Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras

theverge.com

341 pointsmatbilodeau505 comments

In my experience Airbnb isn’t even cheaper, just has more “interesting” housing available.

Back to the topic - removing listings isn’t a sufficient enough punishment imho. And how would you even prove it from the guests side? Take a picture I suppose? But how do you stop bad actors?

Not sure what the correct solution is. Someone who wants to spy can purchase a spy camera which is very abundant these days.

AirBNB "when it started" was quite likely to find you quirky and cheap options.

Now it's commoditized and a business, and the quirky and cheap options are few and far between.

Part of the degradation is both the company, the sellers, and the buyers - back in the very beginning it wasn't well known and most of the customers were well behaved - I'm not sure that's entirely the case now, as the customer base has grown.

I'm a digital nomad.

One luggage, no permanent home, been fifteen years.

I used to use AirBnB all the time.

They gradually become more and more, well, "large company".

Governments gradually made AirBnB illegal or effectively illegal, largely or wholly killing off AirBnB in given cities, or countries.

For example, it used to be about impossible to get into Amsterdam, because of rent control and renting regulations; no supply of places to let. Then AirBnB came along, and everyone and their dog let places on AirBnB. You could get in, and at a good price. Then AirBnB was essentially banned, and now you can't get into Amsterdam.

It was always that there were a lot of people offering places who didn't know how to price what they had; so you'd see a lot of properties, but a lot were crazy money. Still, if there were enough, there would be enough places at sane prices you'd get somewhere.

These days, I still look at AirBnB, but I see that their fees have continually risen over time, and are now like 10% or 15%, and there's just no content. I was in Paris last couple of months. There was nothing viable on AirBnB, unless you wanted to pay several thousand a month. There was one what I concluded was a scam, a very dodgy letting agency, who had lots of apartments, all with no ratings, but very bad reviews on-line. I think they were continually deleting and remaking their lets on AirBnB, to get rid of negative reviews.

Finally, AirBnB itself, regarding "large company", became unreliable as a service, in that I never knew, when I came to us it, if log-in would still work.

I recall the first time log-in failed for no obvious reason, and the and the only option was "email support and we'll contact you in a few days" - and I was looking to move in about two weeks time.

After that, I put up my own HTTPS proxy, which I now use whenever I use AirBnB, to avoid AirBnB suspending my account for a few days, until support get back to me.

I also recall one episode about ten years ago where I had to phone support. It was a three hour long screaming nightmare of hell and madness.

So - fees are now rather high, support don't bother - anything but support - I had to backdoor my own net traffic to use the service, no viable apartments in most locations.

It was great, but now it's really not.

The one and critical thing AirBnB got right was building into their platform the expectation owners would offer discounts for stays over a week, or over a month.

I don't see this on other platforms, and it makes pricing on other platforms crazy. If I come and stay for three months, I expect a discount for giving full occupancy over that time. If you don't offer that, you're off the menu.

All of the above makes total sense (to me) when you realize that people don't know how to price rentals at all - just like the average person doesn't know how to price restaurant food.

When you know truly how to price (and cost!) something, you know when and where you can offer discounts. If cost to acquire a tenant is $2k, then the discount to preserve a good tenant should be about $2k per tenant turnover time.

> people don't know how to price rentals

And "helping" them is a lawsuit magnet: Big landlords are colluding to raise rents, D.C. lawsuit alleges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38155840

If I had a group of graduate students at my beck and call I'd love to try to factor out what effect single-family rentals have had on the rental market in toto - because once you remove appreciation, they're often losing money each month, which means they're subsidizing the renters (and willing to do so because they're making it up on highly-leveraged appreciation).

Why would the math be different for apartment buildings? They also appreciate and they usually have better accountants to make sure no money is left on the table if it's available.

Apartment buildings get handled in a business-like manner, but are also apartments (which have downsides for the renters).

My theory is that single family homes get rented below what it costs to rent them and the landlords make it up via appreciation.

It's pretty obvious that there are places like this, where the rental prices are substantially below 1% of the purchase price (one of the "rule of thumbs").

I think it’s safe to call this a fact in markets like the Bay Area.

In college three friends and I rented a 1000sqft 2 bed 2 bath apartment with one parking spot for $X, then the next year a 2000sqft 4 bed 4 bath 2 car garage for $1.15X. Per zillow, the owner was renting it to us for 0.3% of the purchase price. The only way for them not to be losing their shirt is crazy appreciation.

> because once you remove appreciation, they're often losing money each month

I'm curious if you have a source for this? Intuitively, it makes sense, but I haven't actually seen any figures that support this. Although my guess is that data would be hard to come by.

The lawsuit is about helping them using non-public data from other companies. Nothing stops the platform from making all the rental data public and giving the same recommendations.

> the average person doesn't know how to price restaurant food

Could you be more specific?

"It would cost less for me to buy the groceries and make this at home".

Not that I always could or would care to go to the effort for a fancy meal, but in general it's going to be a lot cheaper to prepare most meals at home. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

Of course it'll be cheaper to make most meals yourself. Especially since the imagined price doesn't tend to include rent, kitchen labor, service staff labor, or depreciating costs of kitchen appliances, which all go into the price of restaurant meals.

I'm living in a house anyway. I'm not paying myself. Appliances last decades. It would cost me money to drive to a restaurant. With rare exceptions (e.g. high end kitchen you don't use much and eating out really cheaply) there's no world where the costs of preparing meals at home are higher than eating out every meal.

The point is that many people expect them to be priced similarly because they think of the ingredients as the main costs (because those are the only costs they actually see when cooking for themselves), which they are not.

I'm not sure many people actually think that restaurants are or should be as cheap as eating at home except maybe some fast food loss leaders.

When going to a restaurant you should include transport costs and time wasted with transport and waiting. Cooking at home can be an efficient pipeline where you have full control of inputs while saving money and time. I was frustrated because I wanted to pay for convenience but in my case I found it to be non-convenient.

Perhaps it's a bit pedantic, but that seems less like pricing restaurant food and more like pricing food in general, which is totally valid if you're on a fixed budget and considering how much to spend for food.

I think they're referring to estimating what restaurant food "should" cost, based on what it is. Rule of thumb I heard years ago was aiming to sell for about 3x what your ingredients cost you plus tax, but that may have increased since.

You should raise prices until you are not quite sold out. If you are at max capacity, you are by definition not charging enough.

There's a lot more to it than that.

Such an approach can give you a long-term unsustainable clientele.

Such an approach can lose you the marketing cachet of being sold out for months.

etc.

Almost no restaurant is ever sold out.

At peak times. There's a reason lots of restaurants have happy hours and lunch specials. And a weekday night tends to be less in demand than a Friday or Saturday.

Almost like Uber was marketed, AirBnB was not initially sold as a "make primary income off this". It was a way for people with excess assets (spare car and some time, spare room in a big house, etc) to make some money and the companies were the broker.

Turning Airbnb into a full-blown rental market with people and LLCs buying houses just for AirBnB was the downfall. At least, that's my interpretation.

I think Paris tried to curb this buy allowing Airbnb, but you can only rent out max 50% of the year. This makes it so local owners can make some money, but corporations wouldn't be able to get the yield they need at 50% occupancy.

And did it work?

I ask because corporates usually figure out how to use the rules to their advantage and I am now trying to sniff through how they would play this.

Yeah, doesn't this just end up increasing short term rental prices across the board? It's not like there is a shortage of demand for lodging in Paris.

Can I buy a property, rent it out for six months, then re-sell it to this other, totally independent corporation I own?

This seems both obvious and difficult to prevent.

Usually there are large and unavoidable transaction costs involved in selling/buying properties. It's a liquidity event on a large amount of capital so it's pretty much inevitable that government want to get involved with taxes, duties, fees etc.

You got it the wrong way around. The goal for both was to offer full time incomes and compete with taxis/hotels.

The “offer a spare room” and “pick up someone going the same way as you” narratives were about skirting regulations.

There's a great meme image I refer to all the time for people pricing their stuff on the Internet:

https://imgflip.com/i/8j0n0r

I'm on one collector group on Facebook and people come and list their items for thousands of dollars even though the average price on eBay is about $1. You'll point them to the sold items and they will say "OK, I see that, but I really think you are wrong and mine is worth $6500 + shipping, and also you are very rude telling me my price is wrong."

What have you been using in place of AirBnB?

Not parent, but bluegrounds and regular apartment hotels.

I think it’s a good thing that laws are being passed to make it mostly impossible for AirBnbs to be in residential areas and to make it easier for residents to find affordable houses instead of tourists

I don't trust the laws. I think they're either implemented on behalf of the hotel chains, or else they only entrench people who already got "permits" for short term rentals, which now become basically golden tickets. I seriously doubt we'll see rents drop significantly anywhere.

And that’s how it should be - a hotel is a business in a commercial zone with professional management, pays taxes and doesn’t negatively affect home affordability

And why shouldn't I be able to rent out my apartment for a week if I go on vacation?

This was supposed to be the intent of Airbnb and is still a valuable resource if available.

Why shouldn't your neighbors be able to use their powers as voters to lobby their government to pass laws preventing their quiet suburban street from being used as a distributed hotel?

This. I hate staying in hotels and love varied and individual places like airbnb has, but this is simply valid.

As a consumer, it has to be good enough if there are only some areas where it's allowed, and some where it's not. Or maybe allowed but only up to a certain density or percentage.

Anywhere it would be allowed without limit I would probably not want anyway, just like a hotel. Most airbnbs are run like little hotels now anyway and I hate most of those, but at least there is variety and plenty are good still.

Your framing is such a good defense of the arbitrary and thoughtless use and abuse of political power. "Use your power as a voter", what could go wrong?

Why shouldn't our neighbors use their powers as voters to keep their peaceful suburban street from being used as housing for migrants, minorities and other undesirables? I'd bet that'll affect housing desirability far more than short term rentals.

Why shouldn't they use their power as voters to ban the construction of affordable homes in their vicinity?

Why shouldn't we use our power as voters to proscribe alcohol in their town? What could go wrong?

Your power as a voter isn't supposed to be the power to arbitrary meddle in other people's business.

What do you think a community is if not a group of people who decide on a common way to share resources and build harmony?

Yes, all of those should be legal. And other voters can oppose them. For example, by electing national politicians who can pass laws like the Civil Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act.

So, you think there is an equivalence between migrants and minorities who are long term renters who had to pay a deposit, got a background check and credit check compared to short term Airbnb “guests”?

Are you okay with a meat packing plant in your neighborhood?

I think the idea is that your neighbors didn't sign up to live next to total randos. How valid that argument is is up for debate.

And it's not like you can't still rent out to friends or the like. Just totally financializing and anonymizing that interaction turns it into a different sort of interaction. Social trust is a thing, and avoiding having _every single human interaction_ pass through some broker and be financialized is not the worst.

But really... a touch of social proof never hurts.

Because contrary to what tourists think Amsterdam is not a theme park. Normal people live and work there.

When tourists come home drunk at four in the morning they wake up families who have to get up at 7 to go to work and school. There is a reason why we seperate tourists in hotels.

AIRBNB stopped catering to digital nomads and went straight into the hotel business.

So should I be able to build a butcher shop right by your apartment and let you deal with the smell?

There are zoning laws for a reasons.

Do you own “your” apartment?

I’m asking because some places consider it an “apartment” if it’s a rental and a “condo” if they are individual buyers and other countries call it an apartment regardless

It'd be better if there was enough housing to support normal residential uses AND Airbnb, but it's easier to just blame Airbnb for problems.

Or you know, if you want short term rentals for tourists - build more hotels in commercial districts that are professionally managed.

Vacation homes are a somewhat different kind of thing. In practice, hotels don't support the same use cases or charge exorbitant rates to do so.

It’s amazing how much more it costs to be a legally run, commercial short term rental that is professionally managed , follows all regulations and pays the legally required taxes isn’t it?

BTW, I live in (and own) a vacation home almost permanently - a condotel - that meets all of the above requirements.

In fact we can’t live here more than 179 consecutively without leaving for some time and renting it out to follow the law.

I knew what I signed up for and we made that choice. It would be completely different when we bought our house in the burbs that was zoned “residential”

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp

I may be wrong, but I think the real solution is to increase supply, not constrain demand.

Indeed, constraining demand acts to constrain a factor which acts to encourage supply.

In a tourist spot, long term renters are going to be paying less per month than short term tourist.

I don’t know anyone who would want a bunch of Airbnbs intermixed with their residential areas

Why are residents more deserving than tourists?

Really? Because people need a place to live. If you haven’t seen it yourself, there is a worldwide epidemic of people who are addicted to needing shelter for survival.

Tourist can go to these things called “hotels”

Silicon Valley Moment

> The one and critical thing AirBnB got right was building into their platform the expectation owners would offer discounts for stays over a week, or over a month.

I'm also a digital nomad. new country every 1-3 months and I completely agree. I'd love to find an alternative but the one month discount is critical for keeping my costs fairly low. booking doesn't even allow you to book over 30 days.

I think a lot of landlords are worried about letting anyone stay more than 30 days. That's usually when tenant's rights kick in and removing someone becomes a complicated process with housing court and potentially months without rent.

Actually Booking has been allowing reservations longer than 30 days for a few years now.

Perhaps accommodations in your destinations that are on Booking don't have availability for the whole duration you're searching for?

> For example, it used to be about impossible to get into Amsterdam, because of rent control and renting regulations; no supply of places to let. Then AirBnB came along, and everyone and their dog let places on AirBnB. You could get in, and at a good price. Then AirBnB was essentially banned, and now you can't get into Amsterdam.

Slightly off topic, and not aimed at you in particular but at tourists in general: For the love of god visit other cities than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is expensive and overcrowded. There's a whole country worth of interesting places to visit instead.

Will you say the same for Paris, London, Rome, Milan, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Hongkong, Singapore, and Seoul? All of those cities (and more!) fit this template: "X is expensive and overcrowded." Yeah, and they have lots of interesting culture so people want to visit. They are willing to pay the high prices and put up with crowds.

Beat on Instagram influencers all you like but popular cities tend to be popular for good reasons. I might go meh to a few cities on that list but quite a few of them would be high on my visit again list.

That is exactly my point. The OP read like a moaning Amsterdammer. I see it a lot: residents of that city complaining about the tourist crowds. I think a better idea would be a very high tourist tax -- like 100 EUR per day charged via hotels etc. (Business travelers would be exempt.) Then, you can exclude all of the low end tourists that few people want in their crowded cities -- they can enjoy second tier cities, or day trips from a nearby city. I cannot find it now, but there is a group of small Italian seaside villages that implemented something similar to limit the number of tourists. My point: Go for quality of visitors, not quantity. The tourist tax can be used to improve tourist infrastructure.

I'm not sure how you distinguish business travelers from tourists. I'm usually a bit of each.

Then don't distinguish. Both pay the same. The goal here is not to increase the cost of doing non-tourism business in your city. Another idea: Allow people travelling on business to apply for a refund. Example: It seems weird to charge a salesperson going to see their client. Business people use city resources and infrastructure in a vastly different way. For example: They don't use (limited) cultural resources in the same way.

That's a terrible idea. Why the insinuation that only very rich visitors are "high-quality", and that "low-end" tourists are icky and undesirable?

I'm a university student, and I enjoy traveling by myself, as long as I can do it on a reasonable budget. In North American cities (and in plenty of other countries), I pretty much blend in with the crowd, am not loud, annoying or obtrusive. What exact quality is imbued into someone who's willing to throw away EUR100/day that everyone else doesn't have? Doing this in large, world-class cities would turn any major destination into VIP hangout clubs for rich people. Not to mention that it's probably flawed financially - even if tiny towns that are over-capacity with tourists might be able to justify it, enormous cities will be forcing their businesses to lose money. Fewer people would travel to the city on account on it being too expensive, and the people who do travel would spend less money since they're paying the tax.

> The OP read like a moaning Amsterdammer.

I'm very glad I don't live in Amsterdam, commuting there is bad enough. I'm actually trying to convince people to visit, among other places, the city I live in. Spreading the tourists around more will make everyone happier. Including the tourists.

    > commuting there is bad enough

I never once heard that about Amsterdam. The YouTube channel NotJustBikes goes on and on about how amazing is the bicycle infra in Amsterdam (and other cities in the Netherlands). Can you be more specific?

Oh don't get me wrong, the infrastructure is amazing! Commuting to Amsterdam is mostly just bad compared to commuting to other well-connected places. There's only so many times you can get stuck behind a group of tourists blocking all the check-out gates simultaneously for 10s of minutes on end before it gets on your nerves.

> Will you say the same for Paris, London, Rome, Milan, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Hongkong, Singapore, and Seoul?

Yes

I've got no first hand experience of those cities, so no I won't.

The point I'm trying to make with Amsterdam is that it's really nothing special when compared to a bunch of other nearby cities. Sure if you want to visit the Anne Frank house you need to go to Amsterdam and stand in a long line. If, however, you are more interested in the culture of the country you can find that nearly anywhere. Pretty much any city of reasonable size will have a FEBO and a pancake restaurant and a couple of neat museums. No need to queue for those, and yet people DO queue for those in Amsterdam for some reason.

> now you can't get into Amsterdam.

On the plus side, locals can still find somewhere to rent, and Amsterdam hasn't turned into a theme park.

I mean this is the zeitgeist for AirBnb, the first word of the SNL sketch is BLAND.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5E5DkBXyfw

> most of the customers were well behaved

...because back then they were dealing with a single homeowner, where there was a certain level of mutual respect.

Once "Airbnb host" became synonymous with party houses, cleaning fees and multi-unit short term rental empires, that changed.

"In my experience Airbnb isn’t even cheaper, just has more “interesting” housing available."

I still, can not wrap my head around this. The idea behind airbnb was to rent out unused parts of your house. You STILL can not do this. Motel 6 is cheaper all day everyday. I will keep giving my $80 to Motel 6, but, I KNOW there is someone out there that has a room and needs $80. The original problem still exists. I can't pay $120 + $30 in cleaning fees, plus do your house chores Sarah.

My suspicion is those cheap single rooms were never worth it for the hosts once you consider the long tail of things that can go wrong.

One bad guest who upsets the other residents and leaves the property in bad condition will sap your earnings and throw off your life. Airbnb might eventually reimburse you for damage, but there’s still your time and aggravation.

Also any household maintenance issue, like an internet outage or finicky toilet or a microwave on the fritz becomes an emergency if it’s an amenity you promised to a guest. Even realizing the guest towels are getting a little worn might be a cause for panic. Motel 6 has a handyman on call, maybe the owner or a relative, and can take a room out of rotation if they’re not booked solid, but Joe Airbnb is stuck begging a plumber to come out on short notice or rushing to Target before check in time.

> My suspicion is those cheap single rooms were never worth it for the hosts once you consider the long tail of things that can go wrong.

They stay too long, and now they're a tenant rather than a guest - and you can't evict them.

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/airbnb-tenant-squatter...

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/805

I suspect that people in general are very bad about factoring in fully amortized costs--especially for expensive things that may be unpredictable and likely only happen once in a great while.

I was having a discussion not that long ago about how a house that's paid off actually costs a lot of money.

> The idea behind airbnb was to rent out unused parts of your house.

Airbnb raised rents to to point where either people have no space or those spare rooms are filled with longish-term tenants, at lower void rates. Or their children had to move back in because all the inner city housing is now AirBnbs.

Is it so surprising that Motel 6 is more operationally efficient? That Sarah needs more money than Motel 6 to allow a unknown stranger into her living space and to clean up after them, rather than a gigantic hotel chain with decades of experience and thousands of locations?

This changes when travelling with kids.

> In my experience Airbnb isn’t even cheaper, just has more “interesting” housing available.

I think it depends. For relatively short stays of one or two people, a hotel is nearly always a better deal in my opinion (for short stays the cleaning fee alone can be a big percentage of the total price).

But for week or longer stays with a family or larger, they usually come out ahead given multiple bedrooms and the fact that the cleaning fee is amortized over more nights (not to mention access to a kitchen can save a ton of money). In this segment, though, they're really no different from VRBO or a host of other vacation rental providers that have been around for a long time.

The whole house thing for a group is where I see Airbnb (or VRBO) etc. being a big win over most hotel options.

But for most singles or couples traveling, predictability and lack of issues is pretty much the priority. That's not to say I only stay in chain hotels--I've stayed in plenty of B&Bs and small inns--but I don't like rolling the dice on that aspect of my travel more than I need to.

Absolutely. Most of the Airbnb/VRBO that we’ve done was to accommodate 12-15 people including 5-7 children. Only other time I do Airbnb is for specialty situations like a beach house where we can have a big patio with a grill etc.

Myself, wife, and most of both of our whole families find all hotels lifeless and impersonal and uninteresting. Sure nice ones are nicer than bad ones, and it's fun to do that once in a while just as an experience, but generally the nicest hotel with impeccable staff isn't prefferable to a cozy appartment even if it has a few problems.

The dice roll is way better. Even the bad ones once in a while are at least different and fun to mock.

It's funny how almost the whole families have the same gut response to stuff like that. Look at something and what is the most immediate natural reaction to an idea or the look of a thing. And some other family might all have the same some other natural reaction.

Like one person finds gold attractive and another finds it gawdy, and so do their whole family & friends groups.

For me, hotels are only good for work. That's the only time the predictability matters. I avoid scheduling as much as possible on vacation. There are events of course but I don't try to tetris pack the days.

But for a few days or a week at a customer, then a hotel just something I need like a highway rest stop bathroom.

It’s much cheaper for larger spaces. If you want a 2 bedroom living space Airbnb is probably 3-4x less than a hotel.

It's not about the price. Hotel suites with multiple bedrooms are extremely hard to find or cater more to the super luxury segment.

Unless somebody is making serious efforts and running hidden data wires, spy cams are pretty easy to find by the average nerd equipped with a cheapish spectrum analyzer by their RF signature.

Are they? Many are wifi connected, but record onto an sd card, which means they shouldn't be easily detectable, except when accessed, right?

Even if they are not sending data, there will be periodic communication between the access point and the device. Wifi power saving modes are pretty advanced and described here: https://howiwifi.com/2020/06/25/power-save-methods/.

Airbnb has a normal fridge, a microwave, a washing machine, a dishwasher and 700-100 sq ft area. A similarly priced hotel room will have 250 sq ft area and none of the above amenities.

Suite hotels have all that except maybe the washing machine and are often pretty comparable in price to "regular" hotel rooms. Those tend to be my preference although I use the refrigerator more than the rest of the kitchen.

> Suite hotels have all that except maybe the washing machine and are often pretty comparable in price to "regular" hotel rooms.

I have not found this to be the case at all. Getting a suite with a kitchen usually involves paying a large premium to a regular hotel room.

They don't mean upgrading to a suite at a "regular" hotel; there are chains specializing in renting out "home-style" rooms ("extended-stay" is the industry term, I believe), and I've seen them referred to suite hotels sometimes.

The biggest chains have these sub-brands in the space, based off three minutes of googling/wikiing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residence_Inn_by_Marriott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staybridge_Suites

https://www.hyatt.com/development/ourbrands/hyatthouse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homewood_Suites_by_Hilton

I never stayed at one, so can't comment how accurate the OP was re/price.

I was thinking of those options too. I do tend to look for them when I'm searching for hotel rooms.

Right. Residence Inn is one of my goto brands. Not always certainly but I tend to be staying at mid-rangeish hotels anyway and Residence is usually in that band, especially outside of downtowns.

I've never seen an extended-stay hotel in a neighborhood that I would visit for leisure. They're usually in pretty ugly, utilitarian spots - off a cloverleaf or behind a strip mall - serving business travelers.

I don't know how you would easily book them if you're not in the system, but what you're describing is a timeshare rental - suite rooms in resort-like environments.

That's probably true in the US; much less so in Asia or places with good public transit.

There's a Hyatt House I pass by sometimes right next to the Shibuya crossing; though I'm guessing that one definitely does not have the price advantage.

I literally stayed in hotels from October 2022 - October 2023 permanently with my wife except for two months between January and February last year as we flew around the country. We generally stayed in Homewood Suites, Home2Suites, Embassy Suites and Hyatt Places.

Most Hyatt Places didn’t have washer and dryers onsite. We had to either Uber to take our clothes or use a wash and fold delivery service.

The rest of the places did.

The rooms are usually around 400 square feet.

Homewood Suites and Home2Suites have dishwashers and full refrigerators. Home2Suites you have to ask for a “burner”

This all depends on the AirBnB. I stayed in one in Tokyo that had a kitchen and washing machine, but no TV. I had never stayed anywhere without a TV before (hotel or AirBnB), so I suppose it’s my fault for assuming it would have on. I was very disappointed, as I was planning to watch at least some Japanese TV in the evenings and instead just had to watch whatever was on my iPad. With a hotel, especially bigger chains, there are certain things a person can count on. With AirBnB I feel like I need to be a detective and keep a list of all my requirements, even ones I thought were default standards.

Also, at the Tokyo AirBnB, once I got there I found a sign in the bathroom that essentially told me AirBnB wasn’t allowed in the building, so if anyone asked who I was, I had to lie and give the prepared backstory. I’ve never had to lie to skirt the law/rules when staying at a hotel.

My next trip I’m staying in a hotel, and it has a kitchen as well (with a sink and range), so I can go to the store and prepare food if I want. It’s not 1,000sqft, but how much space do I really need for a couple weeks? My goal is to get out and do things, not stay inside the whole time. I’ve also had many hotels with a fridge and a microwave. The fridge might not be full size, but again, for a week or two, how much space does a person really need?

> In my experience Airbnb isn’t even cheaper, just has more “interesting” housing available.

For me it has absolutely nothing to do with being cheaper, but simply hotels generally don't cater for families. I have an under 10, and either I go to bed by 9 because that's when they want to go to bed, or I make the stay up and we all have a really shitty time as they are too exhausted to enjoy it.

Two rooms with an adjoining door would work, but most hotels don't have this. AirBNB is simply the only option.

Likewise. It's also really useful having some self-catering facilities with children and other self-catering options are often unavailable totally or only in week blocks outside Airbnb in many places. Plus the cost is often the same or less than two hotel rooms.

Convenience, for me. A flat is better than two rooms when travelling with my son and my girlfriend, for example. For families it has plenty of upsides in places where family rooms or suites are hard to come by.

I find it sad how Airbnb has taken a market that worked (in many places) and re introduced all the problems that have been resolved through decades of regulations being put in place for hotels etc.

Chances of finding a camera in a hotel room are near zero while at Airbnb you have no idea what kind of pervert the renter is. At this point prices for Airbnb have rissen so high why not get a hotel?

It's like we don't learn at all from history or just like to forget so we can make an extra buck.

Most people these days get a hotel anyways.

Also I only took a airbnb once in my life.

Anybody who takes airbnbs regularly has for sure slept on somebody else's dried body fluids.

I'd wager the chance is higher in a hotel.

Source: worked at a hotel.

Well, maybe. Hotels are big (so they definitely capture a big chunk of the tourists), but in big dense cities building hotels is a lot harder than spinning up apartments for booking/airbnb.

And. I guess I'm not alone in preferring apartments. (And nowadays with lockboxes and WhatsApp-savvy rentors/lessors the lack of a reception desk is not a problem.)

Sounds like an ad from the Hotel lobby.

People should still be able to rent out their homes if they want.

This sounds like a lot of tech companies that look to shake up an old industry. They say they’re starting from first principles and try to reinvent every wheel. It usually ends up meaning pain for the customers as they rediscover why the old players in the industry do things the way they do them, and then act like they discovered something new.

I feel like this is a trend, and it comes in cycles. People do business directly, end up fucking each other over, regulation is desired. Such regulation is moat, it benefits larger players, so business concentrates. While this enables things like standards, it also becomes soulless and expensive, and people began to feel that business needs to be more direct. So, with technology, a new alternative is unlocked, people deal with each other again, discover the same outcomes. A case of history repeating itself, well, at least if you look from far enough.

Same happened with crypto, I feel, vs banks and stocks. The latter is regulated and saturated, and crypto is a wild west. So every scam is new again.

>find it sad how Airbnb has taken a market that worked

Houses and apartments come with kitchens and back yards and balconies. Even in 2024, hotel rooms are miniscule and that stupid fridge is, at worst filled with 20 dollar boxes of cookies and liquor samples, and at best too small to fit a large bottle of water in.

I've grown to dislike Airbnb as a customer, but what you said is one-sided, and dismisses the disruption of the hotel model in a digital nomad age.

Houses and apartments come with a very mixed bag of amenities. You can research to a certain degree but...

I've actually be thinking about Airbnb for a fairly extended stay at one point. On the one hand, it seems like the right solution. On the other hand, it's a big commitment for essentially an unknown quantity.

It doesn't help that the reviews are edited and removed when negative.

I was amazed at the type of motel I stayed in back in 2008 when I went to Canada. Kitchens and balconies or decks. Pretty much unknown in the U.K.

Of course I’d had plenty of experience of self catered accommodation on holiday - sometimes purpose built but mostly normal cottages that were simply rented out.

Airbnb and similar systems just reduced the friction of finding and transacting self catered accommodation, and the increasing trend for city breaks delivered a growing market.

Next they need to ban giving my personal info to 3rd party services.

It's becoming common now to upload guests' personal info into cloud property management systems, and set up things like wifi with services that offer a discount if you provide guest info. It's gross and when I complain about it to AirBnB they do nothing.

I've seen this before too. Clearly shady.

I went to an Airbnb where the host had a ledger of all the previous guests that had stayed, with their personal information and their passport number. And it was left in the apartment for you to sign, so I had access to the passport number of literally hundreds of people from all over the world.

And it wasn't a mistake as the host asked you to sign the ledger when you arrived.

In some countries, maintaining such a ledger is actually required by law.

I think the parent poster is more concerned with the fact that the ledger was available for guests to read.

As usual with tech companies, you are also the product...

> they need to ban giving my personal info to 3rd party services.

The GDPR makes this illegal.

In fact, unnecessary personal information is now a liability, not an asset. Thankfully.

I feel like a grumpy old guy every time I read about AirbedAndBreakfast, because that is how it was initially pitched on this site. If people would just keep thinking of it as a way to get an airbed and sleep on someone’s floor, they would have appropriate expectations.

I’ve never used the service, because I prefer real beds cleaned as required by the local health department.

Buried in the sea of vacation-style rentals filled with thrift-store decor, there are still a few gems on the site that follow the spirit of that initial pitch. While they don't usually have actual airbeds, they're often cleaner than even a nice hotel, because nobody cares about a property more than an owner-occupant.

I'm worried this ban will only affect honest hosts.

Anyway, what Airbnb should really ban is hosts charging a mandatory cleaning fee when also requiring their guests to do the cleaning.

We just stayed at one this weekend, and like almost all our previous bookings, the host asked us to:

- Take off all bedding and towels and start a load of laundry

- Do all the dishes and start the dishwasher (but required to hand-wash some items)

- Collect and take out all the trash to the curb

- Clean the grill/stove/oven

And we still had to pay a $200 cleaning fee when booking the place. A hotel would never require this of us or charge us extra.

It's hard to gauge cleaning effort: if a guest uses every dish in the kitchen without doing a wash up, they cleaning crew could be there for hours.

But if a guest is tidy, then the cleaning fee should be nothing.

The hard part is that you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.

Any service that's so pedantic about cleaning isn't a service that most customers would want to use. Airbnb is trying to have it's cake and eat it too putting the responsibility on "hosts" to be the bad guys. It's just lazy and callous to not have strict bounds of responsibilities customers are expected to engage with.

And that’s reason #13563 I would never do an AirBnb and we just stayed in hotels during our year of “nomadding”.

Good for you. We never used it in 10 years of nomadding. However, we did abuse it constantly by contacting hosts and then cancelling the request and paying them cash rent at a negotiated price for a month or two. Idk how well that would work anymore.

It depends on the host. If the host is a "real person" (for a lack of a better word) then it works. If they have a bunch of properties and outsourced it to an agency or something, it won't work.

Unfortunately the latter is becoming increasingly popular and harder and harder to avoid. I usually try to book places where it's a large house and they rent out the top floor or something.

That way if there are any problems, the owner is right there to help and it's easier to negotiate the cash deals.

you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.

Yet hotels manage this fine - it's just baked into the price.

I don't have a problem paying a cleaning fee. I just don't want to pay the fee AND be required to do 90% of the cleaning myself.

I'm happy to put the dishes in and then start the dishwasher. I'm not going to wait around for it to finish and then put them away. I'm happy to pile the used towels and bedding in a single spot, but I'm not going to do the laundry. I'll pick up any trash and wipe down the kitchen, but I'm not going to take out the trash or do a deep clean of the kitchen. Etc.

My wife and I have an airbnb and this is exactly how we structure our check-out. It still costs $250 per turnover for a reliable cleaning crew to come and clean the 3br, 3ba two level house.

that number is almost useless without context .. a dozen things factor into that, and the incentives, local labor market etc

Sure, and so is the $200 number in the first-level parent comment.

$250 sounds like a lot of cleaning, multiple hours of cleaning by one person for sure, of course depending on your location. But that really gotta be some mansion or your customers are really the absolute worst if that's always required. Meanwhile my friend who does this stuff changes the sheets and towels and wipes the tables together with some light vacuuming and that's basically it, only a few times per year he does a more thorough cleaning. And he does it by himself since he has reasoned that he wants to check the apartment personally every time it's used anyway and he can carry those operations at the same time since it takes something like half an hour to do so.

This is the fundamental problem with AirBnb as a business instead of a side gig. The hotel has massive economies of scale in cleaning and other things, because they have dozens of rooms on site. If one room gets totally trashed, they just won’t use that one until they get around to cleaning it. If a guest checks out late or wants to extend their stay, they just put the next guest in a different room.

Also the cleaning crew is already on site. People are always checking out and checking in. The crew just pushes their cart to the next room instead of driving across town, packing and unpacking all of their stuff, and making sure to hit a precise time window between checkout and checkin.

Absolutely, there's a lot more risk in renting a single unit vs a hotel. The fees should be higher. The check-in/check-out timing should be stricter and with more time in between. Etc.

This may be true for hosts with one property but it's becoming more and more common for management companies to own a lot of properties on airbnb. The whole economies of scale have been figured out.

It's really kind of wild. We rented a house on the Chesapeake Bay last summer. Newly remodeled (was very run down the year before - we've visited this town several times) with decent finishes. The manager runs a little real estate empire, either owning or managing rentals all along the I-64 corridor in VA (VA Beach through the Blue Ridge). She also runs a consulting business for people looking to get into the vacation home ownership game.

I used to dream about owning a vacation home, but my parents bought a beach house about 15 years ago. They'd rent it peak season, but keep it for family use on the shoulders through winter. It was fun for a few years, but eventually the constant upkeep and expense wore them down and they sold it. Renters can be real animals - constant stream of broken furniture, stolen kitchenware and decorations, and just plain weird stuff like broken bathroom mirrors. Really opened my eyes, at least to a money-making rental property.

I think that's all pretty fair.

Put dishes in the dishwasher and start. Strip the beds. Pick up trash, quick counter wipe down.

Only difference is the trash which could just be an issue if the host isn't coming for a little while.

These should all be common sense. I don't think I've ever been asked for much more than that. Cleaning fee is for deep clean and general turnover. Maybe it should just be called the "flat-fee" though.

Hotels are literally factories for this. The fixed effort per stay is much different in a home.

It sounds like your two options are to either charge the max to all guests and the expense of less bookings or to take the loss on the extremely dirty outliers and expect it to be made up by the extremely tidy outliers.

> if a guest uses every dish in the kitchen without doing a wash up, they cleaning crew could be there for hours

If it is $200 then that should cover 10 man hours of cleaning in a developed country.

I had similar issues as a guest on Airbnb, paid a cleaning fee $100+ and then had complaints that I left food in the fridge (like normal a pack of milk or something not growing new lifeforms) and couch pillow on the floor. They sent photos to shove my nose into it. And it was a tiny studio not a big mansion with much area to cover

I quit Airbnb 2-3 years ago and am happy without

Have you tried to hire a cleaning person recently? $200 will get a small apartment cleaned, maybe. For a thorough cleaning of a modest house prepare to pay 2-3x that at least.

$600 for a house is far beyond typical prices

If it just needs a sweep, or if some party animal trashed it?

We have a cleaner come in for a 1900 SQ ft place in SF and it costs $250.

$250 for a 2bed 2bathroom house in 2022.

Two people spent roughly 2 hrs cleaning, so 4 hours of labor total + supplies. I think that's reasonable, but I wouldn't hire them for after every single short stay if I ran an Airbnb.

For my small house (~1200 sq ft) the woman who cleans my house charges me $150, and she's usually here for around 2-2.5 hours. She hasn't increased her rate for me for over 10 years, so I imagine she'd charge more if I started out new.

So in other words, even 10 years ago she was charging roughly $75/hr, which is much more than the $20/hr that grandparent was citing.

I'm just outside Seattle. My 2,500 sq ft 4br 3.5ba home gets cleaned every two weeks by two, sometimes three, people, for a minimum of 2 hours, usually 2.5, up to 3.

$165.

When they deep clean? $250.

If that's too expensive then the host should do the cleaning themselves. Or do like hotels and real B&Bs do and hire people as cleaners and pay them a salary.

The entitlement is through the roof, when people pretend to run a business refusing to do any work themselves and refusing to hire people. As long as there are clients willing to use AirBnB and pay cleaning fees, sure. But it is a scam and not much more, as another poster pointed out.

Ha, $20/hr for house cleaners is so 2020. They're much more than that in reality.

And meanwhile the actual cleaners are rarely paid even $15/hr in many places. I always hire one or two person companies if I just can find them since then it's at least honest business and not yet another hustle to get rich by using slave labour. Not just for cleaning which I only rarely outsource but for everything.

What do you think hotels pay their cleaners?

In my area cleaning rates are around double that.

Which developed country? The rates in a US city are generally higher than $200 for 10 hours.

I pay a housecleaning company come every two weeks. Two people, sometimes three, between 2 and 3 hours. $150. Or $200 if it's been longer.

I regularly see $300 cleaning fees.

And when I've had limited options and paid those cleaning fees, I think "I'd have fired my housecleaners if this was what I was getting for my money, every week, sometimes twice a week".

Let's be brutally honest - the hosts using professional cleaners are only paying for an hour or two. And oftentimes, I expect that their "cleaners" are the host's kids being handed a tub of sanitizing wipes.

If you’re paying the cleaning fee anyway, why would you do any of that stuff?

Because they'll charge you for it and ding your rating.

The hosts could leave you a bad review which can make it harder to book in the future.

I love how we went from "the customer is always right" to this.

With instant booking isn't that pretty much pointless now? I'd rather have a low rating than be scammed.

Because hosts can leave bad reviews of guests. This happened to us once when we were new to Airbnb, we had that exact thought: "We paid a cleaning fee, we're pretty tidy anyway let's just let them do their job." But we got a bad review and now almost every place we book, I get a phone call asking about the bad review and I have to explain... "We paid a cleaning fee, we're already very tidy people, and we were stressed and rushed getting our family with young kids out the door on time. The mess they're complaining about was probably 5 minutes of sweeping, but now we are even more meticulous when checking out."

Have you watched Black Mirror's "Nosedive"?

There is a rating system for guests, and losing "social credit" will make using the platform harder.

This implied threat makes people "behave", with both benefits (the worst actors will be filtered out and can't repeatedly impose the cost of their actions on society) and drawbacks (feeling pressured to always give 120%, fear of bad ratings, getting excluded through no fault of your own if you just get unlucky).

Most of those things are pretty common courtesy...

The cleaning fee is for deeper stuff like vacuuming, scrubbing the sink, toilets, etc... And yeah I think it also captures the one-time effort of the "turnover", where the host has to do the laundry, remake the beds, and a bunch of small things you might not notice.

I also hated it when the cleaning fee wasn't added until the end, which was very bait-and-switch-y. But as long as it's upfront it's ok.

It would be nice if more hosts just offered rooms though. If you don't think of it as a hotel, then it doesn't need that deep clean and doesn't need the cleaning fee. I just want a quick place to crash for a night sometimes...

I’d say if it’s not mentioned in the ad up-front, you don’t have to do any of that.

I’ve found high cleaning fees to sometimes be an intentional discouragement to shorter bookings, but sometimes I’ve paid it because it was still the best option and I like that they maintained the option.

Sucks that the only way to push on fixed costs (it’s not just cleaning) is via the cleaning fee.

This! If I show up after checking in and get a message asking me to do a bunch of things, I'm going to give them a hard no and point to the booking.

That’s how you get a bad review and charges for $800 to replace a napkin. Airbnb will side with the host, not you.

Reviews of buyers don’t matter much anymore since almost the entire platform is “instant booking”.

Dunno what kind of rules exist on the host side to block bookings under a certain rating. I know eBay’s are garbage because they’re not in the business of blocking sales.

This doesn't actually happen even discounting the hyperbole. Airbnb sides with guests for little things. And hosts are much more affected by a bad review than a guest is.

Of course not a napkin, but it’s happened to me that they pushed made up charges on to me. So you can’t tell me it doesn’t happen. A friend of mine came to visit me and stayed at a place for one night. They hit him with smokers damage. Not only he doesn’t smoke but also he was there only to sleep. How Do you even fight that?

Charge back.

AirBnB should tie the cleaning fee to your rating, perhaps a cleanliness dedicated rating.

At this point the cleaning fees are just a scam to make the listing fee seem artificially lower.

People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface, e.g. by letting you sort by price + shipping and showing shipping fees before you click.

No, they've worked around that too -- now sellers typically include a [completely unrelated] 0.99p item as an option in the listing, which then moves them to the top of the price-sorted view.

Or on aliexpress, on items you’d usually buy multiples of, set the shipping to $cents for the first item, then it jumps to $$$ once you add a second to your cart.

Sometimes I’ve just bought individual items from several sellers as a workaround.

Usually when that happens, the shipping date jumps too, because it's chosen a faster shipping method. I'm not sure why but I'm not 100% convinced it's deliberate deception. However they also don't show shipping prices in the search view, and display the lowest-price configuration instead of the range.

Some of these would be tiny items. But yeah, on larger items, sometimes the shipping price changed dramatically once you add the 8th item to your cart.

I wish users could order stuff by sea for a discount. Sometimes I’m buying camping or sports stuff for another season and don’t need it coming airmail. Arriving months later can actually be beneficial. But I understand, too many people will lose their minds.

I usually go through the checkout process multiple times, if it works out cheaper, since I don't pay credit card fees per transaction. The buy it now button and multiple browser tabs are very useful for this.

I'm more annoyed by 90% of the search results disappearing when I sort by anything other than "best match".

Cleaning fees aren't a "scam" - most property owners really do need to pay someone to clean the property at the end of a stay.

But, as another commenter said, they can be used as a way to encourage longer stays, as with most places you only pay a single cleaning fee regardless of the length of your stay. But, again, it's just a fact that these rentals are usually just cleaned between guests (as opposed to a hotel when cleaning is done daily so it can be rolled into the nightly rate).

No, scam is the right word. It could pretty easily be rolled into the advertised nightly rate.

OP is right that it's not necessarily a _scam_ but is more so deceptive advertising. You're also right that they should just show total cost of your stay rather than the nightly rate pre-fees. It's wild to me that Airbnb hasn't done this because it's one of the worst parts of their service that has pushed me (and others I've talked to) back to hotels.

If you switch to the Australian AirBnB site, you can see an all-inclusive price because they are required by law to do so there.

I get an itemized bill from the grocery store, but that doesn't make it a scam.

It's like putting a bunch of bananas in your basket, thinking the display price ($10 of course) is the real price, only to find out at the checkout, that it's $10 per banana...

Fees are stated up front, and completely to be expected.

I think getting shocked by cleaning fees is like getting shocked that there is a sales tax.. Every time you go to the store.

Showing the total with cleaning fees at the end is inconvenient and user hostile, but in no way a "scam".

The US is an anomaly in drip-pricing sales tax at the register. It's normal for sales tax to be part of the list price. It's one of the things travelers to the US are frequently outraged by, as well as our "pint" glasses (16 oz) that are smaller than an imperial pint (20 oz) or metric equivalent.

As someone else in the thread pointed out, some locales do require that AirBNB and similar list prices with the fees included, and they comply in those regions. And not including tax is kind of a con when the rate can vary between states, cities and even parts of cities. Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.

Sure, I agree with everything you said,and that is why I think it is annoying, but not a scam.

>Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.

Which is why they tell customers exactly what the total is and fee/tax breakdown before purchase.

What if they charged you a fee because they now have to restock the bananas that you removed from their display?

it would be annoying and stupid, but if it was a regular and expected part of the bill every time I went shopping, I dont think it would be a "scam".

I think scam implies that something is deceptive, but not everything that annoys me is a scam. If users are completely aware of something and expect it, it is hard to claim they are being duped, in my opinion.

> It could pretty easily be rolled into the advertised nightly rate.

No it can't because the hosts are trying to charge a fixed fee per reservation.

If they need a fixed fee they should set bounds on the duration of stay. They keep shifting the burden to users when it should be on hosts.

AirBnb hosts have had their hands on the scale for too long now because the company is terrified of a mass exodus of hosts (many of whom act just as entitled as your average landlord, who will beat every penny out of you). It used to be a much better service for the users.

But there aren't bounds on the duration of the stay. Many places will take you for 1 day or 4 weeks, and there is still just a single cleaning fee.

FWIW I think pretty much every vacation rental I booked pre-AirBnB (or, for that matter, pre-Internet) charged a cleaning fee in a similar manner.

Right, I'm suggesting duration bounds as a host-focused solution to a problem that's been frustratingly shifted to users. Better for the user experience to limit the stay to 3 nights (and thus removing it from results for single nights) instead of trying to put a $200 cleaning fee on an overnighter, IMO.

They can still take that fixed fee and do what some hotels do and average the total cost of the stay across the number of nights booked to get a "nightly rate".

I don't think hosts have the ability to set variable nightly fees like that.

You can't do that on airbnb. You can only set a flat fee and a nightly fee.

However, in my market customers only see the total, calculated to an avg nightly price. So it all works out and is fair for everyone.

I understand that it can't be done currently, I meant that it is a feature that could be offered by airbnb in the future since it has been done by others in the same industry.

Isn’t it? When I search on airbnb the rates shown on the map include everything. It’s only once you open the page for a specific listing that the price gets broken down

No, because math. As others have stated it can't be rolled into the nightly rate because it is only charged once per reservation.

At least last time I booked on AirBnB it was clearly displayed as part of the total reservation price if you entered dates.

I stay at hotels all the time that don't do a cleaning on the first night. How could they possibly figure out the complex calculus of what to charge?

Oh right, averaging.

As another user replied, hotels have a cleaning staff that they just pay a salary to - it is, for the most part, a fixed cost. The owner of a single rental/room really is usually paying a flat fee every time they need their placed cleaned, and thus can have widely different costs based on whether someone stays 1 night or 28. They simply don't have the luxury of averaging their costs over a wide base, no matter how many times you put that word in italics.

This is maybe the least complicated business problem ever. Businesses with fixed asking price but variable cost do it literally every day. This is how it is done: you look at your records and figure out average length of stay, giving you your average cost per customer. You can base your price added to the room on that cost, plus say 20%. Hiding the cost in tack-on fees is not necessary and it's clearly just a method to increase visibility for your property and add the real cost in the back end.

Lets say their cost for cleaning is 100 usd. Without cleaning they the price per night is 150 usd.

How much should the price increase per night to cover the cost of cleaning?

So either too low for people staying one night or too high for people staying multiple nights. Why is it better?

They should estimate the average stay length of their guests and amortize the cleaning fee appropriately, the same way that many other businesses (including real B&Bs, in my experience) handle fixed costs. In theory, AirBnb should be very good at automating the process (they have large amounts of very granular, market specific, historical rental data), but honestly, if that amount of planning and bookkeeping is too much for the rental operator, maybe running a B&B is not the best career fit for them.

It's fairly routine for B&Bs to have a 2-night minimum on weekends but, yes, they typically also just have a nightly charge (which may vary depending on day of week) and don't have a fixed per-stay adder.

AirBnBs have definitely normalized a significant per-stay charge that isn't the norm in the hotel/inn business.

Somehow hotels that don't clean every night figured this out like a million years ago.

Averaging

A hotel with 100 rooms can average. Me with my single room can not.

If you don't like it, fine, just don't use it. But pricing it to what people actually use, is fairest for everyone.

> Cleaning fees aren't a "scam" - most property owners really do need to pay someone to clean the property at the end of a stay.

I'm willing to pay a cleaning fee (though really it should be rolled into the cost of the stay) but not also be required to do the cleaning myself.

If you rent an apartment in my neck of the woods, then this is exactly what the law is. If your landlord charges a cleaning fee you can feel free to let them clean it up at the end of the rental period.

The only reason anyone does the cleaning is because the host can then leave a poor review. Does the law cover this angle?

The law allows you to make multiple accounts. Creating additional cards could help here.

Well, if I'm a landlord I'll often call two or three of the tenant's last landlords and ask them if they left the place in decent condition, if they were a good tenant, etc.. So there is a review system for tenants as well. I'll also use someone's credit rating and derogatory notes on credit reports as a proxy for how diligent they are at following a contract. And finally nobody here rents anything long-term without a very high-quality contract either purchased boilerplate or custom-written by a lawyer.

So yeah, the law and custom both cover this angle.

I think it's the time constraints on the dishwasher. Basically there's two levels of cleaning service. Everything else can be cleaned in two hours, but then there is waiting on the dishwasher. The cleaning crew bills to wait for the dishwasher to run and dry (2-4 extra hours). Just look for higher priced rentals, they will roll that cost in. For me, I'd usually rather pay a smaller cleaning fee because I don't usually use the dishes.

It's a scam when the cleaning fee is as much as the advertised nightly rate, and they require me to clean everything still.

I suspect you’re not vacuuming, cleaning toilets, cleaning shower, washing bedding, folding and stocking bath towels, putting bedding on and making beds, tiding sofas and kitchens, restocking TP, paper towels, and other consumables.

It's not always a scam but requiring guests to clean while they are also paying a cleaning fee is what makes it a scam.

The fee is obviously much more than they're paying the person who actually does the cleaning.

How is that obvious? Paying $200 for turnover service seems perfectly reasonable; when my wife and I ran an AirBnB, we paid our cleaners $250 per visit.

I've rented out a couple rooms in my house in the past for airbnb during special events in Austin to make some hobby money, shared my kitchen, they have a private bathroom. It doesn't cost $200 to clean. I can clean up after them typically in less than an hour.

It cost you nothing but time and some supplies. If you asked a random person to clean it, they would refuse. So you have to pay them. Minimums for cleaning would be 3 hours. At 50 an hour plus taxes and travel $200 doesn't sound unreasonable.

The people cleaning your hotel room who can barely speak english and get skiddish if you are wearing a law enforcement uniform definitely don't make $50 an hour.

If you can't efficiently get cleaning services for your rented out room, maybe you should get out of the hotel business!

Unless you have a pipeline of the undocumented then you have to go through a company.

Wait, your point is that those paying their cleaners well, above the board and with a contract should go out of business?

But those paying cash, no taxes, low salary abusing people, should remain in business?

What an insane take.

I think nearly all the house cleaners will be extremely surprised to hear that they earn $50 an hour. Even more, they get all their travel-related costs reimbursed! Oddly enough, that's not what they see on their payslip. And that's assuming they get a payslip at all.

FWIW I've never seen $200 cleaning fees on AirBnB for a room-in-a-house accommodation, but if I saw that then yes, I'd call BS. I've only ever seen fees that high for whole-home rentals.

It's a scam if a cleaning fee is charged and the renters are ALSO expected to do a truckload of cleaning themselves, for which the fee is presumably charged.

And a less charitable interpretation is that it's a scam because it's deceptive advertising to show a lower nightly rate.

When the cleaning fee frequently exceeds the per-night rate, AND the guest is expected to do a significant amount of cleaning(!) ... that's a scam.

Cleaning fees exist to charge a fixed fee for a reservation, regardless of the number of days. There's more overhead for a reservation beyond just "cleaning".

The most consumer friendly thing would be for AirBnB to just explicitly have a fixed "stay" fee and a per-day fee.

That said, AirBnB's site shows the total cost for a stay when browsing, so I don't really see this as particularly deceptive. I don't care how the host itemizes the bill as long as I know what I'm paying when selecting a place.

I haven't checked the platform lately but from what I remember the first search view did not show the total (plus cleaning) fee and only when you advance to book you would see the final cost.

While not a scam, it definitely feels like a dark pattern.

AFAIK everyone in e-commerce tries to have consistent pricing throughout the whole flow - otherwise people notice difference between pages and drop off.

Stuff that you explained can happen because initially IP-to-Country isn't 100% precise (later in booking/checkout stage you provide country and then it knows for sure).

Other case I've seen is that meta (comparison) website you came from showed you prices without including everything even though they should've.

And then booking platform tries to transition you into correct pricing in between their pages.

Agreed. That said, not that I stay at AirBnbs more than rarely but there's definitely been an ooching in both the per-stay fees and the expectations for cleaning. I suspect some of this is that housekeeping services have probably gone up in cost a lot. I thought my housekeeper was sort of an expensive luxury. It is but after talking to some people, the rates I pay are actually pretty modest.

But to many other comments, there's probably at least some element of advertising a relatively low nightly price and tacking on a stay fee that may not be as immediately obvious.

It only shows total price in markets where it is legally required to. Meaning they took the time to implement the feature and actively decided to be shitty to their customers when they are given the choice.

> they took the time to implement the feature and actively decided to be shitty to their customers when they are given the choice

Ah, but companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be as shitty to their customers as they can get away with.

No they don't.

Many companies act as though they believe that they have a fiduciary duty to not think further than the next quarter's results.

Are you happy now?

Companies obviously do care (a lot) about their current quarterly results. But if they literally did not care about what happens in the future, they could cut a ton of costs. They probably have a ton of engineering and marketing that isn't essential to the next quarterly earnings.

Such companies would fire all employees directly unless they are required to complete the current quarter. I haven't seen many sustainable businesses completely giving up all revenue for all future quarters just to improve the current quarter. It would be a very poor business decision. It sounds like a meme and I'll name it Enterprise Kamikaze.

Dang what does your flamewar indicator say about these?

To help put an end to this meme...

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.

It would be nice for me as customer to see what sorts of objectives any given company values: a sort of barcode scanner / brand scanner that travels up the tree of parent companies and returns the objectives for each one.

B Corporations have a certification process: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/

Are you sure? I'm in the US and it displays the entire price (including cleaning fees) for me.

Airbnb sellers can charge a fixed fee directly by setting minimum stay lengths or by charging different nightly rates based on the length of stay (e.g., weekly and monthly stay discounts).

What if I just want to stay 3 days and I’m willing to pay the fixed fee anyway?

What I do see is some booking automation that will dynamically set minimum stay lengths to avoid filling, say, a 3 day gap with a 1 or 2 day booking if it’s far enough out and set minimum stays to the duration of the gap.

Simple they just have a minimum fee, book whatever days you want.

Former isn't the same thing and is in fact less efficient. Is latter actually possible on the platform?

Edit: At most latter is possible with complex rule sets. But I'm really not sure: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2061

> That said, AirBnB's site shows the total cost for a stay when browsing

This depends on which site you’re browsing on. I don’t think US does this, but you can browse the AU or Canada version and set your price in $USD because those geographic “editions” have to post the all-in cost up-front.

Yes, and I think the only exception might be California where it is now required that prices include previously hidden fees such as "resort fees" (and "landing fees", etc for airlines).

I'm in California and see it

So put it in the price rather than "fees". That always feels highly dishonest to me.

How would you make that work?

I rent out our cabin. If you stay 1 day or 7 days, it's the same amount of work for me and same costs in cleaning. That's impossible to price fairly without having a flat fee.

In my market the customer sees the total price up front. I think this is the best solution for all parties.

> People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface

There’s a longer story to this: eBay used to exempt shipping fees from its commissions.

So sellers would be screwing eBay and, being an efficient market, as it often is on eBay, the savings would be passed onto the buyer.

I’d sell games for 1 cent with $10 shipping (cost to me: ~$2) and put the shipping cost in the title for clarity. If you didn’t like it, fine, pay more to buy from someone else.

Now they charge it on the whole purchase, which sucks when they take a ~15% commission on sales taxes and shipping and sellers can’t easily tack on a premium to these. So they get lower net proceeds when selling to someone that has high sales taxes or shipping fees.

This really discourages sellers from shipping internationally where those costs are higher.

Now that eBay charges percentage fees for “promoting” your item and getting visibility, bulk sellers will often post the exact same item, unpromoted, for less if you can be bothered to go through their “other items for sale”.

Have seen some wild examples where a seller sold one item at very different prices. They must have had items with 50% promotion fees, 25%, 5% and 0% (evidently passed onto the customer through different pricing) to capture the whole market.

As a user I always avoided those low cost, high postage listings as it just seemed a good way for a seller to avoid refunding the full amount.

Refund would always be minus postage costs, so you'd get 1 cent back for your $10.01 purchase when returning (i.e. no point)

I think it’s up to seller’s policy if it’s a buyer’s remorse return situation. I find it hard to believe eBay wouldn’t make the buyer whole in a damaged/not as described case.

Been a while since it came up for me (always sold stuff as “final sale” and if I avoid buying fragile stuff). Once had a hard time repaying a buyer that returned an item where I didn’t describe it correctly (screw you apple for having nearly identical LCDs but with slightly different camera cable lengths)

Thanks for the history. I was wondering why I was seeing less crazy rates on shipping. I had no idea it wasn't on the whole purchase price as that seemed obvious to me. I figured it was sellers hoping people wouldn't notice the s&h until the got to checkout

> I figured it was sellers hoping people wouldn't notice the s&h until the got to checkout

There was a lot of that too. I’m sure it’s sometimes emotional: sellers wouldn’t want to “subsidize” shipping, so they’d fix the shipping fee to what the max could be for anywhere in the country.

What grinds me as an international buyer is when sellers offer “free” shipping domestically, but don’t subsidize int’l shipping by the same dollar amount. Though there can be other time costs for int’l shipping. It depends.

Airbnb is a marketplace with a much wider range of "products" than standard hotels. I have found stays that fit my needs far better than any hotel ever could. I am both a host on Airbnb and frequent guest.

Airbnb's UI needs to guide prospective guests toward specifying what they are looking for so that prices (and price sorting) actually meets their expectations. If you search for a specific date range with # of guests, pets, etc., the sort order needs to be on all-in costs, not daily cost. Maybe they could offer pre-baked "personas" - e.g., I am looking for a hotel alternative vs I am looking for a unique experience.

I've used Airbnb 25 times. 12 of those times had issues. Issues like

"parking space included" - show up, no parking

"wifi included" - show up, wifi is sitting next to window and stealing from neighbor

listed on quiet road - after booking address is changed to unit on busy road

heater is so loud it sounds like a vacuum cleaner making getting any sleep hard

I no longer use AirBnB period. Hotels have extra rooms, reception, cleaning, etc. I'm not saying hotels are perfect but at least for me, the positive experience rate is 90% vs AirBnB which is 50%

AirBnb also lost the price wars, at least as the places I've looked.

It’s good for consumers this way I think. The hotels were forced to compete and I think overall are better than they were 20 years ago.

For normal people, they are not aware of this different form of rented lodging and if you’re hosting a big family vacation or a retreat, Airbnb is not a bad option.

It’s the bottom of the Airbnb market that is completely screwed up.

For what it’s worth, I’ve used Airbnb around 60 times and found it a much better experience than a hotel 9/10 times. Even putting aside amenities such as kitchen and washer/dryer access, hotels always feel like unnerving liminal spaces to me. Very few hotels I’ve stayed at have felt “homey,” which puts a significant psychological damper on my trip.

I guess I don't expect a short-term rental in an urban locale (especially) to be "homey." I'm looking for well-located, clean, and comfortable (enough). There are some brands that I find more welcoming than others but, in general, I'm not really looking for the hotel to be an important part of my experience with some exceptions.

In contrast, some of my favorite travel memories involve unique Airbnbs. People around the world have created some incredible living spaces, and hotels don't let you experience that aspect of travel.

Your persona feature is interesting but I feel that every Airbnb owner would also game it so they end up in the category with the highest prices, just like they're gaming the reviews.

Hotels have a star rating so that I never go to a two-star hotel expecting a four-star experience. These star ratings are done independently, and I don't trust Airbnb to provide objectivity when the owners are going to strongly push back against an "unfair" rating, and Airbnb will capitulate especially for superhosts and others who have influence.

And those were a twist on the old infomercial trick: Get a second one absolutely free! (just pay a "small" shipping and handling fee that is as much as a second one)

The "But wait, there's more!" device predates infomercials. It goes at least as far back as the "Atlantic city boardwalk pitch" from the early 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-tel

> K-tel was founded by Philip Kives,[4] a demonstration salesman from Oungre, Saskatchewan.[5][6] Kives had worked at a number of jobs as a young man, including selling cookware door-to-door and in a department store, and as a pitch-man on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

eBay could have fixed this a long time ago. Most marketplaces (at least in my country) manage the shipping transparently (by taking the shipping fee and providing a pre paid label to the seller).

Idk in the US but I know nobody who still use eBay for anything, I don’t know how they are still alive.

eBay can now show the shipping cost tailored to your zip/postal code, and shows it up-front.

eBay is an undertold story in failure (to innovate).

For sure, still a going concern, but odd of such a large company taking the Craigslist approach of “let’s stay small and just do enough to keep it working comfortably for all of us”

eBay practically invented online shopping at scale and had a huge head start but failed to maintain marketshare.

It’s still the catch-all for products that don’t fit in other marketplaces. For me, it’s a place to buy a lot of Amazon items but at a lower price (at some convenience cost). Or niche/used items. Amazon has overly regionalized (sometimes I can get items in Canada from Amazon.com cheaper than amazon.ca for example), while eBay is still a generally global interface.

I fix old electronics things like phonos, radios, and other sound related things as a hobby and resell(mostly 60s through 90s). Ebay is still great (well "good") for old parts and selling my warez. Although I do sell more locally as I've gotten some word of mouth, and it's more business than I can do with my day job. Anyway ebay still works for older products/parts for electronics and I reckon other fixable things.

They're still sometimes useful for old parts and the like. But there was a period when I used them all the time--admittedly as something of a novelty. Now, it's maybe a once a year sort of thing. Global supply chains have made a lot of the used market pretty tough for things you can just buy new. (I admittedly work a lot harder to get rid of stuff than acquire it these days.)

This is why I can't use AliExpress. Ordering by price+shipping is truly an awful experience. The people in charge of that feature take incompetence to a new level.

I remember a wave of $1 iPhone charging cables on Amazon! (with expensive delivery cost :)

I'm not a fan of how AirBnB has displayed pricing in the past, but don't lose sight of how bad hotel pricing is: taxes and fees not displayed until the checkout page, "resort" fees added at any time, etc.

There are no good guys here.

Maybe that's the US hotel booking experience, I live in Europe and haven't encountered those dumb fees.

There are occasionally local tax rates that differ depending on the type of traveller, e.g. no tax for business travellers, €2/night for tourists. I've mostly seen it in Germany.

It's generally written somewhere, but on aggregation sites like hotels.com and booking.com it seems the hotel can't alter the advertised price directly.

Example: https://www.hotels.com/ho119759/maritim-hotel-koln-cologne-g...

> A city tax is imposed by the city of Cologne. Business travellers with proof of business-related travel are exempt from this tax. For more details, please contact the property using the information on the reservation confirmation received after booking.

> An effective city/local tax rate of 5.00 per cent will be charged

This is also how airlines work these days. Separate airfare from fees and baggage, then trick travelers with low sticker prices.

Most of the many taxes and fees associated with air tickets are built in. Not checked luggage in particular in many cases although I don't pay that on my usual airline and rarely have it anyway. Otherwise, unless I want to upgrade, the price it gives me is what I pay.

I've stayed at dozens of AirBnBs and I've never had an onerous list of chores or a noticeably high cleaning fee, so these complaints always baffle me a little. Are people reading the listing thoroughly? Are they choosing a place with lots of ratings and reading all of the reviews? I've definitely had some bad AirBnbs over the years despite my careful selection process, but my complains are usually about noise or a lack of supplies (extra towels and blankets for example).

I literally lived in airbnbs for three years traveling across the whole of the contiguous United States and never once had this either. I did have them ask to put the trash can outside at some of them and most want you to remove your food from the fridge / freezer but that is about it.

Just checked my account, we stayed at 167 places in the last 5 years.

Maybe it's more common in larger group stays? The type you might not be visiting as much as an individual living in Airbnbs?

Wwe were a couple with two dogs renting whole houses as a rule but yeah that’s possible.

I used to feel the same way, but over the past few months have started experiencing it quite a bit. I think it started in more touristy areas I didn't tend to go to, and now is spreading all over the platform.

It's a terrible experience. last 2 trips I've gone on I've ended up in hotels because all of the airbnb's had cleaning fees close to the nightly rate and an actual chore list for check out.

no thanks.

Same here. 16 stays so far (most long-term, 1+ months), so not much, but all with zero issues. Hosts usually ask to do the most basic stuff - check that everything is closed and turned off, sometimes take the trash out, and possibly collect the used towels and drop them in the bathroom. Stuff I'd do anyway without being asked.

I remember having a request to run a washing machine once - and sure thing I did. It's just a push of a button, not like I'm doing laundry by hand, and if a couple minutes of my time (that otherwise would be spent circling around the place and quadruple-checking if I packed everything I've brought with me) saves someone half an hour then I'm happy for a quick and meaningful distraction. As for the dishes and kitchen utensils - some hosts ask, some don't, but I wouldn't leave them dirty either way, that's just common sense and basic respect to the property.

Don't remember seeing any outrageous cleaning fees - although I haven't really bothered to check the fee structure, all I care about is the grand total and whenever it fits my budget - the rest is simply irrelevant to me. Airbnb used to suck about not showing the total amount right away (which led to this cleaning fee fiasco), but I believe it's long fixed.

Then, I typically spend about a week's worth of evenings carefully going over the listings, multiple times. Airbnb's search is mostly a joke, one can only find a decent place by setting only the most basic filters then methodically going through the listings checking if they're accurate, have a decent number of photos (listing descriptions are useless, have to actually see the kitchen, shower and "dedicated workspace"), favorable reviews, no obvious red flags, checking surroundings on the maps and so on.

Either way, for the long-term stays a good Airbnb house or apartment beats a hotel (YMMV). And ever for the shorter-term (1-2 week) stays I always checked the hotels and always ended up picking an Airbnb because it was a more attractive option.

> Then, I typically spend about a week's worth of evenings carefully going over the listings, multiple times.

This is the key. You're valuing your time at nothing. Which is fine, if it works for you.

It doesn't work for me. I want to do a quick search, using the basic parameters, and to be able to trust my search without going full CSI.

Increasingly, with Airbnb (also booking.com, also eBay, and now even Amazon), the results of a quick search cannot be trusted. In the case of Airbnb, hotels offer a "more reliable" alternative for the busy person.

If you know a service that has a working search over finer details (like a fridge size or having an ergonomic chair or path to a grocery store), and wide availability - please tell me. I’d probably ditch Aribnb instantly, I have no loyalty to it or anything.

It’s not good at all, but I’m not aware about any alternatives that can provide equally good results.

Having a good stay that I will enjoy is what I value of my time against. If I’m going to spend 2 months somewhere, I think spending a week isn’t worse than hating something every day for those two months.

Honestly I think those requirements are perfectly reasonable for the originally intended purpose of the site, which is people renting out their personal homes. I have stayed in several Airbnbs that had the owner's clothes in the closet and pictures of their kids on the wall, and in those situations, it just seems rude to leave dirty dishes in the sink. These places aren't hotels.

I agree that doing laundry is a bit onerous in clearly dedicated rentals, but in my experience those tend to have fewer requirements and tend to not care if you miss a couple steps unless you trash the place.

Those types of Airbnb's are long gone, now its entirely commercial.

They are not gone, I book them all the time. They're hard to find, but they exist.

How are they even hard to find? They’re one of the three top level filter options.

That's not really what I'm talking about. Yes, the "room in someone's home" is a subset of "people's personal homes", but some of my best Airbnb experiences were entire homes that were someone's personal home (or duplex style arrangements), that were being rented out on a temporary basis. There is no filter for this.

That's all fine. The $200 cleaning fee on top of that isn't. The $200 cleaning crew will do the dishes no problem.

Depends on the size of the property.

You knew this when making the booking? Why didn’t you book a hotel instead? Airbnb or the host have no incentive to change if people like you keep going back. They will change only when it starts to hurt their bottom line.

> You knew this when making the booking?

You know about the cleaning fees at booking, but not necessarily the "rules" about cleaning.

Anything not disclosed in "house rules" section at the time of booking is not your responsibility.

"I'm worried this ban will only affect honest hosts."

EMF meters(like in the airplane to spot mobiles) are quite cheap and if you find an active one, you can probably sue the host, but at least reporting should have some effect, even though no instaban.

"If a guest reports the presence of an indoor camera after that, Airbnb says it will investigate and that it could remove the host’s listing or account as a result."

I do think that many hosts are scared of loosing the income, so they will comply.

> like in the airplane to spot mobiles

What are you referring to here?

Yeah I've often forgotten and left my ipad on cellular or my phone non-aircraft-moded. No one has ever said anything so it's unlikely they have automatic detection.

It also never happened to me, but I heard of stories, where the stewardess walked around with one.

But they might have gotten less paranoid about it(since nothing ever happened?). Chances of bad interference are probably very low.

I think (although not sure) that cell phone on planes ban was much less about interference with plane electronics and more about the poor handling of a rapidly moving phone on ground cell networks at the time.

Enough flying phones would cause a significant performance degradation. The issue of handling fast switching was solved, but any "because security" or "because safety" laws tend to stay for a long time.

I fly a lot and haven't head of this at all. Sounds like one of those stories that spread from someone thinking they saw something when in reality it was a crew with a phone checking seats for passengers.

I’ve flown over a thousand times and have rarely used “airplane mode”. I’ve never seen any cabin crew using anything to “detect” cellular activity or even mentioning phones.

People not turning on the airplane mode on their devices while in a plane. Sometimes they check (never happened to me though, but I avoid flying).

Modern mobiles are not using frequencies anywhere close to those used by the plane for nav / comms anymore so this is not an issue (though your battery will run to zero as it frantically tries to find a tower)

IMO phone battery is relatively fine. I've forgotten to enable airplane mode on a few flights.

I try to remember but I know I don't always and the battery has been relatively fine. And over the course of hundreds of flights I've never once seen or heard a flight attendant come around to tell a passenger to put their phone into airplane mode when I'm sure that maybe the majority of people just ignore the instruction to do so.

https://simpleflying.com/why-passengers-must-put-phones-into...

> There is another reason sometimes cited too for the early introduction of mobile phone restrictions, and it is related to the potential impact on cellular ground equipment.

> A mobile device operating at an altitude, and moving at speed, can see multiple cell towers at the same time. This will block frequencies used by these towers, with much more activity than they were designed to handle from ground-based devices. In the US, the ban on electronic devices in flight was initially put in place by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), not the FAA, for this reason.

https://www.faa.gov/travelers/fly_safe/information

> The FCC and FAA ban cell phones for airborne use because its signals could interfere with critical aircraft instruments. Devices must be used in airplane mode or with the cellular connection disabled. You may use the WiFi connection on your device if the plane has an installed WiFi system and the airline allows its use.

You'll note the FCC in there. While the aircraft instrumentation is the most immediate "reason for people to do this" that people can identify, disrupting ground communications is also there. Unfortunately, people are not that likely to do it based on "you'll inconvenience people using the cell phone towers that you fly over."

> EMF meters(like in the airplane to spot mobiles) are quite cheap and if you find an active one, you can probably sue the host

In a house with a bunch of smart meters/appliances, bluetooth devices, a router, indoor electrical wiring, nearby power lines, cell signals, AM/FM radio, etc wouldn't the house be constantly flooded with EMF radiation pretty much everywhere?

They all emmit on different frequencies. But I have not made a test yet, how well it works with a cheap one (I bought a simple one some weeks ago). The advanced ones can be tuned to find very specific bands.

You can avoid those listings if you want. You are only responsible for the tasks they specify up front in the listing under "rules". If they didn't list it up front, before you book, you don't have to do it. If they try to spring some tasks on you upon arrival, that's their problem.

I always refuse to do everything except load and start dishwashers, if I filled it, take the trash out. I have 15 reviews, ALL positive.

Why would customers even put up with this type of abuse? I don't get it. Just stay somewhere else. If I'm staying with a friend or relative for free then I'm happy to pitch in with household chores, but if I'm paying then screw that. I honestly can't understand why anyone would use AirBnB when there are so many better options available.

AirBnB is the only decent affordable option for a large group of people who want to stay together. Other than that, I see no point.

One hack you can do is tell the host you have a disability and will not be able to carry out those tasks.

Yeah these days it is cheaper to rent a spot at apartment hotel.

Might pay $75/night for it but to need to do any cleaning

go to a hotel then, they have paid cleaning staff to take care of that stuff for you

A $200 cleaning fee is more expensive than a night at many Manhattan hotels. Actual hotels. With full service. Is airbnb even worth it?

Not for a night no. It's more of a replacement to renting a service apartment for longer periods of time (e.g. a week or more).

FWIW, the last hotel I stayed at in Manhattan was $300 a day and had no service. And this was a big name hotel too, not some budget option.

Re: will only affect honest hosts

It still probably helps reduce surveillance a fair bit:

- honest host who currently disclosed cameras will stop

- dishonest hosts who are worried about getting caught will stop (most aren’t tech savvy enough to hide cameras, catching them isn’t hard, and they don’t want to risk getting kicked off platform)

- really dishonest hosts who hide cameras will get kicked off platform if caught (and potential civil/criminal cases)

Not perfect but a good move and should help.

A host can’t complain about you breaking the camera if they didn’t say there’s one there.

cctv cameras in non public places and with no oversight (including video doorbells etc) are a cancer on society

There is no situation where cameras are acceptable in another person's living space, so whether this only affects honest hosts is irrelevant; as long as it reduces usage, it is a good thing. Imagine hotels arguing for allowing cameras in their suites because they are "honest".

I believe the argument is that dishonest hotels will simply say "Yep, we got rid of cameras too!" without actually doing so.

You could never trust a host to respond honestly about that anyways, so it's a moot point. AirBNB up until recently never acted on indoor cameras, and didn't care if a user reported it even if they felt the host hid/misled that information.

I have never heard of hotels putting cameras inside rooms.

imagine a hotel charging you because when you obstruct the camera with some object, your video [profile data] couldnt be provided to a data broker

They should ban any hosts that require guests to do cleaning to be honest.

Why? Lots of people would rather do a little themselves to get the price down. Why should your preference dictate how everyone does it?

And it varies from market to market what's the norm. For instance for cabins in Norway, the norm for a long time was that the renter brought their own bedding and cleaned everything, mopped the floor etc before leaving. Long before airbnb was a thing.

Should an American company decide that this Norwegian way of doing it is no longer ok..?

Next time book a hotel then.

The only way things will change is if all of use refuse to keep giving them our money.

Your family was asked to do about 17 minutes of convenient, easy preparatory tidying that most considerate people would do even without being asked (as in a hotel or when visiting a friend).

Yet you benefited from coming into a home that, presumably, had all of its floors vaccuumed, its kitchen and bathroom surfaces sanititized, its linens folded and/or readied, etc. Whether it was the host or a service, somebody followed up behind you and likely spent at least several hours preparing the place for the next guest. And instead of it being bundled into your daily room rate like in a hotel, since it's only being done once per stay, it was applied as a per-stay cleaning fee. That's eminently fair.

There are about a thousand of things to complain loundly about with AirBnB and countless things in life more broadly -- being asked to tidy up a little bit or to pay a per-stay fee to cover cleaning? Not really a compelling one.

I think the point is it should be part of the upfront cost when searching, rather than something that shows up at the end.

Yes, that is one of the many valid complaints one might have with AirBnb and AirBnb browsing is much less frustrating in the markets that have forced them to do that.

But I don't read that as what the above commenter was complaining about.

You empty the trash from your hotel room? Really?

If there's an appropriate place for me to do so, yeah.

And if there's not (as often), I at least gather all the trash together and make that task as easy as possible for whoever's stuck with the thankless job of cleaning up after me.

It's wild and disheartening that people here feel justified in not doing basic tidying of whatever mess they made when traveling or that it's some big demand of a host to ask them to.

Vacuum, mop the floors, scrub the toiles and sinks, clean the dust / hairs. Of course there is a cleaning fee.

I've also noticed that now some hosts are able to use external services and require a security deposit not managed through airbnb. Supposedly these are only via "airbnb approved platforms," but I still don't like it as there is no real oversight.

For example, I found one that wanted almost $1000 as a deposit, and had a whole bunch of rules by which they would charge you extra. Not cleaning dishes, or not well enough would ding you $12 per item! Not putting the keys back in the lockbox on time would be $28/h. There was even a db meter that supposedly didn't record audio. The issue is where is the line? What do they consider clean a dish "well enough"? What is the db limit? Can I see the meter?

I just avoided it as it sounded too irritating to deal with and with the deposit outside of airbnb there is no room for argument.

That's even worse with Booking (half of their listings are now Airbnb-like rentals). After I paid the full non-refundable amount, I was requested to send an extra deposit, pass video-based verification, holding a passport next to my face, explain the purpose of my travel etc.

Issue a Chargeback.

I just move on when I see requirements like that. Some of those I do as a matter of course (clean any food mess/dishes if I have a kitchen). I think my mom beat that one into me. I'm definitely not doing laundry with a house cleaning fee is tacked on. Probably why I stay at hotels 95% of the time.

I don’t understand why this is a worry. There’s no such thing as an in-room security camera in a hotel. Airbnb should have had a clear ban on indoor security cameras a long time ago.

You might as well say that “laws only apply to law-abiding people.” That’s not a reason to not have laws.

I'm a host. I charge a $200 cleaning fee and my cleaners charge me $250, so I lose money on cleaning.

I ask guests to:

* Strip the beds (otherwise, I find that people re-make beds and it's hard to tell if they have been slept in), * Load and start the dishwasher (the dishwasher takes 4 hrs, and the cleaners travel to my remote house, and I want to make sure they can finish in about that time) * Take the trash down to the garage (to avoid ants)

I pay a neighborhood kid to take the trash bins from the garage to the street on trash day.

I successfully manage my place remotely (3hrs away) via a good cleaner and home automation (detailed here: https://www.linquist.com/airbnb/automation). 4.99 stars, superhost.

As you spelled out your reasons, it makes sense. But usually, you don't go over reasons with guests, and they feel like the host is treating them as his poor relatives doing chores. It's totally different at a hotel, where guests feel like they're being served.

I do go over the reasons in the automated message you receive the night before checkout.

Tbh, those are problems that you have to solve, somehow.

Given my airbnb rating and constant positive feedback, I'd say that my existing solution is sufficient.

Give it time.

I'd not be surprised to read that Air BnB are going to curtail this behavior next.

The only reason you're doing this is to game the system. Be honest and charge more.

No the logistics and economics don’t work to run an Airbnb the same as a hotel. Why would Airbnb add regulations that make their customers less profitable or financially viable?

Er, because they can.

And do.

As evidenced by the recent changes.

The point is, you should either charge cleaning costs and not require the customer to do anything other than leave it in a “used” state - or - not charge cleaning costs but require the customer at least does some basic cleaning.

Charging and also requiring customers to clean is unethical in my book.

Pardon what recent changes?

You don’t think the subject of this story isn’t a change of their rules and regulations?

I don’t see how security cameras impacts the economics of running an Airbnb.

Some owners were using them to record damage or vandalism to a property.

Without them that could make some properties more expensive to maintain and repair.

Meanwhile: https://www.rentalscaleup.com/airbnb-adds-2-more-to-guest-fe...

This change, affecting international bookers, will make it more expensive to rent, thus potentially affecting a hosts bottom line.

This may not affect you, but it will affect others.

And remember, as a host, you’re not the customer.

The person booking is the customer.

You? You’re just a supplier.

How am I not honest? The listing shows my cleaning fee and checkout list. Everything is transparent.

Be honest and build the fee into your rates.

Why do you not do that?

What is your rationale for charging it separately?

First, note that Airbnb shows it "built into the rates" when you put in the number of days you are staying when making a reservation. See this article from 2022: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23444561/airbnb-total-pri...

But to answer your question - because it is a fixed cost per stay.

If you stay two nights @ $250/night, you'll pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so that would be $350 night if I were to "build cleaning in") If you stay 6 nights @ $250/night, you'll still only pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so it would be $283/night if were to "build cleaning in").

Airbnb doesn't allow me to charge a different $ based on the number of nights stayed. But they are showing an all-inclusive cost to the user when the user is browsing with their # of days, so there is nothing hidden...

and to your "give it time" statement, it's been over 5 years...

First off: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/airbnb-has-a-plan-...

And secondly if you reread my post you’ll see that I think it’s morally wrong to charge a cleaning fee AND expect guests to clean as well.

That’s double dipping.

My cleaning fee is for washing the bedding, mopping the floors, wash inside the oven, was inside the refrigerator, vacuum all floors, wash all floors, clean every surface, scrub the shower, scrub the toilets, clean the sink and mirror, etc etc.

None of which I expect guests to do. So it's not double dipping.

You've been explained why you're wrong ten times now, and still drone on about it. Maybe airbnb just isn't for you? Book a more expensive hotel instead, and then those thinking my cabin is a good deal can do so and be happy.

This is a public forum.

If I have a strong feeling on something, why do you feel I should not talk about it?

It is your opinion that I am wrong. It is not a fact that I am wrong.

You say you have a cabin - I’ve booked Cabins in the Hocking Hills area of Ohio (not via Airbnb). They’ve never had cleaning fees.

If they can handle this, why can’t you?

> If they can handle this, why can’t you?

Ohh my god, come on, you've been explained this a hundred times by now. It's not that I can't handle it. It's that it's fairer for everyone if the price is set based on the actual cost.

My cabin costs $200 a night to rent, and $100 to clean. If you stay 2 nights that's $500 total, or $250 a night. Do you suggest I just should set the price to $250?

But what then for those renting for 7 nights? Normally they pay $1500. But with your scheme it will be $1750. Or I would have to eat the cleaning cost for those staying 2 days, making no money and instead just pulling it from the market and everyone loses.

The customer doesn't even see the cleaning fee. They see a total price. Then it's up to them to decide if they think it's worth booking or not.

Perhaps this is because I live in Europe, where all costs must be up front. Hence there is no scamming going on here. And I don't care what a cabin on the other side of the world does. I do what makes sense in my local market (people here even bring their own bedding!!). Get it into your head that people want freedom to choose a stay that fits them. If you don't want to care about this, then just don't book.

“And I don't care what a cabin on the other side of the world does”

And there’s the rub. You’re getting very emotive about the subject whereas I am approaching it simply as a customer experience issue.

When I book the cabins I get a cheaper price the longer I stay.

The issue would therefore seem to be that the Airbnb doesn’t provide you the flexibility you desire. The cabin’s I’ve stayed at are owned by different people but rented out by a company that handles such properties in a reasonable manner.

And besides, you continue to ignore my initial first statement: That I feel it’s immoral to charge a cleaning fee AND expect customers to do cleaning.

The original post I replied to stated that they expect the customers to strip the bed plus more cleaning tasks, AND they charge a $200 Cleaning fee.

Even the Airbnb CEO stated he felt that it was wrong to expect customers to strip the bed.

The Cabins I stay are request that when you leave the property you have gathered plateware etc. into the kitchen, and towels etc are left in the shower, and all furniture is left in the basic state you found it.

That takes all of about 10 minutes - which is fine by me. All costs in cleaning and maintenance is taken out of the rental fees.

So no, in my “scheme” costs are not higher because the company I rent through handles rates accordingly.

You broke the HN guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.

Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in particular. They're extremely tedious and definitely not what HN threads are for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I'm a guest, not a host.

I do not think of airbnbs as identical to hotels in every way possible, and I don't want them to be. I am ok with doing some basic cleaning tasks despite being charged a cleaning fee. I naively still consider airbnbs to be a little bit like sharing a space, with an implied social contract. I expect to do a little stuff that is low cost to me, high value to the host. I also know they're still going to have to pay a cleaner. And I really would prefer them to not unconditionally wash and dry the bedding for every single unused bed in the place. That's how our planet got into this mess.

I tend to be way more distrustful of previous guests than I am of the host. There are a lot of nasty and entitled people out there.

You have your perspective. Others of us share mine.

I totally support your right to your view.

As I’ve stated before these are my personal beliefs - and they may have been influenced by my age. I come from a time long before Airbnb was even the merest glimmer of a thought in anyone’s mind, and base my expectations and experiences on that.

Whilst Airbnb started off as folks sharing their properties. It’s now a fully fledged business for many where “hosts” are now corporations who buy properties to let out (in 2021 the figure stood at 28%).

So that also makes me very jaded.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/biggest-airbnb-hosts-canada...

Thank you for that perspective. I spend a week a month in my airbnb, so it is considered more of my second home than a business. There are photos of my wife and I in the house, and I think the house feels "warmer" for guests because it's not just a sterile hotel or full-time business.

And they've done it.

As long as these expectations are spelled out before booking, it's not a scam and completely fine. If a renter doesn't like it, just don't book.

>(otherwise, I find that people re-make beds and it's hard to tell if they have been slept in),

That is why any half decent hotel has protocol to always change all the linens anytime someone rents a room.

I have 6 beds. Change 6 beds when one is used? Talk about energy use and wear/tear on the linens themselves.

Hotels have cleaning "scale" on their side. I'm also operating a large home with a full kitchen, balcony, garage, etc. 8 people can comfortably stay. It ends up being a LOT cheaper AND more comfortable than a hotel for 6-8 people.

>Change 6 beds when one is used? Talk about energy use and wear/tear on the linens themselves.

Depends how much you want to risk a guest sleeping in dirty linens. Maybe you have very trustworthy people you can rely on to accurately gauge if a bed has been used or not, maybe your guests do not mind the risk either in exchange for cost/environmental savings.

I prefer the most foolproof option when it comes to sleeping in between linens or using towels on my body.

My existing solution of asking guests to pull the linens off their beds seems to be working great :).

We just have a card with a couple of chocolates (bribe) on each bed asking that if it is used, the card is removed, and if it isn’t used, it’s left in place. If there’s any doubt, the linens get changed. Means the guests don’t have to do anything by default, the environment takes one less insult, and we save on linen hire costs.

I find that abhorrent myself.

What YOU pay for your cleaners is up to you.

Stop nickel and dimming your customers - if you charge a cleaning fee then there's zero moral rights in my mind that you have to ask customers to also clean.

Just up the nightly rates and build it in.

When's the last time you stayed at a Hotel and found you got hit with a 'Room Cleaning" fee?

What's next - a fee for allowing Heating to be used? A fee to allow water? Heavens above.

My cleaners travel 25 mins each way to my remote home and spend 5 hours cleaning. In a hotel, with identical setups in each room, they can do a lot more work in that time.

My checkout list is clearly defined in my listing, which is doing great based on my ratings and bookings. The cleaning fee is not hidden.

I would re-evaluate if I were not successful.

That’s entirely your problem.

And sure, your listing may be doing “great” now, but what if Airbnb change the rules as they may start looking at doing?

Sounds to me that your model may not be sustainable in the medium to long term. Life’s full of “we did like gangbusters last year until…”

If it stops being sustainable, I'll change my policy. I'm willing to change. I'm always revisiting my policies / listing / amenities / etc.

I'm confused, if the dishwasher takes 4 hours and the cleaners clean for 5 hours, why do the guests have to start the dishwasher?

Are we arguing over the difficulty of loading soap and pressing a button? Yes, it would be possible for the cleaner to do it, and I don't negatively review a guest who doesn't. But it makes things much easier if the cleaner can simply unload upon arrival... and once again, helps keep pests at bay. My property is in the woods and it can be a challenge.

Doesn’t sound like it’s your home, sounds like it’s your business.

I spend at least a week a month there. It's more my second home than a full-time business. It is not profitable.

Why wouldn’t you clean the sheets regardless after each stay?

But everything else seems reasonable. If a host left a note explaining the reasoning behind the dishwasher and the trash, I would understand completely.

6 beds (comprising of 4 different sizes of beds/sheets) make it quite wasteful if a bed is not used. It already takes ~5 hours to clean the home.

I would take the side of sanitation than taking a chance on having used sheets on the bed

My existing solution does, by asking guests to remove the sheets.

Obviously, if no sheets are removed, they would all be cleaned.

And if your guest don’t remove the sheets after they sleep on them?

I pay my cleaners to make sure the home is clean. Simple as that.

Ewww…hosts like you are the reason Airbnb gets a bad rap. I don’t think any reputable hotel would find it ok to not clean the sheets on both queen beds in a room if only one “looked” used. Logistics of cleaning should be built into your pricing and scheduling and not be a chore or something the guests have to think about.

You've never seen hotel staff clean a room, lol. You'd be surprised.

I have a 4.99 rating with almost 100 stays, which seems to be telling me I don’t have a bad rap. In the end, it is my cleaners’ responsibility to leave my house ready for the next guest.

“ I ask guests to: * Strip the beds”

“ But an unreasonable task is like strip the bed…”

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, 2022

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-ceo-guests-shouldnt-ha...

Whatever the CEO said and, much as I tend to not be in the have to deep clean the rental camp, strip the beds and throw the used towels in a pile falls in the pretty reasonable category for me even if I don't do it in a hotel.

I’m a host, two properties in the U.K. I charge no cleaning fee. I don’t ask guests to do anything other than lock the door behind them when they leave.

It’s really simple to manage - price it in.

Our nightly rate is our nightly rate is our nightly rate. We have a two night minimum on our city property, so it doesn’t end up astronomical - and when we have single nights spare we open them up at a higher price point. On the other property, we have a one week minimum, as it’s in the countryside, larger, and cleaning costs more.

We also price in stuff like welcome champagne, tea, coffee, cooking supplies, firewood, you name it - we give our guests everything they would have at home, and enough to throw together a meal on their first evening if they get in late.

Our margin is >50% on both.

Price it in.

This approach makes sense. Not everyone will take it, both because they're trying to compete on (apparent) price and because they don't want to 'force' guests to pay for things that they might have been willing to do themselves. But it's good that there are hosts out there who bundle all of these services together, like they would be in a hotel or resort. For many people, this is what they're looking for. They don't want to do chores when they're supposed to be on vacation. And because there are all kinds of hosts on the platform, the types of guests who don't want to have services bundled in can book a lower-priced listing that requires guests to do more work (but not pay as much).

No come on, some of those are crazy, no one is expected to clean the oven after normal use.

I've seen this lots but I've never actually done any of the things they ask me to. Bringing out the garbage? Sure, but only if it's overflowing while I'm there. I will start the dishwasher. We've also never received a bad review so I think at least where we stayed, while those things are explained in their handbook or wherever there's no downside to just not doing them.

Why do you have to do all that, though?

What will they do if you refuse?

Is this partly about norms I'm different countries?

If I were renting a holiday cottage in the UK (airbnb or otherwise), I'd expect to do the washing up and take our rubbish, and possibly strip the beds. I wouldn't expect to clean ovens or put laundry on.

Staying in Finland recently we had to make our beds at the start - no idea if that is normal there but wouldn't expect that in the UK unless you were at a youth hostel.

I assuming the cleaning feel covers mopping, hoovering, cleaning bathrooms, making up beds with fresh laundry. Some places do feel like they overcharge nonetheless for the number of hours required and I presume that it is more an overhead person stay charged to discourage short stays.

Don’t do the cleaning and leave a medium review that politely says you were not informed of cleaning policy beforehand. Host has no way to penalize you (outside of a bad review) and you can respond to their review (if they criticize you) saying you were not informed at booking. Keep your review and response cordial and any future host evaluating you will assume that the past host was weird. There’s no way anyone can verify the claim by the other host that they articulated the cleaning policies.

> Hosts can’t use outdoor cams to keep tabs on indoor spaces

That might be easy to game either way. Hosts can claim they didn’t keep tabs, just had a hunch to come over and check; and guests can claim the camera in the yard could see some part of the interior through a window and ask for a refund.

One interesting effect is that now hosts with hidden cameras can't offer the footage as proof during disputes.

Sure they can. They simply 'forget' that there was a camera there but when a dispute comes up then they suddenly realize that actually there was one and surprisingly there is relevant footage, too.

That might work once but then they'll have to be more creative. And, of course, it would depend on the consequences of breaking the "no camera" rule. If they can show the guest smashing an expensive TV or something, it might be worth the consequences.

Not sure how AirBnB has a $100 billion market cap. The use case for an AirBnB, which is mostly large group travel, seems limited when comparing to the use case for a hotel (every other type of travel). Marriott and Hyatt combined have a lower market cap than AirBnB.

Airbnb has a PE of 22 and is a money printing machine. Airbnb makes 10x the profit of Hyatt, which has a PE of 75.

Use case of hotels might be bigger, but it is a highly contended market. Airbnb has a huge chunk of a smaller market.

Also, the margins are much better on hosting a website than building hotels and paying thousands of service employees.

What is PE?

Price to earnings. Market cap divided by profit. It is loosly associated with how long until you can make back your investment with current revenue.

If you have a business that makes $1/year after costs and taxes and are selling it for $20, your P/E is 20.

i suppose price/earnings ratio

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earningsratio.asp

Price to earnings ratio, or P/E, is a way to value a company by comparing the price of a stock to its earnings. The P/E equals the price of a share of stock, divided by the company's earnings-per-share. It tells you how much you are paying for each dollar of earnings.

On the flip side, Hyatt has billions of dollars of equity in real estate (which appreciates in value while not technically generating a profit), while AirBnB has an online marketplace. Presumably that's part of the PE difference.

Most branded hotels are not owned by the hotel brand. The hotel brand sells the brand name and (presumed) quality control, but different businesses usually own the real estate, such as REITs or other types of hotel owners.

Extended Stay America is an exception to this, they own all of their real estate.

Also, unrealized gains in real estate would be priced similarly by investors for both Hyatt and Airbnb, so that would not make a difference to P/E.

I’m stunned people still use AirBNB after most hosts turned their high paying customers into unpaid housekeepers.

Because maybe that hasn't been the case for the people still using it? It certainly hasn't for me, and I've seen other comments in this very thread saying as much[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39669973

Hasn't been a problem for me. I apply common sense and do the absolute minimum, usually starting the dishwasher. They can ask me to do whatever they want but it has no teeth. I've never seen one of our hosts complain in a review either.

Which also shows you how little oversight they have - I guarantee that there are a sizeable number of places that are not inspected after each stay, let alone clean.

Wouldn't that be obvious though? You know, the bed not being made, dishwasher full, towels on the floor...

This would be so obvious I have trouble seeing how you might believe it. The bed wouldn't be made, the dishes wouldn't be cleaned, the items of the house wouldn't be put back.

It is also trivial to look at a bed and see if the sheets have been cleaned even if the bed was made -- hair shows up easily if not other stains.

Before HN I hadn't even heard of any such things (as a European), and I stayed in 3 Airbnb's last month alone.

Amazing that this even needs to be stated

Exactly. I always thought there was a presumption of privacy when renting any residential space, long or short term, and that presumption was legally binding. And I just assumed that interior cameras violated that. For example, I've read about creepy landlords installing cameras in their rental units, mostly to spy on their female tenants. The creepy landlords always got arrested. Furthermore, if a large hotel chain like Hyatt or Hilton was found to install cameras inside hotel rooms, people would not tolerate it, because, just like an apartment, there's that presumption of privacy inside a hotel room. But for some reason, AirBNB was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, "Owners can do whatever they want. Not our problem."

Imagine for a second, that you checkin at a Marriott/Hilton/Fairmont and there was a camera in your hotel room. It's amazing it even lasted this long with airbnb.

One more rule written in blood. How much abuse has it taken to reach this point? Incalculable.

This is how you do it. Come in as a "disruptor," ignore all the rules the establishment has already learned the hard way, and make shitloads of money for as long as you can without pesky old oversight or constraints.

Eventually, you wind up with the same rules the establishment had, if not more. Your catalog gets clogged with cottage enterprises that game your algorithms to steal your customer equity. While you're neck-deep in customer complaints and bad press, you're reduced to a clearinghouse for someone else's business -- little more than a classified ad service. You lose, your customers lose, and -- unless, god forbid, they get organized -- your original suppliers lose. Everyone loses except the scalpers and the scammers. Except now you've run out the competition, and consumers have little other choice.

In this example, why use AirBnB when all you get is either a Sonder that is more hassle and no better than a hotel, one of a dozen apartments leased by the same weirdo, a retirement-home-in-waiting in a bland suburb, or a sketchy individual's greasy rathole?

In the end, welcome to niche status. You do actually have a unique product (in this case, places for big groups to stay for several days), but the market for that isn't big enough for perpetual "growth," so you're on track to be acquired by a hedge fund, rolled together with your former competitors, soaked with debt, and then put out to pasture. But your founders are long gone, booking corporate speaking engagements between yacht voyages. Some "vice president" decides your labor pool stays cheapest if you disincentivize things like career development. Eventually everything is parceled out altogether. What's left of the value of your brand gets smeared over commodities. "Welcome to AirBnB, powered by Motel 6 (an SV Capital Partners, LLC experience)."

> The change comes after numerous reports of guests finding hidden cameras within their rental, leading some vacation-goers to scan their rooms for cameras.

Checking for cameras seems like a smart move no matter what their policy is. You just never know.

How do you reliably find cameras?

There are numerous techniques needed to search but, crucially, nothing can guarantee you've found them all.

I'm struggling to find it, but I read an article a few months ago where a team placed about 30 cameras hidden in a home and tried to find them all. Most methods found low single digits. Even the best ("an advanced lens detector" for $400) brought the total up to fewer than 20.

Really wish I could find that because now all I'm finding is dogshit articles claiming it's easy.

edit: found, it was from CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/22/how-to-find-a-hidden-camera-...

You can also check what devices are connected to the wifi but there's no guarantee they don't have a second network just for the cameras which you can't access.

I guess we can always tape up tarps to cover the walls and then drape some over the furniture. That won't stop audio from being recorded though.

It looks like the best method only found 11. It looks like 17 is the total amount of cameras they found using all methods. Pretty crap really. The advanced lens detector was the most effective and only found a third of them.

The only method I can think of that might work is one of those media sniffing dogs the cops have, which is super impractical obviously.

Hack out all of the drywall.

Airbnb did previously allow indoor cameras?!

Yes, I stayed in one that had one in the entryway pointed at the interior of the front door. Very uncommon in my experience, but this was in someone's home that they actively lived in, but were away for the weekend, so I found it to be understandable.

> I found it to be understandable

I'm astounded you found it understandable.

If I'm renting rooms, I certainly don't expect the landlord to be in the business of filming myself or family, especially as we may well be walking around sans clothing. Not only is this rather illegal, I suggest plenty of people would find themselves responding to the landlord rather violently in such a situation. And I would not blame them.

My experience was such that it wasn't that way at all. The camera was indoors but not in areas of the house where someone would be walking around without clothing, and they were clearly disclosed in advance before booking, and they were clearly visible in the home.

Why would I not be able to be naked in all parts of the house?

because the example is that you're renting a room in a house shared with other people

Some houses have areas where it is fairly reasonable that people wouldn't be running around naked, e.g common areas shared with others, or rooms with a large amount of glass open to the exterior of the home. And in some cases it might even be illegal for you to be naked in those areas if exposed to others.

Yes - but you had to disclose it very prominently in the listing.

Yes, cameras were allowed to be installed, but host are required to notify about it. As I was explained, this allows, for example, placing one outside the entrance door, to know how many people actually were living there, because there are cases when people deceive. And the price depends on the number of people as I know

I had one once in my living room. I was pissed. The host told me it had written about it in the description. Sure enough it was there when I looked carefully. Still what the heck. In a Boston Airbnb with my parents visiting from abroad. I ended up leaving a one star review, and he begged for me to take it down. I explained long and large how wrong what he did was and left my one star review. Felt good.

That review was almost surely removed by AirBnb.

I had this happen in Seoul, the host messages me and asked me to not leave the AC on when I went out (it was a 10-minute walk down to the corner store) - I was a little confused how they knew I'd left it on, so I purposefully left it on and went out, sure enough I got a message as soon as I left. I messaged back and said it wasn't on, and they said they had a camera and could see it's on. I contacted Airbnb and they moved me to a hotel that day, but I wasn't super stoked.

Had an airbnb that locked out its thermostat within a range outside our preferences.

Nothing an ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel on top of said thermostat couldn’t resolve.

Out of the box solutions ftw

I almost forgot how annoying Airbnb is until I started staying in hotels again.

I will gladly take a smaller property in exchange for dealing with people that have actual hospitality training, daily room cleaning, room service, etc. Hotels are just a nicer experience. I don't want to spend my vacation cleaning the room or worrying about a "host."

Airbnbs are amazing for:

- Group get-aways where the point is being together at the place, not seeing the sights of whatever area you’re in.

- Families traveling, especially when not staying in a city core

- Trial runs at living in a place

- Areas poorly served by decent hotels

They’re bad for lots of other scenarios.

[edit] oh and the less time you’re staying the worse they tend to be—stuff like cleaning fees and having to tidy up before leaving really suck if you only stayed for a night or two, but aren’t a big deal if you’re there for a week.

> Group get-aways where the point is being together at the place

And how are the neighbours going to feel about your house party in their residential area? You can't call this model "amazing" for all concerned. Don't say that this doesn't happen, it really does. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39669347

There are lots of actual vacation properties on the service.

Agree that it sucks in denser housing outside tourist areas. I’m sympathetic when local governments outlaw short term rentals.

I've often felt a bunch of the "love" for AirBNB comes from people who didn't realize that you could do short-term rentals of entire properties before it hit the market (and where you'd go for those).

Yeah, they’re not the only option and certainly weren’t the first. The sort of thing they do can be a really nice option, though, and they’ve definitely expanded the set of properties available.

It was easy enough in normal "vacation" areas. Like the NC beaches. Or ski resort areas. But, those were largely location-specific listing services - Airbnb have us one site for the world. There's no longer a need to call a travel agent if you're visiting a new area.

>> and where you'd go for those

Where would that be?

That was the problem - there wasn't a unified listing for the whole world. (Exactly the same as Uber, whose (to me) primary value is a world-wide working taxi hailing app.)

Popular tourist destinations? Travel agents or some snooping around could find them. Ranch rentals? Ski resorts would know where they were, or others.

But nothing for something similar in Bakersfield (where nobody goes willingly).

You'd look it up in a guide book, or contact the tourist information office for the place you're visiting. Later, some of this was online, and even later there were websites for the bookings.

Earlier, you might have to write letters. I remember my mum describing doing this when she travelled to the Eastern Bloc — she had to write letters to the tourist office, then follow up by letter to make the booking. It might have been necessary to write in German or Russian.

Vacation style rentals are generally crappy properties, whether on Airbnb or otherwise.

I think Airbnb has become worse as these types of properties have become common on the platform. The best experiences on Airbnb are, and have always been, people's personally owned homes.

And how many nights of Airbnb do nice properties last before being utterly destroyed?

The ones I've stayed in usually have dozens to low hundreds of reviews. They often have picky hosts that don't do instant bookings, and they're the type of properties that wouldn't be physically suitable for parties. And often the owners are in the same property or close by, meet you in person, and they'd know if something fishy was going on.

I have had all good experiences as an individual using them. It seems almost all abnb disaster stories stem from families or groups staying in a place. Even couples.

By biggest complaint though is that the cleaning fee is priced for groups and families. I'm paying $60 for someone to come and arrange the pillows at worst.

Also great if you can’t live in your house for a short period (repairs, etc).

The stress of staying with a group at an Airbnb is not Worth it anymore. One of our friends didn’t PERFECTLY follow the instructions of what to do with the sheets and just piled them all together in a corner for easy cleanup.

The cleaners used this as an excuse to scam the owner who lived 8hs away and saw the property every 6 months to tell them we had trashed the place and that they had to work 6hs. They took up close pictures of trash… (that was outside in the trash can btw) and claimed we just left it everywhere. Took an up close picture of a crumb on the floor. Am I supposed to vacuum the whole place?

If you’re a couple it’s easy to track everything and have a strong case. With friends you have to start questioning your friends to see if any of these claims are true. I don’t go in their rooms to check, so I have to take their word for it.

Very much not worth it. Not to mention the quasi legal battle with Airbnb that is a pandora box and for 6 weeks or more you are unsure of what’s going on, the host trashes yours and all your friends profiles, and they expect you to “pay for damages”.

All this because they estimate the minimum possible time for their cleaners and if they go over the 15min they booked (at a rate that is only matched by HP ink) they pass the charges to you.

Screw that. Never again. We’ve been staying at hotels with much better amenities for the money and actually REST. Checkout is at 10? I just leave. I don’t have to wake up at 7 to do dishes and bed sheets and trash and sweep and look for crumbs and take pictures to cover my ass later.

I've found that hotels have cut back on the services also. I tend to stay at middle-tier hotels, i.e. Hampton Inn or something similar and they often don't service the room if you are there for multiple nights. I get not replacing towels if they are hanging up but even making up the beds and removing the trash isn't always done.

I'd guess that post-pandemic they just don't have enough staff to get all the rooms done so they prioritize rooms where there will be a new guest checking in.

I think there has also been a generational change in culture/expectations. Personally even if I’m staying at a nice place I don’t like having someone come into my room and rearrange stuff. I am a neat enough person that I don’t need someone’s help keeping a room usable after using it for only a day. I’d rather save that money.

Yeah I'm nostly that way myself but I'd like at minimum empty the trash and restock the toilet paper, etc. without needing a call to the front desk to ask for those things.

I'm totally with you. If someone doesn't come into my room for 3 or 4 days, possibly interrupting me when I'm working, I am perfectly good with that.

I had a co-worker who really hated people coming into her room. I think we were in Japan and she had a Do Not Disturb sign up and she got really pissed when a maid came in and made up her room anyway.

First thing I do when I check into a hotel is find the Do Not Disturb sign and hang it on the outside doorknob. It stays there until I check out. Even then, it does not stop cleaning staff from trying.

A good hotel will have a policy to check all hotel rooms on a regular basis (at least once per week), regardless of a do not disturb sign. Just one person living in squalor can cause myriad pests and damage to spread to many other hotel rooms.

Well, like being "green" with respect to towels, it also just saves them money. (And, yes, couple that with labor shortages for a job that pays poorly.)

Honestly, it's fine. It's not like I wash my towels or my sheets daily at home. To the degree the pandemic was a forcing function to think about what labor people actually cared about, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I've found the nicer middle (upper-middle?) hotels offer the same thing, but often give some reward — a voucher for a drink in the bar, snacks, etc.

I'm fine with it; I don't want someone remaking the bed so I have to loosen all the tight sheets before I use it.

It would also be very unusual for me to have enough trash that it needs emptying, or use enough toilet paper that it runs out, but I guess others might eat particular take-away food which could account for both...

They’ll still come in and service whatever you need if you call the front desk though.

Agreed. The Airbnb of today is a far cry from its early days. Back then, the annoyances of an Airbnb were tolerable because rates were competitive with hotels, and you got more space and a proper kitchen.

Nowadays, it really only makes sense if you're renting as a group. Small, affordable Airbnbs just don't exist anymore. Airbnb knows this - just look at their new ad campaign. Not sure if that was inevitable as the company scaled, or if they've just found that they can milk more money out of larger rentals.

All of this being said, Airbnb-esque services exist that offer small apartments at competitive rates. I stayed in one in Detroit for a few days, and it was pretty nice. I think it was called Mint Something. No cameras, either.

I have stayed in AirBnBs once or twice as an individual and was happy with both the accommodations and the pricing relative to other options. That said, a lot of "the hotel experience just doesn't work" is mostly about groups or large families. As an individual or a couple I'll generally take the relative predictability of a hotel or a traditional B&B.

I've stayed with Airbnb once as a large group, but as a terminal cheapskate I always check to see if they have a good deal available. I almost stayed at one in Memphis, then checked the Google street view and realized it was a shack, and a recent review mentioned that there wasn't a functioning toilet on the property.

I've stayed with a couple small competitors to Airbnb, though. Mint House was a good one, with solid rates and a nice living space.

I'll be trying Vrbo for my bachelor party next month.

Good to see that they are also thinking at least one step ahead:

>> Hosts can’t use outdoor cams to keep tabs on indoor spaces, either, nor can they use them in “certain outdoor areas where there’s a great expectation of privacy,” such as an outdoor shower or sauna.

There are certainly hosts who would instantly put a camera in the tree looking in the windows.

They'll still do it, but they can't use the pictures without incriminating themselves.

The arms race continues, but slightly better for guests.

Definitely always scan your rooms. I volunteer with helping women who were filmed involuntarily for sexual purposes and the level of voyeuristic content from AirBnb hosts has been skyrocketing.

Are they also banning the host practice of renting out multiple rooms to guests who are strangers to each other? I would prefer indoor cameras as protection from other guests.

How about we just ban Airbnb and solve part of the housing crisis while we're at it?

Pablum. Near impossible to enforce.

This reminded me that AirBNB is a crap service. I wanted to delete my account but never got around to do so.

So I did it now!

Making small changes to policy like this will continue to have no effect on the negative externalities of AirBNB rentals.

Will this improve guest privacy? No, hidden cameras are too difficult to detect and too easy to install.

Will this prevent AirBNBs becoming party houses/apartments in residential areas? No, obviously not, since that's apparently already banned.

Will this collect commercial taxes from investment property owners illegally renting out AirBNBs in residential zones? Of course not.

Et cetera.

But they get to remind everyone that they're the "good guys", and they're "trying"

My guess is it will stop property owners from using cameras openly indoors as they have been allowed to before.

This does give AirBnB a reason enshrined in policy to take consistent action against misbehaving hosts, something that was lacking previously.

Also, I am not sure why you are conflating AirBnB’s authority with a local government - or course AirBnB won’t address the issues you cite in your last paragraphs as that is not their job and to think it should be is totally ridiculous. We have local and state governance to pass laws regulating behavior that is not good for society at large. AirBnB’s job is to generate value for shareholders all while operating within those bounds.

Why wouldn't it be AirBNB's responsibility to prevent hosts from operating illegally?

You know what you could do?

1. Not allow Airbnbs in residential areas

2. Force each Airbnb host to list the address

You know, like hotels

Hidden cameras aren’t as useful if the host can’t take any obvious action from it. So it does have an effect

There are properties with openly visible cameras in the interior, which are typically pointed at reasonable locations to watch (like the front door), but being inside, they could potentially be listening to conversations that they don't really need to be. Those cameras should really be on the exterior of the property. This fixes that.

Typical BS reasoning. The hidden cameras are already against policy. Do they really think expanding the policy to all indoor cameras is going to stop those actions? If anything, people looking to protect their property will now have more incentive to place hidden cameras if there are no options for allowable ones.

It feels to me that AirBNB hosts are an entitled group of people. They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers. There's a multitude of rules, chores, invasions of privacy (Cameras, decibel monitors, et al).

These are supposed to be vacations, not a walking-on-eggshells experience because the host is constantly spying on you. If there's damage, submit a claim against the person.

In a lot of countries many of the hosts are violating zoning laws and evading tax to.

A lot of people are getting very tired of being subjected to weekend after weekend of stags and hen parties because the neighboring apartment was turned into a hotel room.

Not to mention the extra pressure it's put on property and rents.

Secret recording is also a serious crime in most jurisdictions.

I wonder if nuisance laws can be used against the host if repeated violations are coming from the same property, even if the renter is different.

I agree. AirBNB was a mistake. It used to be that an apartment could be rented out for a decent amount above your mortgage, and expenses. But now there's no incentive to opt for long-term rentals, when a short-term one is more profitable.

Then the rich get richer and consolidate more properties under their companies, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Think of people who had been making sacrifices so they could save up to purchase something, just to be outbid by collective groups of people just purchasing property to rent them out. There's no competing.

> now there's no incentive to opt for long-term rentals

this happened very, very quickly in some markets.. +10 years ago

The worse part is how the “success stories” or airbnb hosts have brainwashed lots of people: my middle class friends strongly oppose regulating airbnb because they dream of someday buying a place to rent on airbnb and get passive income, when they don't realize the reason their rents and housing prices are so high is because of this kind of behavior and that they'll never make it in the first place because of the high prices. The ones who owned before airbnb came where the ones who made real money.

Yeah, and this rule change won't change any of those problems. We can already see that the prior rules were being ignored by the problem hosts.

Yup.

I have never had an Airbnb that was not clearly an illegal hotel.

> They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers.

In the first part of that sentence you characterize the transaction as akin to renting out a spare room, but in the second part you characterize the guests as "customers." Historically, if you rented a room from someone, you were subject to all sorts of rules, invasions of privacy, etc. In many circumstances, that's still the case (e.g. with live-in nannies).

What's actually happening is that guests treat AirBnBs like hotel rooms, and hosts are doing the same thing. It's just a commercial, arm's-length transaction.

Exactly, in the former situation you obviously don't have a full expectation of privacy. But when you're paying a premium for an entire property, onerous rules and spying are uncalled for.

We already have a solution, and they're called hotels.

Society forgot why hotels were created, so now we're re-learning it via AirBnB.

"Hotels" does not solve "I'd like to stay in an isolated cabin in the countryside", or various other things that are readily available on vacation rental sites.

(AirBnB has lots of other problems, but "hotels" alone are not a complete replacement for what it provides.)

Fair enough, hotels don't fully cover the entire AirBnB usecase, but cabin rentals and bed-and-breakfasts in the country have been around forever, too.

My point is, commercial rentals exist because of the problems AirBnB are having. They're trying to "disrupt" the industry by not providing the protections and safeguards to save money, and basically running into all of the problems that led to the commercial rental industry in the first place.

Their innovation is collecting a fee while pushing the dirty work off to unsophisticated 3rd party property owners.

I'd put this under "enshitification".

I've had plenty of complaints in the past about terrible airbnb hosts, but this seems to me to be clearly motivated to bring more money into AirBNB at the expense of the hosts and neighbors. Just like Paypal made conscious decisions to ignore customer fraud and hold sellers liable for everything, now AirBNB is trying to squeeze more out of the hosts by supporting and enabling bad behavior by guests, removing options for hosts to control or respond to terrible customers. I stopped using AirBNB several years ago, but then I noticed that hotels have copied AirBNB's shitty policies, like the price doubling on the last page due to unexpected fees. They're enshitifying the whole hospitality industry.

Hosts, like hotels, can simply document before and after if they're concerned about damages.

Disallowing potential spying on guests and requiring disclosure just sounds sane. Nobody should be monitored without their knowledge.

Signed on just to say, like that Figma post garbage quickly moving off the main page... Forget AirBnB- These businesses lacked justification to begin with and followed the selfish whims of their boards. Abandon these paid dog food products and go out and build/support open replacements for them.

Who ever down voted this is clearly a capitalist scumbag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com