why they airbnb over hotels they say its because I can take my family or group of friends to an airbnb, where as in a hotel we'd need to get 4-5 rooms.

In most other cities you can trivially find 5 bedroom places that fit that bill. In New York I'm not sure you can find alot of 5 or 6 bedroom places, especially in Manhattan.

So airbnb's main draw for most people just isn't available in New York in a way that it would be in most other large cities.

Which means you'd expect alot less people to use airbnb over a hotel in New York.

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I used to work for a similar company - a competitor - and the marketing analysis would consistently and very strongly return the same result everytime:

Customers think they are getting more for their money via a short-term rental platform like AirBnB.

The perception is that Hotels have all kinds of additional services (staff, etc) to pay that (somehow) AirBnB hosts don't. The glossy adverts show you a loving, warm, full-of-character home to visit, whilst most hotels have an almost cold, faceless image of nothing but dimly-lit corridor after corridor of numbered rooms.

Reality is most of the properties are owned or managed by rental megacorps, are priced very highly to hide all the commission and fees, they sit empty for long periods of time between rentals, and they get cleaned and maintained _far_ less frequently than hotel rooms do.

For me it’s the price of single occupancy.

I’ve spent a lot of time nomadic freelancing in the past 10 years. In most cities around the world, a room on Airbnb is about the same price as a bed in a hostel. And a hotel is usually double the price.

My needs as a traveller are certainly less important than those of the residents in the cities I visit. Nonetheless, I still lament, as the ever-growing ban on Airbnbs effectively kills the nomadic lifestyle.

> Which means you'd expect alot less people to use airbnb over a hotel in New York.

This analysis doesn't make any sense given that New York was a huge part of AirBnB's overall inventory, being their biggest market worldwide for a long time.

> This analysis doesn't make any sense given that New York was a huge part of AirBnB's overall inventory, being their biggest market worldwide for a long time.

Was NYC their biggest market?

Where can i find the data you're using?

It says it right in the article. Furthermore, the article says Paris is currently AirBnB's biggest market, which further disproves the comment I was responding to. You're not getting many 5 bedroom apartments in Paris, either.

I can confirm NYC was the starting ground and biggest market place for AirBnB. I had access to data from https://www.airdna.co/ in a former role.

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