What Took Down Airbnb | Hacker News Reader

What Took Down Airbnb

theatlantic.com

30 pointsmattm76 comments

What took down Airbnb for me personally wasn't the government, nor was it the housing crisis, but rather the poor experience it offered. Years ago, staying at an Airbnb was a fun novelty and often I could save a buck. Now the novelty has worn off and the predatory fee structures make me weary.

There aren't many things an Airbnb does in a place like NYC that a hotel can't do better. Hotels are ubiquitous and uniform. You generally always know what you're getting into, and if something is amiss you can usually get it corrected by staff on-site or migrate to a nearby competitor. With Airbnb, you'll be lucky if you can reach a human to help with what will inevitably go wrong. Instead of full-time housekeeping, you'll have to put up with the shoddy resetting that a bottom-rate contractor cleaner does between visits, and Airbnb will happily mark up prices for the privilege.

I'll check out Airbnb again if I ever get the itch for an "experience," but otherwise... hotels, despite their flaws, are just a better product.

Good riddance.

When I think of a hotel room, I picture a one room studio apartment with a desk chair, and maybe a couch. This studio apartment has no kitchen, but it might have a small refrigerator and a microwave. It's a cramped space, and not very functional, outside of sleeping. For most people, this means making a bunch of sacrifices from their normal living situation. Lodging that doesn't force people to make these sacrifices will continue to be in demand, even at higher prices than hotels.

I do like having some level of refrigerator but, when traveling, I actually don't generally care if I don't have a normal living situation. I'm probably in that place at least partly to eat elsewhere and really don't care if it's like my house--where I'd be if that's what I wanted.

If you travel with kids, house-like amenities are lifesavers. Feeding young kids with only restaurant food for days... isn't a realistic or healthy proposition.

Plenty of hotel rooms have kitchenettes, you've just got to find the right hotel.

They do, but they don't generally have living rooms separate from the sleeping rooms. When I had little kids, and they went to bed at 8pm or got up at 5am, having segregation between the sleeping and non-sleeping family members was great. AirBNB gave you that, plus the kitchen without having to pay 2X for two rooms. It's also a lot more comfortable to set on a couch than on a bed, or the tiny desks you get in hotel rooms with kitchenettes.

AirBNBs are also broadly available, with lots of selection. There may be hotels with the amenities you want, but they are rare, and are less likely to be in the part of town you want to be in, near your family or friends, etc.

It's not that common outside the US in my experience, and the kitchenettes are barely usable.

Yeah, it generally costs more but extended stay places and suites are fairly common. I sometimes rent them though I don't generally use anything beyond a refrigerator. AirBnB (and VRBO etc.) do tend to win when the objective is to rent an entire house.

You have your own experiences obviously but my brother and I traveled with my parents for weeks from quite a young age--five or so--growing up and we always ate at restaurants (or sometimes room service once old enough to stay in the room on our own).

When travelling for more than a few days, restaurants are not a viable option anymore, especially with the whole family. I used to find it difficult to find healthy options. But nowadays, the cost has become simply prohibitive.

The restaurant budget alone would be much more than hotels and flight prices combined, and we'd still be mostly eating bad, unhealthy food most of the time.

An Airbnb with a kitchen is a must. For extended stays, washing machines are super convenient also.

It seems like hotels are catching up. I stayed at many newer chain brands with decent full kitchen offerings. Still not quite the same as a real appartement/house, but they are fine and often not that much more expensive than your typical hotel room, just look out for it.

When I'm on holiday, I'm usually doing very little in my hotel room other than sleeping, so that's fine. I'll be out most of the day.

When traveling you already are making a bunch of sacrifices in that vein, often happily.

Most Hotels are short term bedrooms/bathrooms with some extras.

Where air b&b competes is against medium/long term stay hotels that try to give a more normal living environment.

Initially airb&b had price attractiveness for even short terms stays but that's largely gone now as it became a business opportunity rather than a side income option.

At least when people 'think of a hotel room', they are happy with your assessment of these hotel rooms. In other words, expectations almost match. This is not the case with Airbnb: a large variance between what one expects, and what one ends up getting. Airbnb, their scammy hosts, hosts with 10 properties, etc are all responsible for it.

This is why I always try to book a small suite (preferably with working kitchen). Not always much more money, and much more comfortable.

Depends where you go. NYC sure but in a smaller place I still usually prefer to have a house or ideally a cabin rather than staying at the sad chain hotel next to the highway

Most hotel chains are boring but they're mostly there to mostly not take away from the experience of wherever you're visiting or passing through. For the most part, I value predictability of accommodation over the possibility that it may be exceptional (or awful).

I think this (experiential vs bland) and parent (urban vs rural) are huge components of the AirBnB experience.

Generally speaking, most people prefer bed and breakfast experiences at their best:

   - Interesting home
   - Home furnishings / kitchen
   - Optional home cooked meals
   - Local recommendations
   - In a residential community

However, there are only so many of those. Especially in urban areas, where an efficient supply of hotels already existed.

Far fewer actual bed and breakfasts than AirBnB needs, once it went public.

Consequently, it pulled an eBay/Amazon/Etsy and lowered its standards to increase volume to drive revenue.

And in doing so, diluted and devalued their own product, because the worst experiences are synonymous with the best.

What AirBnB should have done was recognize that they want to provide fundamentally different things:

{Boutique bed and breakfast experiences} that meet strict standards but have lower volume (especially in urban areas)

{Bland housing} that meets minimum standards but has higher volume

Not doing so was an egregious marketing and product design failure on their part.

Yeah. I've certainly stayed at B&B's/small inns--especially outside of cities on vacation--and have generally appreciated the experience. Some were listed on AirBnB although that's not how I booked them 99% of the time.

Not sure that "good"/vetted B&Bs is a VC-scale business model. I do book trips through agencies that arrange housing at places they've had experience with (doing so at the moment) but that's basically a specialized travel agency-level scale model--not a VC one.

Agreed.

And therein lays the bait-and-switch that AirBnB was forced to pull -- we'll market the best of our properties, but the average experience will be far worse.

That's not a winning brand formula.

Chain hotels, love them or hate them, are more honest about exactly what you're going to get.

>Chain hotels, love them or hate them, are more honest about exactly what you're going to get.

Yep. I'm almost certainly not going to single out my whatever Marriott brand chain hotel as one of the highlights of my trip. And, maybe I had a decent view out my window and maybe I didn't. But I pretty much knew what I was getting. There were almost certainly no issues with checking in if my flight was delayed. And I could leave my luggage at the desk if I wanted to walk around before departing the city.

But it's a case where "meets expectations" is what I'm looking for.

I get that others, especially traveling with friends or family, have different needs than hotels are generally setup to cater to and that's fine. And if someone with local knowledge can book me a place with more character that's generally good too. But I admit that neither I nor my parents when I was growing up ever felt a need to cook meals where I was staying.

It finally clicked for me when my father pointed out that most hotels weren't in the business of providing luxury, but rather consistency. In the same way that McDonald's is.

One newer Marriott brand that always flummoxed me was Moxy. Until I stayed in a few in Europe and realized "Oh, this is a Marriott hostel." Which we don't have the underlying reference for in the US.

I'm not sure I'd describe Moxy, which I generally like and have stayed in both in Europe and the US, that way although I see some commonalities. It overlaps a lot with Marriott's Aloft--which I think was originally a Sheraton brand--(and to a lesser degree Yotel which downsizes rooms to a greater degree). A certain self-conscious hipness, comfortable but somewhat minimalist rooms, and generally welcoming non-stuffy public spaces without restaurants, fitness centers, and other hotel features that I rarely use in an urban hotel.

Agree with respect to consistency although McDonald's tends to be below my baseline if I have any choice in the matter whereas most of the big business hotel chains are pretty much fine for my needs. Most of the time I wouldn't take advantage of what more luxe properties had to offer nor would I use a kitchen (aside from maybe a refrigerator).

And AC Hotels, which I forgot, because why would you remember them?

I've never gotten Aloft's thing. Stayed in a bunch, but "sterile-cool" always seemed a weird mash-up.

Marriott has a ton of overlap in their brand stack now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriott_International#Marri...

E.g. Courtyard vs Fairview vs SpringHill (to say nothing of the Sheraton-inherited Four Points)

Just collapse it down already.

Element is somewhere in that mix too.

But yeah, especially post Sheraton acquisition, Marriott properties branding is a bit of a mess. And add to that, depending on location, something like Residence Inn varies quite a bit too. In one place it might be a basic family-friendly property while, in another, it may have a cool rooftop bar.

But I guess it works and actually changing branding is expensive and those of us who travel a lot don't really care.

Well the sad chain hotel next to the highway at least doesn't hyper-gentrify the neighbours out.

I agree and had the same experience. The underlying problem are the supply and demand dynamics. Most Airbnb listings I've seen are the equivalent of Youtube clickbait spam or Chinese FBS sellers on Amazon. They are made by "professional Airbnb hosts" who own dozens of properties with nearly-fake pictures and fake reviews who are trying to squeeze the maximum profit out of it without caring about providing a great experience.

The failure of Airbnb is that it incentivizes this business model as opposed to incentivizing great experiences. Similar to how Amazon incentivizes low quality no-name brand products and fake reviews.

It was fine once upon a time when people used it for local accomidation. Now people rent airbnbs for parties, as drunken post-party crashpads, and even when they needed to isolate for covid. The customer base is now equally as shady as the professional airbnb landlords.

For me staying in an airbnb is always so much nicer and more trustworthy I haven't been willing to stay in a hotel in years

This hasn’t been my experience lately. I’ve had worse accommodations for more money, and a list of chores I’m expected to perform for the hosts.

Sounds like a good reason to leave bad reviews

If I'm traveling somewhere, I want to relax, not have to find last minute accommodations due to leaving somewhere because it turns out to be unreasonable. Hotels might be bland, but for the most part you know what you're getting.

Your issue is that Airbnb isn't great for what you describe. Airbnb works best when you need something more or less than just a room to sleep.

For example, I know people who use Airbnb because if they need somewhere cheap to sleep for the night and they don't need a nice hotel room so they're happy to rent a cheap bed at someone's house for the night. The reason I've personally used it before is because I'm staying somewhere (often for an extended period of time) and I want a place with a kitchen or living room.

If what you're looking for is basically a hotel room, then yeah, hotels are going to be better 99% of the time unless you're looking for something a little more novel.

"uniform" is exactly what I hate about hotels. If I never have to stay in a hotel again I will call that suceeding at life.

Stay at better hotels.

The same answer holds true for a lot of complaints people have about airbnbs.

There is no such thing as a better hotel.

There’s literally always a better hotel unless you’re staying in the best hotel of the world.

There's litetally no such thing as a better hotel when the problem is the fundamental nature of hotels. For a hotel to be good, it has to be so different as to no longer be a hotel. The best plate of dogshit in the world is either still terrible because it's still dogshit, or the dogshit has swapped out with other stuff and it's no longer dogshit.

You might try a 4/5 star hotel and then revisit your remarks here

You might try not assuming.

Ok, stay at a 7 Star hotel.

Or Jeff Bezos' yacht, or the moon. This is silly.

I stayed in a 2200sqft new construction luxury condo for the same price as a 450sqft hotel room with one bed last week. Provided not in NYC, but the experience in many markets is one that hotels can’t touch.

Airbnb strayed from its original purpose. It was meant to be a side gig for homeowners to get a bit of extra income when they have to be away. Now it became a full on business with all the auxiliary jobs around it. People make a living by become airbnb cleaner, airbnb property manager, airbnb landlord, airbnb supplier, etc.

For once, scaling up made it more expensive. All these people and jobs want to be paid a living wage. And so costs stack up and it became no better than a hotel. In some cases, worse than hotel because at least a hotel is a mature and professional service. People involved in this airbnb "gig" aren't guaranteed to be.

This article is primarily about AirBNB in NYC, and how they think it’s been “taken down” is a complete mystery to me. Their 12 month revenue reported in June 2023 was $9 Billion, an increase of 23% over 2022. The increase from 2021 to 2022 was over 40%. It’s a service that presents great value in many locations.

I’ve used it to stay everywhere from DC to the Appalachians to the Carribean and it’s been an outstanding experience every time. You just have to know how to filter and choose the right rental. If you’re looking for a hotel in NYC, get a hotel room.

If they just would cap the fees it would be viable. But I’m not paying a $200+ cleaning fee on top of the nightly rate and other fees.

Can't recall cleaning fees higher than $100 over the hundreds of AirBnbs I've looked at (generally studios/1 beds throughout Europe and major US cities which would be seen as hotel competitive units). Was that for a house or something like a luxury 2 bed in NYC?

I've heard this is a major issue but I feel like it's very rare thing, usually it's what I'd expect for having to clean a 500 sqft space. The only time I'm disappointed is say a $50 fee is assessed for use of a bedroom.

I recently was looking at one place and started the process to book it when I realized that the cleaning fee was $279/night and the stated rental rate was $179/night. The cleaning fee was significantly larger than the rental fee!

They don’t charge cleaning fees by the night, nor can you set it up that way when you’re listing your property. It’s one fee for the stay.

You are correct, I amortized the fee to a per-night value, for a long weekend (Friday night until Monday morning). I should have been clearer on that.

If it's just me passing by: hotel. If I'm going somewhere for a few days or with family and friends: AirBnB.

Hotels are "I just want a bed to sleep and get out and about".

AirBnBs are when you need more privacy because of imperfections like kids, or when you'll be somewhere for a while and you need a chill-out place, and you need some more normal house-like amenities.

In recent years my pendulum pushed back toward hotels, from almost exclusively AirBnB, but I still book AirBnBs about 50-70% of the time.

If hotels were to explicitly promise “home-grade” Internet service then they would seal the deal for me.

They’ve improved a lot in recent years but I’d still want to have that explicit guarantee.

I haven't stayed (in Europe) in an Airbnb that didn't have shitty internet.

Nowadays they're all made exclusively as investements, not as people sharing their own apartment anymore, so they get the cheapest connection they can get away with.

> Nowadays they're all made exclusively as investements, not as people sharing their own apartment anymore, so they get the cheapest connection they can get away with.

It is possible to dig deeply when reviewing AirBNBs to see how many units the host has, if they're associated with corporate owners. It takes more time, but it is still possible to find people renting parts of their home like it was originally.

Just got back from Europe where I stayed at 9 AirBnbs. I do Speedtests whenever I get to a new location. Only 2 were not getting at least 10 Mbps, and IIRC 5 got 50+. 3 that I got in France were in shared apartments.

My personal background is that I’ve lived in airbnbs for >3 yrs full time around the pandemic.

Early in my experience, I had the internet crap out at one place and the host wasn’t responsive to fixing it, so I petitioned Airbnb support to cancel my reservation.

They did so on the grounds that I had happened to ask the host about the quality of their WiFi prior to booking and was assured that it would be solid.

Since then, I always make a point to give the host a minor 3rd degree about the WiFi quality prior to booking, and have gone years without major trouble.

Hotel WiFi reliability has improved greatly during that time, but I need some sort of explicit guarantee from them before I would make the transition to more hotel stays.

I couldn't give you an ironclad guarantee at my house. It's almost always quite good but it goes down from time to time. Major hotel chains are pretty good these days (generally). B&B's/small inns are pretty hit or miss.

I understand. I did stay in one place where a bulldozer dug a trench and broke the line to the place. It was repaired in a day, and I just rolled with as something that happens in life.

Rather than an ironclad guarantee that the internet will 100% stay functional, more precisely what I want is a guarantee that the host will be approximately as responsive to outages as I myself would be were it my own internet at my own home, which is the best that anyone can realistically do.

I suppose if someone’s internet went down for weeks I might have to opt out of the reservation, which isn’t totally fair to the host if it’s not their fault and it’s beyond their control.

But also that has never happened, and it similarly wouldn’t be totally fair to me if the internet were to go down at my own home and I had to rent a coworking space for an extended period.

> The share of Black residents dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent; the share of white residents increased from 15 percent to 33 percent. The neighborhood became less socioeconomically diverse

Doesn't this mean the neighbourhood became more socioeconomically diverse? In the US especially, socioeconomics are often tied to race, and the dominant race reduced by 20%, a minority race increased by 18%, and I assume another race increased by 2%.

Airbnb was so good and I don't want to mention the year because I will get it wrong. I went with my friend that year for literally hardly any money and we seen 8 European countries. It wasn't just Airbnb but Wimdu (We are UK).

In the space of a year, prices doubled, and then there was fees not included in the price so when I accepted those prices and fees and went to book, there was more fees under the "checkout" section.

That might have been 7 years ago when good quality hotels were parity to the final price. Obviously I haven't been back on any of these since but it was definitely amazing at one point.

Airbnb was awesome for several years and then it just became shit. I guess they make more money, somehow, by being shit, but I wish people would care about something other than making money and becoming shit.

Having used airbnb in multiple countries I have never seen the appeal over hotels, except for location/neighborhoods.

I also don’t understand the appeal of Kardashians

- They’re amazing for traveling with kids.

- and for working vacations (yay, remote work) with kids.

- They’re great in areas poorly-served by hotels.

- They often let you stay directly in or at least much closer to nice places than hotels do. Have coffee on the deck among the trees, smelling the pines and listening to the birds, and feel the mountain breeze as you wake up, versus continental breakfast among the sights and smells of a typical dreary hotel, then driving 20 minutes to reach the mountains. That kind of thing.

- If you’re looking to move, they let you sample living in various parts of a city or in several towns in a way that hotels very much do not.

Having used many of both hotels and airbnbs (or vrbo these days) I don't understand why anyone would ever prefer a hotel given any choice. I mean if I were to guess at a reason it would not be flattering, like people who actually like cruises.

And I also do not understand the appeal of the Kardashians, and so that was a strange thing to try to equate.

IMO there's appeal to both. I just got back from Europe for the summer. About half the places I stayed were AirBnbs, the other times hotels or shared living communities (ie. Outsite in Lisbon, CityHub Amsterdam).

In some cases the AirBnbs got me a much better location at a reasonable price. Vienna and Paris in particular. But then places like Prague and Berlin had more reasonable and central options w/ hotels (both 25 hours Bikini Berlin and Numa Prague were incredible experiences).

Because when I'm traveling in a lot of cities I value predictability over a potentially better (or worse) experience. My lodging isn't usually the experience I'm going for. It's something about the location. So I often book the lodging that provides me with a decent place to stay without unpredictable downsides. (I've used AirBnB--rarely--but generally go for boring business-class hotels.)

You can't see the appeal in some circumstances for a house/apartment vs a hotel room?

I never understood why, but in Zürich I can always Airbnb some kind of palace for the same or usually much lower rate than my corporate hotel cap, which is ~$400/night.

Why do people always discuss AirBnB v hotels, rather than AirBnB v real B&Bs? Is that not a better comparison?

NYC has applied draconian rules on tenancies, and crazy restrictions on hotel construction. These units are not coming back, because the owners risk losing too much money. We'll just have knockoff Airbnb copies which will be worse for both sides

Is there any evidence that it has been "taken down". It's its own industry. Hotels with their tiny rooms, shitty appliances, nickle and diming every part of the experience (e.g.:minibars, wifi,tv) and having to interact with staff (good and bad) are not worth it. Plus you can find airbnb close to any destination, you don't have to plan around hotel locations. Vrbo was already there before airbnb i think.

The experience is not that bad except when you inevitably get a shit!y renter but that's on the renter.

I feel like it is only people who were satisfied by hotels, taxis, cable companies for whatever reason that keep expecting/hoping airbnb,uber,neflix and the like to go under. If anything, I fully support tax payer money bailing out these companies instead of banks or subsidizing them instead if oil companies. Their value to the average person's quality of life is immense.

Who cares? Stop posting articles about this corrupt company that takes advantage of travelers at every chance, robbing them of money and potentially putting them in harms way.

It's a middleman that needs to go extinct.

Paywall, go to https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...

Greed!

Government.

The most fascinating thing about the “takedown of Airbnb” is how disconnected this narrative is from reality.

This one article is mostly about NYC (and forward looking) but it’s part of a larger tapestry of “Airbnb is dead”, “nobody uses Airbnb anymore” articles and social content (particularly on TikTok) that might lead you to think Airbnb and its hosts are in freefall.

The problem is that the reality looks to be totally different. Airbnb keeps putting up record quarters, and while the economics are changing for hosts (many markets are definitely becoming saturated) the platform and the model appear to not have actually lost much if any strength over the 12-18 months that this has been a popular narrative.

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