Comment by downut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downut | Hacker News Reader

I had this precise MO happen to me in Romania, only I got a "cancellation" message at about midnight the evening before. Plumbing issues. "We have another property that is much better instead."

I am not a trusting soul, especially at midnight, so I just said fuck you Rus, ima get on the line to AirBnB. And amazingly they made us whole, and after a night of interaction between an AirBnB droid, and apparently a couple of unconnected hosts in Bucharest, by 9AM I had another rental, not too bad in fact. This was 2018, does AirBnB still do that?

Also non-US countries' cellular networks for the win, a lot of communication happened the next day while I was on a bus heading toward Bucharest. Almost as good as Mexico in fact. Which is where I'm going next month. However I'm suspicious these days so my next AirBnB I have already stayed with that host before.

Anyway as I was messaging with the AirBnB repair droid all night, the Rus kept coming back and I decided to have some fun, and boy howdy did he get mad. I trolled him intelligently, good and hard, apparently they don't get much pushback. I got to thinking though, maybe not a good idea to troll the scammer hard as I'm about to inject into a city I don't know that well? Spicy!

Sadly AirBnB edited that message thread quite savagely, very annoying when I went back to enjoy the exchange later on.

I just remembered that I had the last minute cancel thing happen to me in Chicago too! Only the host didn't do the divert to the "better" apartment bit, and it was 2 days before, so I was able to find another rental.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just stay in a reputable hotel?

With a kitchen and a washer/dryer?

I have a stayed in hundreds, maybe into thousands of reputable hotels in many countries over 40 years.

It is such a drag when this tired line comes out. 98% of our AirBnB stays have been fantastic, and I have cooked out of many food markets in lots of interesting places. Including Romania. The host interactions, often through side channels, have been quite cool in close to a dozen cases: theatre tickets gratis in Paris, local pointers that are truly local in some places.

But all good things must come to pass, and it seems likely that the enshittification process has terminally afflicted AirBnB. In the future probably we'll be joining the rest of you in our sterile "reputable hotel" rooms, eating out of the adjacent dreary (but sterile!) industrialized corporate food processors (aka "restaurants"), all of which might as well be located in the same interstellar spaceship, no matter where the nominal physical location is claimed to be. A dreary future.

This is such a hilarious hot take. I almost think it’s fake.

You do you, bud, but that’s a lot of shade for the dumbest story ever.

You travel all over the world so you can checks notes stay inside your airbnb and cook ingredients. Cool

You'd do well here to not start attacking someone for how they want to live their life. Nothing about cooking means they have to stay inside while traveling. This is a fully valid way to do things. You can get access to new ingredients in new places.

La Boqueria, La Merced, oh let's see in Paris, Marche Couvert San Quentin, La Libertad in Guadalajara, I could go on and on. What on earth could you do with the stuff you can buy there, but hardly anywhere in the US. I should go out for a drive in my FSD Tesla, and meditate on this question.

(I don't have a Tesla.)

Over decades of travel, I've found that one of the best ways to experience a culture and a place is to learn how to cook the local food. I guess you could do that through cooking classes, etc., but I've found a whole new dimension of traveling by staying in Airbnbs/etc. that have kitchens, and going to the market down the street to find ingredients.

For more experienced & long-term travelers, having some way of preparing food (maybe just breakfast, or breakfast + lunch) often means you have the budget to stay in a place longer and get to know a place better. And you can take a day or two off to recharge if you've exhausted yourself, and know that you won't go hungry or be forced to go buy crappy to-go food at a convenience store or the like.

I've stayed in at least a few hotels that had small kitchens in Europe. I washed clothes in the tub. In the US, extended stay hotels are incredibly common, cost-effective, and I actually prefer them.

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