Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode
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People say hotels are as cheap, but they never have the same amenities, and the location in town is often worse. An AirBnb with a kitchen is essentially $20-30 cheaper per day than a hotel without one. Add to that laundry, more privacy, and other perks and it's not really a fair comparison. It does seem like there are more hotel resellers and leasing companies using it as a stopgap between tenants, which I understand, but hate.
I get why they want to be an "everything app" (rich people have more money to spend on "experiences"), but other commenters are spot-on regarding the dangers of taking their eye off the ball. Seems like a better use of company attention would be to really boost and reward the genuine hosts that put their heart into it, and at least put in a modest amount of friction to slow down the corporate resellers with barebones apartments in half-remodeled buildings.
We only use such if there are no other options in given area or if we want food prepared (this quickly becomes another chore with small kids).
I've never seen a well rated airbnb place with many reviews being bad. They may not be stellar in some aspect, ie small maintenance may be lacking but otherwise having a full kitchen with wash machine is pretty amazing for any type of trip, and one has a wide variety of locations and prices. Also it allows you to experience the place a bit more, compared to hyper sterile and uniform hotel experiences.
Lets not forget airbnbs would never become a thing if they werent cheaper than hotels (or at least provided much better experience at similar price).
Doesn't really make a lot of sense to me to just shop on price and then compare the experience to booking a hotel room, it's totally different.
So I feel like they did successfully establish themselves as the noun for that kind of thing, which to me speaks to the power of the idea and the marketplace they created because the name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
But overall I think the hotel room market is just much larger than the "boutique group stay" market so they have to maintain position as a direct hotel competitor (but I think it is an issue vis-a-vis people complaining here about things like having to coordinate with an individual even though they willingly chose that route).
Even these days I'm not mostly looking to deeply research my overnight stays much of the time and often default to my hotel chain of choice or a hotel/Aparthotel that I have previous experience with.
At the you're paying more than a hotel and you have to spend 2 hours deep cleaning the place... That's when you start to really reconsider.
That was my preferred experience too - well maintained and lived in just enough to make sense. Some places do cheap out on "perks" that seem there only to boost themselves in rankings/filters, but otherwise been a pleasant experience.
AirBnB’s differentiator on launch was “rent just one room” in an owner-occupied dwelling. Remember when it was “the sharing economy”? There are still listings like that, but I think most of the money is in whole-dwelling rentals now.
I think Airbnb will have a branding issue. By transitioning from rentals to offering a wide range of services, they might dilute their brand before people have the chance to fully embrace and experience the new offerings.
Perhaps they should reinvent themselves as a platform that manages travel and stays, emphasizing that their “airbnb certified experience” includes access to specific facilities and guarantees. This way, users can choose from other service providers in their marketplace with their own standards. That way, expanding to more services over time would seem like an organic expansion.
Essentially, Airbnb could transition from managing services to a marketplace model that also hosts managed services and other providers. However, by maintaining a focus on “stays” or “travels” and slowly adding more ancillary services would prevent dilution before their metamorphosis is complete.
I can't tell who owns air.com, but the website it hosts is a tiny landing page from someone who would obviously sell.
The rebranding will be met by a slew of astonished articles asking "they spent how much?" and almost as many apparently-thoughtful midwit counterpoints saying no, it looks obvious in hindsight, but it took real marketing genius to conceive of this in advance.
Want hotel quality and safety with apartment perks? Just go to an apartment hotel! It costs more than a hotel/AirBnB but you're also not at the whims of random hit-or-miss listings and shady shit. And they clean your room if you want them to!
They're not nearly as common as Airbnb apartments in most countries. I also trust Airbnb listings and reviews more than what I find on most booking sites.
Maybe some way to secretly write problems, and get next guests to agree/disagree with each concern?
Repeatable patterns of problems (rather than one-off bad luck) are what I'm most interested in avoiding.
I find booking.com has been more reliable, and less risks of unexpected costs. AirBnB is usually way less professional.
For instance, hypothetically, there might be a listing that mentions plenty of clean towels, a swimming pool, and a walk to a convenience store. I get there and there were two towels, the swimming pool was one of those above-ground models, and the convenience store was a 20 minute walk.
Leaving a negative review on AirBnB might fuck the guy over in search results or certain incentives, so I wouldn't really delve into the definition of "plenty" and how a "swimming pool" should mean "a pool that's large enough to swim in" and not "a big puddle that's perfectly suited for splashing around in, but less so for actual swimming". I might mention them in a private note to the renter or something, but it's not egregious enough to sabotage the otherwise-perfectly-fine service I was provided.
There's no such direct gamification with a third-party review site, so I might bring these things up there.
It's similar to leaving a thumbs up for an Amazon driver who walks on the lawn because he didn't notice the paved walkway. Was it "perfect delivery"? No. But is it something I'd want the guy to have negative employment ramifications over? Also no.
Most people just want somewhere to stay while they visit a city or relatives or an event.
Even if you want a kitchen many hotels offer some basic facilities.
In this way they are perfectly comparable.
The experience is OUT THERE, not where you are staying.
So yea I’m looking for the cheapest place that meets the bar. Sometimes it’s Airbnb but usually it’s a hotel.
Having an actual kitchen when you travel with kids is great. Having actual separate bedrooms so we don't have to go to sleep at 8pm when the kids go to sleep is great. Being able to do laundry without tracking down a laundromat or pay exorbitant hotel prices is great. Having a living room or similar area with at least a few square metres of floor space where kids can sprawl is great.
I think this is a huge factor in why my family always camped when I was a kid.
And to be frank, I don't like being cooped up in a hotel either.
Hotels tend to be pretty consistently good when it is over a certain price point, and at any higher price point, all you get is better views/location (and may be some amenities such as gym or pool) - aka, quality caps out and just becomes expensive.
Airbnb prices are quite correlated to quality. High priced airbnb (for example, a holiday lodge) can be _very_ good for the price. But airbnb is a sort of buyers beware type deal.
I think what you mean is "chains" tend to be pretty consistent. Which, yeah, that's always been the main value prop of a chain. You go to McDonald's in Tunisia and you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
I mean, that one is on you. It is possible to go on vacation even camping with kids without having anxiety attack over everything.
Also, while some kids are difficult and kids are slow and certainly limit you, hours of tantrumps every holiday and impossibility to eat are not normal.
And yes, the point being advanced in the thread is that compared to camping - which is generally healthy and not something to freak out about! - homes are going to be cleaner, occasional mold issues aside. So it's silly to freak out over the infinitesimally-slight chances of little Timmy and Sally getting dust-mold-smoke cancer-AIDS from a less-than-perfectly-sterile room.
Generally though, I would expect camping to be healthier than a hotel room. Hotel rooms and airbnbs are places that many humans go through, and humans are generally the main carriers of human pathogens. The only germs on your camping gear are your own ones.
I mean, it's an adventure, and those can also go poorly, but our experiences have been just excellent. And at those bottom-of-the-barrel prices mentioned earlier.
Definitely not something that hotels offer.
The last thing I want to do when I'm pulling in after a long flight an hour past the kids' bedtime is to deal with potentially dealbreaking problems with the place. In a hotel, they generally have maintenance on staff and extra rooms to switch into in case of problems. Generally with Airbnb, the staff is 30 minutes away and is annoyed that you've called them. Most of the time, everything is fine, but there can be snafus with locks, plumbing, cleanliness, etc, and kids make these more complicated. This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
Just having a separate living room and bedroom in your hotel can be hundreds more per night.
Interconnecting rooms are rare, you can request it, and it’ll be subject to availability. So you can’t even guarantee you’ll have one.
Hilton and IHG both have similar brands, but their exact names escape me at the moments. The search keywords are "extended stay" and "apartment hotels".
Ok... Can you show me some like that in the EU?
> This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
Just don't do that.
This is different from Airbnb's where they abuse a residential building for short term stays.
Which is quite different from, and far more expensive than, a hotel which GP was talking about.
> This is different from Airbnb's where they abuse a residential building for short term stays.
As allowed by local regulations, so not quite abuse. Sure it used to be the wild west several years ago but it's been cracked down on since.
There ended up being an issue with the dryer not drying. So the hotel staff took a laundry basket of clothes and delivered them washed and folded the next morning. That level of service would not have happened in an Airbnb.
Yes, trivially. There are filters for it on booking.com. Here's a link for rooms in Paris suitable for 2 adults and 2 kids with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/kitchenette and a washing machine.
https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?label=gen17...
My experience is that e.g. it used to be a lot easier in the USA to find hotels that even just had a kitchenette or even a pay to wash “laundromat” (which is what I assume you are referring to), but maybe that is also just my personal experience. But my sense is that those offerings have been in stark decline especially over the last decades, and especially outside of the inland western half of the country that in some places is still a kind of real America that has not yet succumbed to con job level corporate practices.
It seems fairly accurate to include AB&B in those who have succumbed to “enshitification” for whatever of the several reasons that may be. In the case of AB&B it feels like MBA Wall Street types pressed to slide or chip away at ever more standards to drive “growth” and/or “cost cutting”, the only two real tricks the number monkeys have in their bag.
American here. The opposite is true -- there used to be few of these, and they were "upscale". Now there are tons of different low-end chains that specialize in it. Homewood Suites, Marriott/Hilton/Sheraton Suites, Embassy Suites, DoubleTree, Hyatt Place, Springhill Suites, and maybe half a dozen others.
These are usually, but not exclusively, located in areas that are a bit more rural -- I don't know if you'll find one in Manhattan, for example, and you'll see definitely them by pretty much every major freeway interchange. But I've stayed in one on Maui, in San Diego, and near the airport in SF, so you see them in "tourist" places as well.
The suite hotel I used in Maui, for example was pretty fancy: pool, restaurant, bar, gym, balcony rooms, etc. But the price point was certainly below equivalent hotels in the same area.
Your description of how well hotels are run does not match my experience. I’m sure it’s true of very nice hotels. It’s also true of very nice AirBnB’s! And VRBOs, which are not as well known but similar idea.
Whereas I would not be surprised if more than 80% of Airbnb's have a full kitchen or access to one.
I, like you, prefer the hotel offering. Messing around with hosts and their rules is not on my list of things I want to care about, the fact that there are hidden fees and stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Hotels, I know the rules. Don't destroy or steal, make life easier for the maid: done.
With AirBNB, there's the cleaning fee, there's the self-replacement of items situation, there's the unknown state going in; and there's some faff about checking in.
However, the laundry fee's are definitely killer in hotels. I prefer to travel light and paying €8 for a pair of socks (or.. depending on the hotel manager PER SOCK) to get them washed is just painful. It's not just a high price tag at that point, it's borderline criminal markup.
I have also noticed that amenities such as Irons are less common in hotel rooms these days, which is annoying as I've started wearing shirts in my old age- worse still is the toilet situation. Modern hotels must think we're all voyeurs or something. The majority of hotels I've stayed at in the last 3 years I would not want to be with a child, frosted glass bathrooms, rarely a lock, sometimes it's just slatted wooden cabinet doors... idk, something wild is going on with hotel bathrooms man.
The ironing board is sometimes.. however..
Kinda small: https://www.amazon.com/Ironing-Tabletop-Foldable-Collars-Han...
Just as much as many parents think having had kids is one of the proudest decisions (or happiest accidents) they have made, I think not having them is one of my best decisions, travelling is one of my many reasons for that, and I find the assumption from some parents that we should bend around their choice is a little presumptuous.
Furthermore, ignoring various other definitions of better, hotels are sometimes better value (or, at least, just less expensive) then AirBnBs these days, unless you are lucky, and inexpensive/value-for-money seems to be a very important factor for parents that I know.
Having said that I still use AirBnB sometimes, it just certainly isn't my only/preferred option as it was for a time.
My issue is the assumption, amongst many of those with kids, that everything should be optimised for people with kids, and anything that isn't is wrong. Because why would you want to optimise anything for other conditions in some cases?
>Why not show the same courtesy?
There is courtesy, and there is being expected to accept suboptimal things for myself so that everything can be optimal for other peoples' choices.
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[1] except perhaps the particularly uncontrolled ones, and I acknowledge that is sometimes unavoidable
How exactly is everything optimised with families in mind? Ask any parent and I'm sure they will tell you how unoptimised their life is.
Why does a single person with their own expendable income worry so much about being catered for specifically? Your only responsibility is to yourself. Do you look around and bemoan family specific services? It's such an odd thing to care about unless you had a grudge.
Kids aren't a 'lifestyle choice' like deciding to travel. Do I need to go into the reasons why kids are important or who will be paying to keep you alive when your older?
In your response, yes. Either that or you are significantly misreading my posts.
> How exactly is everything optimised with families in mind?
It isn't. I didn't say that at all. Some things are, possibly not enough, but many parents think everything should be and everything that isn't implies some deliberate slight.
> Ask any parent and I'm sure they will tell you how unoptimised their life is.
Ah, the old “you are not a parent, you don't know how hard it is”. I know many parents, and even without that personal context the issues with parenthood are well documented throughout our culture. If anyone is ignorant of reality here it is parents who are surprised to find it isn't easy…¹
> Why does a single person with their own expendable income worry so much about being catered for specifically?
I don't, and that isn't what I said.
> Your only responsibility is to yourself.
Incorrect. I have parents, other family, friends, pets, my work (though that could be filed under responsibility to myself I suppose - I'm not a public servant by any description), other organisations (both commercial and charitable) that I interact with, certain responsibilities we all have to society in general, etc.
> Do you look around and bemoan family specific services?
I very much do not, I don't even bemoan funding them, and I explicitly said as much (to quote: “I don't begrudge my taxes going into education and relevant parts of the NHS…”). Try reading what you reply to before replying to it!
> It's such an odd thing to care about unless you had a grudge.
Not a grudge as such. Just an irritation that if I'm sometimes seen as selfish if I appreciate something that is optimised for my lifestyle. I've been called selfish for just not wanting to have kids.
> Kids aren't a 'lifestyle choice'
They very much are. It is a choice that affects your lifestyle in a great many ways whichever side you choose (or, in some cases, have chosen for you).
> Do I need to go into the reasons why kids are important
No need, I've been told these things, despite already knowing them, many many many times already!
> who will be paying to keep you alive when your older?
That is a complicated discussion that I really don't have time for ATM, but further to “why kids are important” I am well aware of the problems an average ageing population can cause.
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[1] Obviously excluding those whose kids have specific issues, be they physical, mental, or both. Those matters are not predictable unlike the general challenges almost all parents face.
However, you find it irritating when people call you selfish when things are catered for you.
Who are these people calling you selfish by the way? Who has said your selfish for not having kids for example.
This frustration with parents seem to come from a sense of guilt? Not that I agree you should feel that way. But all this talk of feeling selfish and being called selfish. I have never felt that way about any friends or family I know without kids. Never even crossed my mind.
If you're truly happy with your lifestyle choice, these things shouldn't bother you at all.
You are twisting my words again. I'm strongly suspecting this is deliberate, to make my position sound more hard-line, rather than a misunderstanding on your part. I said many, which is far from most, and to those with kids not to their specific family¹.
> This irritates you.
Not directly. If you pay attention to the start of this thread² you'll see that the source of irritation was the implied “you aren't a parent so you don't understand”. Here it was said lightly, but often there is more than a hint of suggesting that those without kids, particularly those who very much don't want them, are somehow both inferior in terms of knowledge, intellect, morality, or some mix of the three.
> Who are these people calling you selfish by the way?
Currently, directly to me? No one. I've successfully convinced the world around me that my line ending here is not a bad thing!
Though it was explicitly stated in my direction in my younger years when talking about future life plans. Who was saying it? Quite a mix of people, though there was certainly a bias towards those to whom religion was an important part of how they gauge the actions/intent of others. In some cases I think people take my explicitly not wanting that way of life is me saying that the other choice is generally wrong and that they, by inference, are wrong³, which is not the case. My original home town has a prevalence of certain opinions about the world, and there was from some people a suggestion that other cultures having more children than was a concern so breeding is some sort of duty, but that is part of a different kettle of mouldy fish.
As an example more outside of myself: I have a couple of friends who would like to have themselves rendered incapable without the hassle of pills and other treatments which, for them and quite a few others, can have significant side effects, but that isn't something they are allowed to choose in this country even at their own expense. The word selfish has definitely been levelled at them (also “misguided” and similar, along with “you'll change your mind and regret it” as if they are a 14-year-old wanting a face tattoo not a 30-something trying to make their life less problemful for a week each month).
> This frustration with parents…
Again, your wording seems to be trying to frame me as saying things that I am not, here that all parents have unreasonable expectations. That is rather disingenuous of you.
> seem to come from a sense of guilt?
Nope. I don't see what I would feel guilty about here.
> If you're truly happy with your lifestyle choice, these things shouldn't bother you at all.
I am, but I have to admit to not being high-minded enough not to be bothered by the implied inferiority (“you aren't a parent, you wouldn't understand”, etc.) or that everything should cater for the other choice.
Also, I am not the only one who matters here. That the pressure to conform to traditional family models exists, means that some end up in a place that they really wouldn't have chosen for themselves and that they are not happy about.
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[1] The latter would imply I think that their view point is from an entirely self-centred perspective
[2] Assuming you are not an LLM with a limited context window so don't have access to that!
[3] This certainly applies to a couple of people who have since popped out enough, or been the cause of others having them, to make up for my lack of desire to have any. How much it applies more generally is less provable.
When things go well, it’s amazing. When things go poorly, you realize how anti-guest the policies and support team behave.
That’s when it changed for me. I realized how pro-host, anti-guest they are. Hotels generally seem to care when something goes wrong. Airbnb support behaves like you have inconvenienced them by raising the issue.
The hotel I’m staying at right now is dirty as fuck.
The valve for the shower does not operate properly, the water pressure is extremely low and it barely gets above 90F. Other rooms in the same hotel have a different valve and the showers work fine.
“We will send a maintenance person right away” it’s been a week.
There is old food under and behind my bed.
They empty trash in the hall once a week, it fills up in two days.
They advertise laundry but the driers are all out of order. Apparently the only reason is the change collection bucket is full, the owner doesn’t trust anyone but himself to empty it, but he’s two states away.
I can hear everything through all the walls around me. I can hear people fart.
This hotel has 4.5 stars with >2000 reviews.
For me AirBnb has the dubious distinction of being the only online service I'm banned from, and I have no idea why. I barely used it and the few times I did the hosts were happy. One day I tried to log in and the app wouldn't work properly. I filed a support ticket and they told me they weren't going to tell me anything and there was no appeals process either. And that was that. My guess is I got IP clustered with another person whose account was legit banned, but really, who knows. What's the point of the ID verification process if they act like a free webmail operation anyway?
With booking.com and hotels, you're paying about the same but avoid the BS that comes with Airbnb. It's a much more reliable and predictable experience. The idea of people requiring Airbnb for anything more important than a vacation rental is horrifying.
Not really. When was the last time you stayed at a non-chain 2-star hotel in Asia?
Hotel chains care because they care about their brand. Not that's a result of being a chain, not of being a hotel.
I booked a cabin via VRBO for a few nights as a celebration. It was somewhat remote, but the architecture was neat, and it was a decent deal for my budget. There was some weird cotton-like stuff and...snapping?...in one of the walls that was a bit off-putting, but nothing seemed serious.
Then, night came.
I awoke in my bedroom to something moving. Bleary eyed, I turned on the bedside light and saw something flitting almost silently in the darkness. It seemed like a large insect perhaps to my blurred vision. But whether it was the size or the weird sounds, it eventually clicked: it was a bat trapped in the high-ceiling bedroom.
So, after swiftly getting out of the room, doing some hasty research, and calling animal control, I learned two things. First, bat encounters in the area have a standing policy to IMMEDIATELY see the nearest emergency room to receive a rabies vaccination. It turns out bat bites can be super-tiny and difficult to detect, and they are carriers.
Second, I struggled to convince the limited support channels at VRBO that there was a freaking bat in their property. There was no real emergency line for support I could locate at the time, and I really hope that the information I left would somehow be used to prevent someone else using said property from, ya know, potentially contracting rabies.
To this day, I find myself more wary of property encounters. I don't think I ever got a refund for that debacle, but admittedly I may have been a bit more focused on my mortality.
Normally, I never use a kitchen when traveling. When with GF, she does often like eggs in the morning though. So if there isn't a hotel/inn breaffast that can sometimes be useful.
I agree with respect to circumstances where you want houses or at least multi-room apartments though. Hotels aren't mostly a good fit for that although suite hotels sometimes have a couple of bedrooms.
The kids generally prefer hotels because they have pools.
We've found plenty of professionally run "resorts" where the space is like a small apartment, with a full kitchen and multiple bedrooms. These tend to be right in ski areas where we could walk to the lift if we were staying during the ski season. We did stay in one that was AirBNB-like because it was privately owned but the ski area handled the reservation and any issues that came up while we were there.
- If I need a kitchen? AirBnB
- Am I staying somewhere with low population density for more than a couple of nights? AirBnb
- Am I staying somewhere with low population density for a couple of nights or less? Motel or camping
- Everywhere else: Hotel
And this is after I explained it’s my wedding!!
Never again.
At hotels you also don’t have to worry about spy cameras, upset neighbors and questionable legality.
I did use AirBnB years ago with my family and it was great. However the quality tends to reflect the country. I have had wonderful experiences in Northern Europe and the worst in San Francisco.
The problem is not much of the hotel/apartment but rather the platform. AirBnb manipulates search results, prices and UX to squeeze harder. It now wants to up sell "experiences" that it puts in your face every-time you open the app. It is just exhausting as the rest of everything on the internet that is taking the same path.
I've been a digital nomad for the last 9 years. Airbnb is a huge reason why my experience has been so great. How else can I show up in a city in a new country , spend 5 minutes the day before I arrive, and end up with a nice furnished apartment in a great location for a week's stay?
The housing issue is more complex than just Airbnb / short-term housing as well: is there enough housing investment? what is the effect of international or corporate investment? are local regulations supporting or sabotaging the effort to build more housing? is there a large speculation market?
And anyway as long as there is no restrictions on the day-rental, investor will choose the option in their economical self-interest. Restriction must apply to force long term rentals.
I would not say "healthy", there is many situation where it is wealthy but not really healthy
Of course tourism can pipe in money and help a place invest in high quality services and amentaties compared to catering to industry.
However tourism often has a tremendous income distribution problem (see Hawaii or Colorado living conditions of service workers). This remains a fundamentally political problem to guarantee income distribution through living wage guarantees etc.
Not really in practice. Ex: there's lots of hotels around airports and highways. Would anyone want to buy a house there? Definitely not. The markets and thus economics are totally different.
> having short term stays is important for those visiting even for non-tourism reasons (e.g. in town to visit family, for work, etc)
I don't know about "important", but "useful" yeah. The thing is like, how ubiquitous is this? I'd naively guess for every 1 person who finds this useful, 1000s more are negatively impacted by Airbnb.
The issue is however in the short run, air BNB encourages taking existing rentals out of the market to turn into short term rentals. The effect is driving long term rental prices toward the short term price level supported by income level of the visitors. (untenable for most residents).
The conversation of new units refers to a decades long process dependent on credit cycles and investment interest.
This is true if we focus entirely on housing cost and basically ignore all the down sides. Of course, ignoring the perspective of those who owned real estate too at that time.
Real estate always has quite a bit of preference falsification associated with it too. Everyone is always publicly outraged at the cost increase of real estate while those who own the increasing real estate are internally quite happy with the situation. I suspect that is the main variable why we can never solve this problem.
As someone who spends time being digital nomad myself, it isn't my fault when I stay in an AirBNB that is available somewhere since I'm just consuming the available supply that is permitted by the local government and I'm all for residents having priority. Often time its a local resident who owns and rents out the place in the first place, blame them for not renting to locals if you want. Its the local regulations and governments responsibility to regulate this.
Until I had a bad experience, that turned horrible. I saw a side of the company that made me think "never again".
I rented a place from a "superhost" that looked very nice on paper. It was in fact very bad. Everything in the description was misleading, photos were doctored to look nice, "windows" opened to a wall on the next building two feet away, there was mold everywhere, the shower flowed into the bedroom, etc.
At this point it wasn't the end of the world; I stayed two nights and went home. Then I wrote a bad review. It was simply descriptive and contained no harsh language of any kind.
The review was immediately taken down; I asked why, and received a barrage of emails from Airbnb (some automated, some maybe not) saying that they were very sorry, they understood this wasn't the outcome I expected, but they couldn't publish it.
Turns out, Airbnb will go to extreme lengths to protect their hosts, because they are much more valuable to the company than one random customer.
But if the reviews are fake or filtered, then I can't trust the platform.
I went back to booking.com; they now have properties in addition to hotels, and are much more professional.
https://skift.com/2025/05/09/no-more-hidden-hotel-fees-new-f...
Everything from rats to exposed wiring next to a shower!
Review got removed. Full story here: https://pietersz.co.uk/2017/02/airbnb-block-bad-reviews
At this point, I stay away from serviced apartments altogether. At least with a hotel you can go to reception and demand they fix your issue.
The only exception is actual vacation homes that people rent out when they're not there. If it's not clearly a vacation home, I know that it's going to suck in at least one way.
View was amazing, as advertised. The bed in the living room was inflatable and deflated over night. Only three forks in kitchen drawer. Convoluted scheme to enter the building and room cause they want to hide the fact it's an Airbnb as it's not really allowed in that building. Swimming pool was on maintenance since 2 months.
Airbnb couldn't care less, basically I was being annoying to them. They didn't publish my honest review.
Sure having a kitchen and a comfy place to rest is nice, since that experience I'm very reluctant to take again that risk, especially with kids.
In this case also, it appears that the customer has no recourse (bad reviews are taken down.)
The nuances of these laws can vary, so context matters significantly in legal interpretations.
Hotels.com also cancelled a brilliant loyalty programme of buy 9 nights get the 10th free which was another motivation to look elsewhere.
[1] https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/hotel-safety-hacks-t...
> Airbnb prohibits indoor security cameras and recording devices, including audio, in most listings globally.
and my point is that there is no reason to think this is enough of a problem that any well-adjusted person should factor it into the "should I use Airbnb?" calculation. If someone thinks that is an issue then I would assume they never use public bathrooms.
Yes because of course nobody would ever do anything illegal.
If I’ve already been recorded and say, the footage distributed no amount of complaining nor dealing with the police is going to reverse it.
Also, I would argue that it may not be common, but it's much more likely with airbnb versus a hotel chain. Two reasons; more access to the space without witnesses, and the owner is more likely to know if their preferred gender is going to occupy that particular space.
Meaning, hotel staff can be walked in on by other hotel staff, and there is no guarantee that the attractive person you want to see nude is going to get room 203. Whereas you can see who is renting your Airbnb, and you have access to it by yourself all the time.
When travelling for a week, I don't want to each out every day. I appreciate having a couple of things in the fridge for lazy moment, or being able to cook breakfast if I want to stay in late.
And I can wash a bunch of clothes instead of paying €8 to wash a single shirt.
I'm from Russia originally and the first time I have ever seen one outside of a movie was when I moved to Canada. Russia does have them, but, generally speaking, only in large cities.
I think I’m the wrong audience though, as I’m happy as a clam with something like a Best Western or a Motel 6.
I stopped using them. will not got back
Not to mention that hotel websites are typically easier to navigate and contain a lot less React-sludge that makes every click take forever to respond.
I'm glad I turned around and booked with a hotel. It was very personable, good value, and better than what I would've gotten for the same price on AirBnb for that city.
To some degree, I understand the businessification of rentals - it's uncomfortable for both parties if you're trying to get a grandma to meet you to exchange keys after a late flight. But also, that person-to-person charm is a big part of why people chose Airbnbs in the first place. If it's just an IKEA flip of an old apartment, why bother?
I've actually noticed that my taste in interior design has been impacted. The "pastel and sculpted veneer" aesthetic that took over Airbnb, "modern" coffee shops, and supposedly adult furniture brands like West Elm disgusts me now. I suspect it would have appealed to me if it hadn't been badly copied with shitty materials so many times. Now, I associate it with hollow experiences, poor craftsmanship, and attempts to get me to pay more for a "quality" I won't receive.
Of course there are people that still ignore this, but the government has started to crackdown on this a bit, for example some months ago they started removing key boxes on the walls in the street
Yup my average airbnb experience in eg Spain is: dealing with an agent, asked to submit all my personal data to some random third party, all other communication done via WhatsApp, and often my number is given to third parties without my consent who spam me with things like offers of experiences/day trips etc
EDIT. Spaniards don't take it personally. There is a war at the EU borders and there are waves of scams and various predatory behaviours, plus usual organised scams from Balkans, China, and India. Visitors will not be happy about their documents being scanned.
It's like you're arguing banks should be absolved of using tls because it's just so tricky.
If your business requires you to handle PII I expect you to have the right equipment and processes to handle it.
Seems more like Airbnb ran out of money to burn and hotels lifted their game.
So if I ever take the risk of getting an Airbnb instead of a hotel, then I know the next time I book I'll pay cash directly with the host because it will be that much cheaper.
It's like uber: the bait and switch to a service that becomes less good and more expensive is costing them because the competition survived the first wave.
Also, the regulations caught up with them.
Basically, they wanted to win by scummy means, like a lot of American startup that calls doing illegal or immoral stuff "growth hacks".
Still worked well, they are a leader, but not enough to kill the game, and now they have to fight.
Good.
This probably won't work for you. It specifically violates Airbnb's TOS to attempt this, and Airbnb scans all messages between you and the host to ensure that you are not attempting this.
As for arranging it with a F2F conversation with the host, it's been years since I've rented an Airbnb and met a host F2F. That doesn't happen much any more.
In fact, it's not legal for AirBnB to prevent it in my country.
I think airbnb is still the better option in many situations - such as when you are willing to pay a premium to be in nature or you going on vacation with 6+ people.
I don't really see how better tech would ever prevent this outcome. Perhaps this disappointing in terms of continual growth, but I think it was inevitable and still provides a good path for the company to be uniquely useful.
That way was to skirt laws around obtaining hotel permits and zoning and paying all the relevant hotel taxes and business insurance.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/insurance/?city=portland
>When you earn with a transportation network company (TNC), referred to here as ridesharing, most states require extra—and costly—insurance.
>Uber maintains this commercial insurance on your behalf. What’s covered depends on factors such as who was at fault; whether you were offline, online, en route, or on-trip; and your personal insurance policy. Learn more about the commercial insurance coverage Uber maintains on your behalf below.
But I still think it was inevitable that cities caught up, either by restricting AirBNB units or giving in and allowing more hotel construction. There was no path for Airbnb to grow for 30 years without it ending up with basic econmics.
It was never meant to be. It definitely has been though. Lots of people making much more money renting out AirBnBs rather than using their property for long term leasing. Which has obviously compounded the housing issues most cities are currently experiencing.
Compared to these structural problems short term tourist rentals are a complete red herring.
Say I own a house and I just rent it out a few weeks a year. Even if it's not a source of income I am still going to price it to the highest amount that people are willing to pay.
One big example is Gites de France [1] with 55k listings, which is a 70 year old guide. Most of these aren't anywhere else. It doesn't make sense to look elsewhere when travelling in France. Other countries often have something similar, maybe in a smaller scale. For example there are holiday homes websites in the Netherlands, with close to 1000 listings [2].
[1] https://www.gites-de-france.com/en [2] https://www.vakantieadressen.nl/
Reminder that airbnb was supposed to be about renting your place when you were out of town, not buying 5 buildings to become an hotel chain yourself...
At least hotels don't ask you to clean the dishes, switch of the fridge and do the laundry before you leave
This made me realize that their original strategy was to extract the promise from the fat long tail of their respective supply ("unique experience" for abnb, "relevant search results" for goog). But then the Septembers are apt to become eternal if you can't keep it at a level manageable by humans, like a dang-or-2
From TFA
>I want to be a luchador!” he tells me, then immediately regrets it.
(dang is probably quite great at minimizing regrets a la Jeff, the insta ones most of all)
>Leave it to the subconscious to highlight what matters.
Online reviews are totally broken. I recently spent a week at an Airbnb in the Gold Coast, Australia. The property was rated 5* but was tired and worn. The photos must have been 5 years old before a soul set foot in the place.
I rated it 3*. Shortly after, I got a phone call from the owner. He had my number because I'd had to call him because one of the two toilets in a five-bedroom 14-guest 'villa' was blocked. As in, overflowing with fecal matter blocked.
He essentially tried to bribe me to raise my review. I refused. The house is currently listed as 4.9* with those same photos. A preposterous exaggeration of its quality.
Hours later they filed fake complaint to Airbnb that I rated poorly as I wanted late checkout and asked money to remove review. Airbnb removed my review post that. I had a flight to catch so I couldn’t checkout late anyway. I shared even flight details with Airbnb but they didn’t reinstate review and added a strike to my account. I expect host did this previously as well to improve their rating.
Wouldn't go back anyway.
I had an Amazon review removed because apparently mentioning that a competing product is more effective goes against their TOS.
I had a WordPress plugin review removed because apparently a critical vulnerability that got our site hacked isn't a valid reason to give it one star.
I had a local BBQ chain offer to give me a free bottle of sauce if I let them watch me give them a 5-star rating on Google.
I've seen tons of video game and app websites apply "anti review-bombing" measures to factor out thousands of low ratings for being supposedly off-topic, often for major games that they're financially affiliated with through sales or advertising.
And that's just for third-party websites. If a company's website has customer ratings/reviews for their own products, then the conflict of interest is too great to even pretend that they might be legitimate.
I think it would be interesting to be able to see an Airbnb place directly on Google maps (via a direct link), to compare reviews there; I'm working on a simple Tampermonkey script to do just that, will post it when ready.
- leave unemotional matter-of-fact reviews so they can't complain for slander
- leave them days later so they can't link them to you
- leave them for businesses that provide incentives for 5-star reviews
- leave them when multiple reviews already complain about unethical actions taken by the owner
A 4-star HIG hotel in Bangkok once proposed I leave a good review to fix one of their mistakes. I firmly said I wouldn't and then mentioned the request in my 2-star review. The mistake was assigning "free breakfast" to the wrong room in a 2-room booking. Had to fight 3 days to get it fixed.
It is technically possible to add a delay or whatever such that the land lord doesn't know who gave the review.
And there are social problems too. It is like you never give anyone anything but 5/5 if some app make you rate someone, unless maybe the worker try to murder you. A 4 is a 1.
But I think landlords are in a way better position vs AirBnB than gig workers are versus their employers.
Hopefully goes without saying that all communications should happen in the app.
A friend of mine had the same bribe experience (Airbnb, Israel) with a terrible accommodation (moldy, dirty etc).
In hindsight, why wouldn't they? Even if their reviews tank they can just register again with different credentials.
The last time I ever directly gave Airbnb money the host accused my female work colleague of blocking the toilet with menstrual products and charged us 400CAD for a plumber to "fix" it. My colleague was incensed -- she angrily stated that the chronology was wrong, demonstrated that no aforesaid items were in her possession, but the host didn't believe it. We ended up with my card being billed before claiming successfully on travel insurance. I can't believe that happened in Toronto -- Canada is one of the nicest places on the planet -- but (US) Airbnb support took the hosts side instantly and wouldn't budge. We had a shitty toilet for a week!
The last time I stayed in one was in a urine soaked crash pad with cardboard covering the broken windows in Montréal. We spent five hours there around the unsafe electrical unit before they did actually sort something else out. The host didn't reply to emails and it later turned out had been arrested, explaining both his silence and the less than salubrious people we'd previously been sharing with.
I deleted my account and refuse to go in airbnbs now. Booking.com is far from brilliant but at least it's scatologically free so far...
I never said that! He was not.
I effectively stopped using Airbnb, both due to prices that are approaching or more expensive than hotels, but also because of this shift of hosts to only caring about reviews and focusing on making a steady stream of new people checking in, without really doing any effort of making someone return. As long as the review scores are fine, all is good.
The original idea of Airbnb is long gone, and I experienced more than once someone writing on Airbnb, then another person sending a message with check in instructions. It is a business - nothing wrong with that in general, but it is disguised as people renting their spare rooms, which is rarely the case now.
What services like Airbnb would need would be direct partners actually testing the listings in person. But that costs money and requires hiring staff, which is antithetical to the business model of "gig economy" apps which exist in order to avoid the overhead of running a real company in that industry by instead offloading all the work to "gig workers" as independent contractors.
bribes or people just commenting "great" on avg or below avg offerings
If someone rents a place with scheduled roof repairs, not informing AirBnB or customer, they should be eternally banned. I couldn't even get a full refund. I can't imagine actual hospitality places with a long tradition around Mediterranean to ever do something like that.
I feel like it's very similar with everything:
* suitcases without nice silent rubber wheels, even premium suitcases have loud plastic ones,
* airplanes are a chore, descending into madness over time,
* eternally inefficient software, becoming slower and slower on faster hardware,
* tiktok guitarists without skill showing off their montaged videos earning a living through popularity,
the majority is voting out quality and care out of everything.
Strong cosign. Ratings and reviews should always be independent and beyond the control of that being reviewed. Reddit would be an amazing service if it supported commenting on any page/site/product/entity, but this is anathemic to advertising dollars.
I have no idea who to trust on the quality of products in an era where the amount of choices available is overwhelming and the number of real human responses on the internet in any place where there's money to be made is dwindling by the day.
People listing mcmansions they cant sell in a state of disrepair, lies about amenities and internet. Had to relocate several people repeatedly in the middle of the pandemic lockdown and it took months for the refunds to process.
Had another host try to pressure me into a cash deal and then claim damages to extract fees when I turned it down. After supplying their text messages and proof that the place was fine I had to wait 18 months for a refund and was locked out of renting a safer place.
I can't imagine trusting them for anything else. I now exclusively use craigslist and other sites that allow you to directly deal with property owners and have been really impressed.
You rent vacation rentals on Craigslist? That's the first I have heard of this even being a thing.
The bit that I should have expected but didn't was how strongly they side with the hosts in case of disputes. In hindsight, of course they do; the hosts are their money makers, while I'm booking them only a few times a year.
I stopped using Airbnb and closed my account. Hotels are fine, and never had any major issues.
So apparently you have found the ~10% or so of craigslist short term rental listings that aren't outright scams?
Everything was handled by local realtors and felt substantially more legitimate than AirBNB. You're really only going to find overpriced garbage on there. The places I have been renting are booked >2 years in advance. We often encounter other families on the beaches/lakes that have been booking the same month for a decade+!
Or run a hospitality business without doing any real hospitality.
Yes, a marketplace is a dream business from a profitability perspective, but it’s too easy to forget the marketplace is not the actual product that people come to the marketplace for.
It doesn’t matter if you have 5000 overpaid developers building the slickest software, the end product is not the Airbnb software, it’s the actual hospitality experience.
They wanted to disrupt a market, same as uber, and did this by circumventing laws and breaking everything.
There is a reason why we have zoning laws: To protect housing for people. AirBnB broke this. Took my city munich / germany years in curt to get the data from AirBnB.
While Covid, plenty of reports came up how suddenly good flats in good locations became available again for renting to humans.
My mother uses flats for her retirement (she is not employed by a company and therefore doesn't get benefits) and she always tries to keep the rent low. Just that someone tried to AirBnB HER flat for more money than the rent.
Uber, just in case you are not aware of, takes the cake from taxi companies. Taxis who are there even if uber is not available. The only problem with taxis i have: They fight accepting credit cards still today. "Oh credit card? Mh were do you want to go?" yeah fu...
This is so strange. Why can't the beurocrats just read the listings as everyone else? Is it too cumbersome to prove an apartment is sublet?
Also an UI is not a scraping API.
Also yes you also need proof. Just putting it online is not a problem. Even doing temporarily because you are really away for a period is fine.
Really? In practice it looks more like zoning laws exist so NIMBYs can increase their property value and keep black people away.
Can cars be used as a weapon? Yes. Was Henry Ford a racist antisemite? Also yes. Do cars exist so people can run over Jews and minorities? No. (Family Guy cutaway aside)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
The zoning laws i mean are: commercial vs. non commercial vs. heavy industry (loud, safety requirements).
The whole concept of taxi medallions is also extreme market manipulation with basically no benefit to the average consumer, which makes it doubly odd that someone would consider them somehow more ethical or less manipulative.
I have not seen any uber in smaller cities.
Uber goes were the market is 'cake'
This experience doesn't exist anymore, because Uber/Lyft/ridesharing apps out competed useless taxi companies.
People who needed to get taxis certainly didn't always get taxis.
But at least here most cities i'm aware of, do not offer uber. But Taxis.
Big cities sure they have uber.
I also agree though, i don't like that uber is disrupting existing markets just because but taxis are shitty. Still i haven't seen an uber doing dialisis drive in my hometown, its taxis not ubers.
The CEO knows exactly what the problem is because he spells it out in the article...
> Chesky explains that historically, people used Airbnb only once or twice a year, so its design had to be exceptionally simple.
It's true! I've probably averaged no more than 1-2 AirBnB stays per year for a lot of years. But the average host is probably handling 50+ guests per year. That means the host is the AirBnB customer, not me. I'm about as important to them as their cleaning service. The hosts and the execs are all just trying to make some money, and my dumb ass is in their way asking for extra towels and late checkout. Hotels are essentially just as hostile, except they are good at it. And since the cost savings have essentially disappeared I'm inclined to go with the pros and only look at AirBnB when the location or context give me some reason to choose the complicated option.
I have been using AirBNB for years (top 5% guest at one point) with virtually no issues (that weren't quickly resolved by support) and I imagine my experiences are this way because I am almost never in the US. I would love to see a poll on how people rate AirBnB broken down by where they usually stay.
Per another comment, if I'm in a city, I mostly look for a functional/predictable hotel. Sometimes stay in conventional B&Bs as well, which may list on AirBnB as well.
With a hotel, I don't have to worry about a doorman asking me who I am and then having to lie, per the host's instructions (yes, this happened to me). I probably don't have to worry about the pictures being of an entirely different unit and having an entire day of my vacation ruined trying to find somewhere else to stay (yes, this happened to me). I know exactly where the hotel is before I hand over hundreds of dollars.
I reserved an AirBnB months ahead of time to see the eclipse in Dallas last year, and the host canceled it the day before I was to arrive, with no communication (even when I tried to message them). I got a refund, but that's pretty cold comfort. Without any disincentive to do this, it's pretty easy for hosts to screw people over.
I find it hard to believe those places paid any penalty and if they did it’s not enough.
I mostly stopped using Airbnb. The same listings often appear in other sites too and those usually have less bad UX for search and booking.
It may also affect internal ranking order by which they show properties to people, but who knows whats implemented internally right now, and what will be in place in 3 months.
My GF loves it though and has a bigger preference of staying somewhere more homely as opposed to a hotel. Truth be told she has found a couple of great places...
I've seen Airbnb slowly get banned in many places I've visited over the last 5-6 years. Hong Kong. Banned and heavily restricted. Singapore. Same. Saigon. Same. All of China. Same. Taipei. Same.
I sold all my Airbnb stocks. I couldn't be wrong and maybe they'll find a way but it seems like the world wants less and less Airbnb and not more.
>It destroys the social fabric by injecting a rotation of strangers into the community.
Absolutely this. Literally half on my former neighborhood was AirBNBs, mostly small-time couples (1 or 2 properties) but also mega-owners (dozens).
During my few years on the side of Lookout Mountain (a relatively nice part of the city), we had several small-time police altercations (typically younger folks with drugs/alcohol), but one huge event stands out in particular: a D-list soundcloud rapper concluded a raging party by attempting to intentionally burn the structure down [paid on a stolen credit card]. The only reason his group was caught: they posted TikTok footage of "they new crib," which included them trashing the place — it only didn't become a structure fire because we heard the smoke alarms early!
I'm not sure what concessions AirBNB gave the homeowner, but very quickly the house was sold (and is again for sale).
My brother lives nearby, and literally none [¡ZERO!] of his neighboring houses house neighbors. You get to the point that you just ignore everybody in the neighborhood (this constant stream of changing faces) and mumble bitterly to yourself when mega-AirBNB-owner purchases his tenth home/hotel.
Isn't this why cities initially created zoning?!
----
Fortunately for me, I moved to a less-desirable part of town which houses zero AirBNBs (and lots of wonderful working-class neighbors).
If you want to play hotel owner then build one without exploiting people that want to live normal lives with their families.
I was surprised by two things when Chattanooga banned new short-term rental applications:
First) that it even passed
& 2nd) that the grandfathering clause conveys with the deed on all future sales [†]
But still I consider this a small and necessary victory to prevent future homebuilds from unhousing. A year later (last year) our surrounding county also placed its own bespoke STR restrictions, mostly different from the city's (of course!).
[†] IMHO, these have ALWAYS been a violation of most SFH zonings (e.g. R-1), so I would like to see some sort of "phase out" or "non-conveyance" so that eventually everybody is following laws enacted of its constituencies —if not immediate/timed
Quote
“I don’t know if I want to call it a social network, because of the stigma associated with it,” says Ari Balogh, Airbnb’s CTO. So they employ a fuzzier term. “We think of it as a connection platform,” he says. “You’re going to see us build a lot more stuff on top of it, although we’re not an advertising system, thank goodness.” (My own observation is that any for-profit company that can host advertising will, but whatever.)
End quote
Launching a communications tool in 2025 that isn't one of the two overly trod spaces (the advertising-hyperengagement loop of instagram, etc. or the people-you-already-know of whatsapp) is a genuine moonshot in a way that "what if airbnb but for manicures" isn't, and it's something that an incumbent like Airbnb could do that would be impractical for anyone else.
I dunno, now that I typed it it seems a bit awkward. How about "something@home"...?
They are bringing more "amateur professionals" along with the hosts by adding all those services. this is a big, unruly crowd of half-assed servicepeople
They’re kind of like Uber, in that way. But where Uber has become faceless and quiet, Airbnb wants to be a leader, and I respect that. Certainly there’s lots of cool things that _could_ happen with experiences, and I hope they do.
Airbnb has definitely gone the opposite way. My first Airbnb experience involved getting woken up by the daughter of the family that lived downstairs asking me if I wanted breakfast for 5€. I was getting whole apartments for 30€/night. Now it’s just as expensive as regular hotels, half of them expect you to wash all of the linen before you leave, and it’s totally unpredictable what you’re going to get. I just book with Hilton instead. There’s free bottled water and snacks waiting for me when I get there, it’s a pretty consistent experience, and free good breakfast at most of them.
The AirBnb may be illegal, there is no consistency with how you get in and you can’t even find out the address until after you reserve. Hidden fees, weird policies, you never know what you are going to get or have any recourse if they cancel on you
And also did you have a problem with AirBnB based on skin color?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/tech/airbnb-project-lighthous...
I spent over $10K on Uber over a year a couple of years ago.
With personal services, they're risking having that problem at a lot bigger scale: are you willing to pay your barber or masseuse 18% extra to cover Airbnb's commission? I suspect a lot of people would use Airbnb to find a reputable provider, and then make contact off-platform.
What's the first sign of a midlife crisis?
That someone thinks a new car will turn them into a not-asshole.
> He wanted to bust the company he’d cofounded out of its pigeonhole of short-term home rentals. Amazon, he was fond of pointing out, was first an online bookstore before it became the everything store.
> “I was basically going from room to room just pouring out this stream-of-consciousness manifesto, like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road,” he says
> Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.
> “Brian’s been badly underrated as a tech CEO,” Altman says of his friend. “He's not usually mentioned in the same breath as Larry Page or Bill Gates, but I think he is on a path to build as big of a company.”
> “Steve Jobs, to me, is like Michelangelo or da Vinci,” he says. Despite never meeting Jobs, “I feel like I know him deeply, professionally, in a way that few people ever did, in a way that you only possibly could by starting a tech company as a creative person and going on a rocket ship,”
> “[AirBnB experiences] was like our Newton,” says Chesky, referring to Apple’s handheld device that predated the iPhone.
Yeah... somehow I don't think that guy understands subtlety or nuance. What a douche.
The PR pack contain actual ad for the company announcing API platform etc. this was submitted to HN at the same time by a few different people.
Most press just replicate whatever is in a press release from a company but some, better, publishers use it to write an article.
Airbnb complementary destroyed some great places and rural cities around the world, because of them:
- Food/Restaurant prices go up
- Food/Restaurant quality goes down
- Real estate price goes up
- Dirtiness goes up
- Bugs and other animals thrive
- Quality of shops goes down, everything is disposable
- Quality of building/materials goes down, why install a wooden window if it's for an airbnb?
You could argue that it's not because of Airbnb but because of tourism, but I don't think so, Hotels are heavily regulated, they have strict cleaning rules, max occupancy and are built to host a certain amount of people, mass tourism wouldn't be possible without Airbnb.
Have you not travelled before Airbnb is a thing in a place? There were always similar alternatives?
The blame game with Airbnb is the most ridiculous thing ever.
Completely unfounded to try to blame so many things such as the housing crisis. Oh, that is just Airbnb. Just ignore that you still have problems due to taxes, government policies in places where there's virtually no Airbnb offera.
Hotels being regulated generally means nothing in places where there's a lot of tourism because you still get extremely poor services and experiences at times and Airbnb and other similar BnB services (this is not new, come on, is everyone <30 years old?) have provided much needed competition improving quality, which has otherwise been going downward steadily (cleaning, breakfast, bathrooms, etc).
You seem to dislike supply so youd problably want to ban low cost airlines so that less of the "rubble/mass tourists" would travel, right?
There's interest in painting these strawmen by people who didn't use the service or just tried to get cheap stuff and didn't pick good places, which can happen with booking.com or google maps. The govs love blaming their failings on apps and regulations mean market capture by certain entities.
It's funny how you can call for Airbnb's to be banned to solve the housing crisis but you can't call for stopping hotels being built everywhere which are then used to house refugees/socially disadvantage people in a beautiful money making cycle for government contractors, to just name one thing happening in at least a few European countries.
The anti Airbnb narrative is tired and dishonest.
In vacation destinations there are real estate companies that specialize in this. In the old days you would contact the local chamber of commerce for a referral, or look them up in the phone book. After that, there were websites like VRBO (still around, still works well). Now they put their stock onto AirBnB as well.
AirBnB did not invent short-term rentals. The parent is right that housing supply issues have a much deeper root cause than AirBnB.
I think you're underestimating how much AirBnB as a platform opened up this market to the average traveller, including business travel, and yes, absolutely contributed to the housing crisis, though I wasn't even making a point about that.
Oh, the disconnect. Your average person rarely hires services like this, maybe a handful of times over a lifetime.
Can AirBnB find a second niche they can start to take over?
The "loss leader" concept is Business 101, and Groupon was presented to customers as a gallery of loss leaders they can shop.
Actually delivering a good loss leader is hard. Design the offer wrong, and people don't attach properly-- they either don't load up their cart with additional, higher-margin items, or they don't return for future full-price services. I suspect Groupon didn't help-- if they provided consulting, it was probably to steer the merchants to give the store away to make Groupon look compelling regardless of bankrupting the merchant.
Over time, a lot of industries pulled away, either because they personally ran the numbers or simply saw their peers trying it and losing their shirt. The offers eventually retreated to what could survive in the cost structure: stuff like classes (near-zero marginal cost per attendee) rather than food or personal services with significant cost of goods or labour.
In many top places hotels would not be able to accommodate all visitors coming, meaning only the richest would get them.
So now I have to put up with the apartment next door being an illegal Airbnb, with all the inconveniences that come with that.
Even more troubling are the widespread privacy violations. Thousands of guests have reported hidden cameras in their rentals -- some even found in bedrooms and bathrooms. Airbnb didn't ban indoor cameras until March 2024, after more than a decade of complaints and several high-profile criminal cases. Combined with fake photos, misleading descriptions, and little accountability for bad hosts, it's clear the trust that once defined the platform has eroded. Airbnb didn't just lose its shine -- it actively neglected the safety and transparency that made it appealing in the first place.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nationwide-fake-host-scam-on...
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1n...
One time the host kicked us out on the second day of a week-long stay to sell the house. She then put us up in a nicer house, but not in the area we wanted to be in. Our schedule was also completely screwed as we had to move our stuff over and the other family wasn't even out of the newer house yet. Everyone was confused and upset. Then there is a cleaning crew that typically doesn't speak English, so it's hard to communicate what is going on. You also don't want to leave your stuff there at the time as although they're just doing their jobs, they're also strangers and you don't know if they'll steal any of your stuff. So we had to end up waiting for awhile and burning up valuable vacation time. Never again.
Pretty sure the only price you can see now is the total price.
I was looking a couple weeks ago and got annoyed that I couldn't find nightly price or how it breaks down
Are they abandoning NYC as a market since rentals are restricted there, or did they just not put enough effort into recruiting before launch?
I am not a particular fan of Airbnb--nobody is a fan of real estate agents, they are intermediaries that provide a service, facilitate discovery, etc.--but I am currently staying in an apartment I booked on Airbnb, and I am spending $2k a month for it. Decent space, a kitchen I can use, space for my clothes, a washing machine, a big fridge. If I had to book a hotel room, I would spend at least $8k a month for it.
“Book a hotel room” sounds like when a former university instructor told a student to "just install Linux" when they had some authorization issues on their Windows computer. The use cases are different.
Owner of the unit did nothing and as did AirBnB.
Luckily it was only a few nights a year - there's no mechanism to eject a guest like this. They create new accounts if they are banned from the platform.
Airbnb doesn't give a shit about you (and frankly, neither do the cops), but the cops and Airbnb don't want to tussle with one another.
Either way our condo started enforcing a rule that was long on the books that owners couldn't rent out their unites for less than 3 months. It was the bedbugs that did it.
Contrary to other comments I wish they'd actually focus on both the agent and the random host scenarios...
But personally my favorite things are weird places that are a bedroom in a house.
The mild form is when they have a dog you get to pet/play with. The less mild is staying with people who are weird in a non dangerous way.
My only bad experience was also with dogs, a place where when you step out to the bathroom at night two formerly friendly large dogs shadow you, growling cause, a rando walking around at night! Really helps the bowel movement.
And the weirdest experience I had was 2 girls roommates who advertised their open floor plan living room as a "separate bedroom" (it was not instant book and I'm very obviously a dude). With a cat that slept at my feet, and a dog that woke me up in the morning (they did offer to lock up both). Then when I was talking to one of them in the kitchen she told me without any context that they were not lesbians. I am in a relationship and it was pretty awkward so I didn't develop the subject further, but I am still wondering.
Just like with Groupon where the idea was so novel for the time but quickly faded away as irrelevant, a diluted shell of its former self.
When you really think about it, Airbnb offers you nothing that a normal travel booking site by the giant incumbents like Expedia group offer, and unlike Airbnb, Expedia group sites can compare rentals by owner alongside real hotels, too.
So basically when you go to Airbnb you're going to a partial travel site and it's also a travel site without any extra travel functionality like rental cars, hotels, and other vacation packages.
I wonder if Airbnb's pivot toward local experiences is a much bigger mistake than using their momentum to make a real attempt at competing more directly with Expedia/Priceline. Why didn't Airbnb start working with hotels and other traditional travel industry players?
> Despite never meeting Jobs, “I feel like I know him deeply, professionally, in a way that few people ever did
As opposed to all the people that did actually met him, or worked for him?
This is such a painfully gushing puff piece and this sentence is peak cringe that just makes the man sound mentally ill.
It's always weird and I have no clue why people get that mindset.
Hey, that sounds like AmEx Concierge.
Airbnb had novelty, inventory, and savings as its special sauce.
Nowadays we all know what a sub-par, overpriced Airbnb is like and it’s worse than a hotel because it’s usually far more inconvenient.
So we’re back to a hotel like experienced as the desire: convenience, available, and competitively priced.
AirBnB also provides extra capacity when a city or town gets overcrowded due to an event (matches, concerts, convents, etc). Building a proper hotel is much more capital intensive than converting a house or an apartment into an AirBnB place, and back into a normal long-term rent unit, or your own abode, when needed.
Vacation rental fulfil a niche that hotels do not, and I don't understand people who view them as substitutes. The fewer people use them the better. More for me and at better prices.
That said, Im probably not the median consumer. When I vacation, hotels cover almost none of my needs.
Im looking for a private beachfront Jacuzzi, hobbit hut in the forest, or someplace to party with family and kids.
I cant imagine using one as a hotel substitute.
What criteria? What do the hosts know about the guests?
Do you see the names and home towns etc?
BUT then came the growing pains caused by investors and speculators. Both of which clashed with governments who were manipulating their housing markets.
This isnt a place you want your business competing; the governments will come take you out.
Toronto for example, airbnbs can only be your principal residence. You have to register and license. there's a 4% airbnb tax.
This wipes out the investors and speculators. toronto's housing pricing is down 5% across the board. There's now people selling and losing ~$400,000. We're at record highs for number of units unsold. # of Sales are down 20%
There has to be a correction, but how that doesnt pop the housing bubbles, i dunno. doesnt help that toronto's unemployment is at 10% which is worse than the financial crisis. Toronto's also losing their film industry shortly. Auto industry is suspended if not moving.
Also do they let your search by final price now or do they still hide a bunch of fees?
Why even allow fees? Make the owners set a price that includes what they need for cleaning, etc.
- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).
- Inability to change pagination size.
- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.
- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.
- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.
Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.
Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.
As of slowness, I suspect they don't have a DC an Australia, so your packets need to travel across Pacific and back.
I also suspect that their web site already brings enough customers, and a serious rework to make it more usable won't bring in many more customers, and any more money. Investing in that is likely a poor business decision. I bet their resources mostly go to protection from fraud, legal battles, and other non-engineering concerns.
I imagine significantly reducing database calls and blob downloads due to short-sighted pagination behaviour would result in significant cost saving, reduce bounce rate and increase conversions.
- Impossible to filter / search by rating, which is a must-have if I am going to travel, no way I am risking staying at a first-time host, a lot of horror stories from forgetting bedsheets to outright scams.
- There is no way to see the precise location, which is understandable for safety in some places (mostly listings in areas with "single-family" similar neighborhoods, like Orlando suburbs, you don't want to advertise your home as "available"). But, in some cities, for example, in Rio, a large radius can make you uncertain if the apartment listing is beachside or in the favela's entrance.
Much better to spend years on an expensive redesign that somehow makes the user experience worse. Now that's how you get ahead.
reinvention of Airbnb
AirBnB provides an amazing service, the ability to painlessly book hotels that feel like houses.
I guarantee you they are not going to be the next Apple or Microsoft, they're instead just going to dilute the value of their core business chasing things that aren't going to work, instead of focusing on their core service, and then in so many years time they will become irrelevant rather than inevitable.
Airbnb is still a great option if the location is under served by normal hotels, or if you are traveling with families so you want to have a kitchen/amenities. But otherwise I almost exclusively book hotels now.
They chose to stick experiences and services as a root choice in the mobile app, not something that is attached to a booking or stay you already have. While I expect the major use case to be using these new services during a stay, the app design shows they are paving a future where you take some of what you loved about your airbnb stay back home with you.
The future of Airbnb was and always will be a place to book stays in someone's home. These other things they are doing are a bad joke that will at best waste money for no gain, and at worst will cause their actual business to suffer. Trying to be all things to all people is idiocy, stick to what you're good at.
Over 10 years ago I rented a folding couch right off of Pearl ST. Boulder, CO.
I stayed in the living room of someones 1 bedroom apartment for $300 a night instead of 1k+ a night for the equivalent at what amounted to a travel lodge motel. The prices there were out of control, no inventory, just awful.
There are "plausible deniability" cartels everywhere, it's and it's always nice to see their grip on a region drop.
Safe place to stash your luggage is another matter, there's a dozen apps that cater to this need now too so if you are sleeping in the bus station at least you can put your baggage behind a locked door
Before someone declared a need for buggy and unreliable locker apps, for decades prior you could deposit something called a "coin" into a slot which would allow you remove an equally archaic object called a "key" from the lock, which you would deposit in your pocket and be on your merry way.
Back in the '90s, sure, but then some people flew a plane into a tower block and apparently this meant we need to pay $20 for some minimum wage dude to put our bags on a shelf that's only open 9-5 instead.
Vienna Austria has a great set of lockers at their central station, I think I paid 3 or 4 euro for 12 hours for a locker. Venice too, but I did not anticipate that Venice has nowhere to lock up a bicycle, so I ended up paying 18 euro to store my "oversize luggage" for the day.
All in all I found European train stations to have better accommodations than American (makes sense because people actually use them everyday, 100+ trains a day in Berlin vs a place like Cincinnati with 2 trains a day)
Bilbao Spain I was glad to find a convenience store that was on the apps but also just accepted 5 euro to take my bags into their store room a few hours. I bet most hotel receptions would make that deal with you too.
Nador, Morocco I could not find anyone to take my luggage, the train station attendant told me to try the bus station, but the bus station attendant refused without my having a bus ticket, "even with cash?" "Even with cash"
Source: Have hosted couchsurfers very long ago
There used to be very few hotels with kitchenettes, any space really beside just a bed.
There's way more suite and kitchenette options.
Lots of people travel for longer than just a night or two, or to travel beyond just business, where you might want to be able to actually enjoy being in your private space.
Hotels weren't really designed for this.
They wanted you to never be in your room, and instead upselling you at the bar.
Now, you can pretty easily find relatively affordable hotels that have many different types of rooms layouts for all different purposes.
Now, that defeats a lot of the point in having an AirBNB.
As you said, AirBNB is really only good if you're traveling somewhere with lousy hotel options, you're going to be staying somewhere for a long time, or traveling in a huge group, or you want to host a rager party or something...
As soon as you go to two rooms, airbnb gets more appealing fast.
It’s also great where there are either no hotels, or the only options are motels, if you want somewhere with a kitchen and such.
Good for destination-type getaways where the point is to mostly hang out at the airbnb. Hotels suck for that. Even the nicer suite-type ones mostly do.
Any data to back it up, please?
The narrative is always that "it's worse and making things worse" and gets blamed for everything such as the housing crisis which is insane but it's been an awesome asset to humanity. Not just Airbnb but other similar search lodging offerings.
Perhaps someone here on HN will read this here, make an app out of it, get funding and set up such a thing in the US.
And Uber did the same thing for taxis. Now Uber's ridiculously expensive and taxis are often a better option.
There's an incentive by many to just trash these competition apps and services but they've been a net good.
Dodging regulation and taxes was Airbnb's biggest competitive advantage.
Regulatory entrepreneurship only works long-term if you can continue to dodge, or change, the law (either statutes or case law.)
We will see what happens with all of the AI companies who claim fair use.
Quick edit: just searched on both VRBO and Airbnb for rentals in my city for the same date range, VRBO shows me 191 options, Airbnb shows 330 options.
By the way, I live in a capital city in Europe so the discrepancies between listings would probably translate to many other places...
Paypals revenues have been growing for ever. They basically do just one thing. But since the market in that one thing has a limit. The market can only price in a certain amount so the stock never grows.
So they look for growth else where
> It is also revitalizing an unsuccessful experiment the company began in 2016: offering bespoke local activities, or what it calls “experiences.” The next stage, launch date unspecified, involves making your profile on Airbnb so robust that it’s “almost like a passport,” as Chesky puts it
> After that comes a deep immersion into AI: Inspired by his relationship with Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.
That kind of makes sense to me - Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company (except maybe Uber/Lyft)
Looking at incumbents:
Tour booking - TripAdvisor and Viator, not enough network effect
Home services - Angie's List and Thumbtack, not enough network effect
Events and concerts - Ticketmaster, enough said
Classified ads - Facebook Marketplace, enough said
Gym and fitness - Classpass, which I think is pretty good actually, but definitely going to be acquired or copied by Big Tech
Volunteer event hosting - Meetup, anyone under 40 even remember that?
Not at all. Basically all reviews on Airbnb are positive bc of the threat of retaliation. Your reviews are like your social credit score, not worth threatening to post a negative but honest review.
Give someone three stars; which is “okay” (airbnbs own language) and you’re forced into specifying why a review (or part of a review) got three stars. The canned reasons are pretty negative (“felt unsafe”, etc). The “write in your own reason” option is limited to 50 characters.
So you’re incentivized to select 4 or 5 stars which allows you to click through the review without any other entry requirements.
I only give truthful reviews and I’ve only had three cases (out of ~70 stays) where the host was an asshat in response.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.
The path to success is made by many failures; and when you get to success, you can't take the success, you can't be 'done', you need more success. It's a long form of chasing the next dopamine rush.
He probably hasn't felt more alive than the week he threw everything in the blender. It's a mix of issues that starts with childhood and leads to a life of addiction for more.
On the cover of a magazine, it's an inspiring story, but deep down it's a sad human trait.
All power to him though, it sure makes for interesting stories.
AirBNB from 10 years ago "nailed" it in a better way than AirBnB of 2025, but that's the customer's perspective. From the business perspective, they probably "nailed it" in a sense of squeezing as much juice out of the unwitting guest...
Greed. Founders and employees who cannot understand the value of a sustainable business that does one thing well and keeps people employed. We shouldn't seek to grow indefinitely, we should seek to reach comfortable levels of success and then focus our efforts on rewarding the people who are clients and employees maximally.
Manage rides -> manage deliveries -> manage booking with places that are already in network -> expand bookings from restaurants to other services -> expand bookings to hotels -> vacation homes.
But honestly going the other way around isn’t that crazy.
The reason I should have uninstalled it much longer is because it's toxic for rent prices. I now pay more for hotels and sleep well.
I got rid of Uber for the same reason.
The worst part is we had their support on the line for hours. And he told that they didn't even have a way to escalate technical issues. His job was to stall on the phone and be yelled at until hosts gave up.
Unfortunately it's just the latest example of awful experiences with the company. As a host you are liable for everything. The only way to get them to hold up their end of the bargain is small claims court. They collect their fees for doing nearly nothing for either party.
You will not find a way to contact any individual at Airbnb. It's an impressively seamless anti-human design. They have built a wall and kicked down the ladder.
Not even Uber wants to be the Uber of Whatever anymore
For an actual thought… I absolutely love that the era of free money is on pause!
When I think of Airbnb, I think of an apartment with a pool in the Caribbean, where I have to hunt around to figure out the best places to eat, or cook myself.
In some countries at least the latter is a well-established tradition that long predates Airbnb. Like, you'd literally just drive or take a train to some coastal town and then look around for signs that say "vacancy".
booking.com also offers apartments too, and has far better pay upon arrival and pay nothing right now features.
Additionally there’s a creep factor in the number of cameras on the property. Hotels have lots of cameras but you don’t get the same sense that you’re being policed. I realize some of this is necessary but it can still be off-putting; usually everyone in the rental comments on the cameras.
Airbnb could normalize the value by enforcing standards and capping certain unreasonable charges in particular cleaning fees. A uniform cancellation policy would also help.
Additionally there are no rewards for booking Airbnb and no perks at all for repeat customers.
I’ve moved from Airbnb to Marriot and I get 4pm late check out, upgrades to suites, free breakfast, priority booking etc… and I don’t have to take the garbage out, bundle up sheets, do the dishes, etc…
Oh, I thought they did a double unlock. I.e. waiting for both reviews to be finished before publishing either.
i don't think so. I've seen reviews from hosts that i haven't reviewed.
Our place is all five star reviews and there is very little benefit for further five star reviews. So it's kind of all risk for us at this point when someone does review.
Reviews should have an expiration date, because places age and wear out; I'm not interested in learning about the experience of someone from five years ago, I'd like to know how it was last week.
yea i usually refrain from bad reviews because i might want to go stay with them in future.
I'm not gonna leave a mixed or negative review because snitches get stitches and I can't imagine anyone else reviewing has any less pathological incentives.
Source: look at online reviews of literally anything
It's now widely understood that online reviews can have a large impact on the success of a small business.
- What rating do you leave if you have a disappointing service from a really kind proprietor (like if the best humans make you the worst food)?
- Are we entering a world where there will be ramifications for the reviews you give? Will a restaurant be less likely to seat you if you left a middling review? As more places require you to identify with a phone number before you can be seated, will you receive worse service if you left a disappointing review or tip? It feels like reputation is about to flow in both directions.
- How do you avoid rating inflation when people who have bad experiences are reluctant to write about them?
And there are a bunch of little bugs in the current rating ecosystem:
- Culture impacts a rating. Americans are conditioned to start from 5 and deduct stars, which makes it harder to identify truly great places. Contrast this with Japan, where 3.5 stars is a really good rating, because Japanese people start from the median.
- If a place has thousands of reviews and a really high score, they're probably bribing people to rate them.
- How do you protect against spam? That includes reviews being bought from call centers, but also shitposts from people who don't like that something exists, or the way its staff behaves outside work.
- If people who eat fast food like a fast food place, it could have a better rating than an objectively better place that caters to more discerning clientele. How do you communicate that the people leaving reviews are/aren't representative of your tastes?
And as you alluded to, writing reviews (and HN comments) takes time that would often be better spent doing other things. What incentives do people have to take the time to leave a useful review? Can we find a way to make the process less burdensome?
i think on Google Maps they can't rate you back (maybe on Booking too?), so depends on the service. I don't review much anyway, but about a couple of times a year I run into a pretty amazing place that I can't help but compliment, and once in a blue moon a really crappy place that really upsets me so I feel like sharing that too. I see absolutely nothing pathological about that.
When I do I shut my mouth, lest it be overrun by influencers, content creators or other undesirables.
As someone that has a backbone and isn’t afraid of the consequences of reporting when I get ripped off, I find mixed reviews to be valuable.
with some chain hotel at least i know what to relatively expect in terms of service and amenities and have someone to complain to to make it right.
Only time it makes sense is if you're traveling with a large group of people
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".
I used to still look at AirBnB (until very recently, when one of the founders joined DOGE), but I saw that their fee continually rose over time, and became like 10% or 15%, and there's in many places (Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London...) no meaningful listings (which is due to State bans).
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 a set of listings which I concluded was a scam, the same very dodgy letting agency, who had lots of apartments, all with no ratings, but very bad reviews on-line elsewhere. I think they were continually deleting and remaking their lets on AirBnB, to get rid of negative reviews.
AirBnB itself (and here we see "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, and had of course no reason to have confidence in the boilerplate estimate of "few days".
After that, I put up my own HTTPS proxy, which I now use whenever I use AirBnB, to avoid AirBnB when I log in suspending my account, which I then have to have support fix, which of course means the account cannot be used until support get back to me, and assuming they actually do unblock the account, and given how variable support is, this is not a given.
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, which was eventually resolved by dint of the new process AirBnB had imposed on users (something about ID and account photos, IIRC) actually not working properly, so in the end it turned out Support (some poor Indian woman working from home) and I were able to circumvent the problem.
I've also been reading people write about AirBnB blocking their valid negative reviews on spurious grounds. That undermines all reviews on all properties; you're looking at reviews wondering if there were valid bad reviews you're not seeing because AirBnB has been blocking them.
To summarize, fees are now rather high, when it comes to Support my response is Jesus please God anything but Support, I had to backdoor my own HTTPS traffic to use the service, I'm now uncertain about the veracity of reviews, and no viable apartments in quite a lot of locations.
So, for me, AirBnB was great, but now it's really not.
Then, recently, one of the founders (his role now is only on the board) came out as pro-MAGA and joined DOGE, and that was the end of AirBnB for me.
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.
Sometimes, places I've been to before, where the owners and I know each other.
Another approach is to look on AirBnB and if there is anything, use the images n reverse image search to find the listing on other sites - and often places are on other sites.
Other times, a more general search for the location of interest and see what's there which is simply not on AirBnB, and negotiate discount for long stay.
For the now considerable number of cities where AirBnB has been or has effectively been banned by State, you have to use these approaches anyway - that's how I got into Paris.
A disappointing and soulless comparison.
Note they have a fucking ridiculous interview process of at least _6 rounds_. Absolutely bonkers.
I was tempted to go for it but fortunately have many other companies in my pipeline with much saner interview processes.
Good luck to whoever gets those positions. Seems they pay quite well, but the question is whether ABB push to expand will pay off and become self sustaining.
This app based disruption shit that was fed by zero interest rate policies can go somewhere very far away as far as I’m concerned. Like Mars.
On two separate occasions this year I've had issues with them.
First, my wife had booked a lodge in the lakes with lots of outdoor space for us to go with the kids and hopefully see the stars, and give them room to roam outdoors; for months our children had been looking forward to it, and a mere 4 days before, the host contacted us saying they'd have to cancel because the power was out; clearly bullshit, no apology, they'd obviously gotten a better price elsewhere because it just happened the weather was looking better than expected that weekend; and I don't see how it would take 4 days to get the power back on; it wasn't remote.
On a separate occasion, 2 friends and I had booked an AirBnB in Wales to attend a wedding together in the area, the host cancelled days later because they'd accidentally double booked; we booked another, they cancelled, no excuse; half a dozen cancellations later, we currently have a booking, and we'll find out in a couple of weeks how that goes.
I don't have the time or the patience for this kind of game-playing bullshit from hosts, and I certainly don't like disappointing my children; I would choose a hotel at a higher cost but they're not always able to provide the experience you're aiming for; it's not always just a room to stay in.
We've used AirBnB in other parts of the world without issues, but we'd usually book those for a few days into a trip, and start with a hotel, so you're not arriving somewhere and immediately have problems when something goes wrong.
One country in particular; my wife and I travelled with two friends who were travelling to arrange their wedding in said (European) country, booked two double rooms, we arrive and we knock at the address we're given, since we've been given no further details; the "host" says to come with him; first tries to put us all up in a box room in some lady's house, with two bunk beds with an adjacent toilet that was flooded and pouring in to the room; when we decline, he takes us to another place where an old man was looking to rent a room, he seemed like a nice man, but my wife was uncomfortable because his living area had a window into the shared shower room, no thanks; the old man was quite upset that we'd declined, he probably needed the money and we felt a little guilty about that; after a couple more examples of this wandering around the town with this guy, it had become apparent, he was taking bookings for rooms that didn't exist and trying to put people up in random peoples homes; I suspect he also wasn't paying them near what he was taking for these bookings.
It was a disgrace, and when we became irritated after so much time wondering around with our cases in the heat we suggested we'll book rooms at the Hilton we had passed while wandering and deal with AirBnB after our break, he managed to find us something suitable; both "almost" to the standard we had booked, and both places he had the keys to in his pocket.
We reported it to AirBnB, but they of course did nothing.
Things have mostly settled down, but suddenly taking a lot of housing off the market meant real supply shocks even if there was plenty of land available for development.
You can build new houses. But if locals are pushed miles away from town, the town dies. A new town is formed. And if that new town gets the slightest bit of popularity on social media, Airbnb swoops in to suck the blood out of it.
It's absolutely killing communities with incomes below the US average.
IMO it's meaningless to cite this 0.1% non-sense, because nobody will rent an AirBnB on the outskirts of huge cities far from tourist hotspots, so whoever comes up with these numbers, they probably try smearing the data by selecting an unreasonably wide area for comparison
As a simple example, in Austin TX, Inside AirBnB tracks over 15000 short term rentals, which would be closer to 5% of housing stock.
And the "only a small percentage of housing is AirBNBs" is a poor argument anyway, because home prices are set at the margins, and a relatively small reduction in housing supply in a constrained market can have a significant effect on price. Plus, for people that rent out a room, in can essentially have the effect of increasing the amount they are willing to pay ("I could normally not afford this apartment, but I could if I rent out a room on AirBnB"), which also increases prices.
More importantly, though, people have actually done studies on the effect of AirBnBs on prices, and found they have a positive (i.e. housing gets more expensive) effect on rents and home prices. One example: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
Quite the opposite. See for Montreal a recent article https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7445844 Officials estimate 4k airbnbs which gives 0.2% of all residential dwellings.
Who cares about residential dwelling as a whole. Most of it is occupied by owners, we are talking about rentals and 4000+ taken by short term rentals is insanely high and sets the prices for what's left too.
https://www.redrocknews.com/2025/02/28/interactive-map-of-se...
I just wish more Airbnbs had really dark rooms with blackout curtains. Hotels normally have that covered
Perks of ABNB- Private jacuzzi, functional kitchen for large group meals. Stay with friends and their kids under the same roof.
I can't gut a fish or leave gear on the porch at a hotel.
Beyond that, I value beauty and character, and find hotels devoid of both.
I understand your point if all you're looking for is somewhere to sleep that's clean and comfy.
An Airbnb isn’t cleaned during my stay either, but at least the trash can can hold a day’s worth of trash, and there’s a proper kitchen and more space.
If hotels brought back proper service I would prefer them.