I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

This is the extraordinarily naive libertarian position. Most people would not welcome a brothel as their closest neighbor for example.

You can see how it's useful to protect society to not allow people to run unlicensed hotels?

As others have pointed out, residential zoning laws aren't generally the product of corporate malfeasance. Usually they are there to help combat it. That's what NIMBYism is all about.

Well then, less allure would lead to lower prices, right? What's not to like?

I don't think I've ever seen an example of this reflected in prices. Do you know of any, or of any studies of this phenomenon?

Some tourists would prefer to support the town they're visiting by directly paying shop owners, etc, instead of having "hotel taxes" of indeterminate destination tacked onto their expenses.

(But you're right, using "kickback" was needlessly offensive.)

If there's one thing I've learned in my old age, it's that I love buying things for people. Because then the power dynamic is in my favor: this is my city, enjoy your visit but leave no trace.

(1) I'd rather the aggregate recommendations of a million people than the personal opinion of just one in most of these situations - you want the statistical mean experience, because a travel agent can be given special treatment or just have had a lucky streak placing clients in an otherwise seedy place.

(3) Hopefully another thing tech can fix. I mean, yeah, you have the rare extremely special case circumstance you can't easily break down into a power search, so they have a niche, but as a general tool for people looking for places to stay, you really don't need another fleshy body directly involved with the seeker.

When it's more than the website, I do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether the value I'll derive from paying a slightly higher price for amenities is worth it or not.

And, I get the benefit of the travel agent's expertise, as you say, who knows a little bit about me and what I care about. Sure I can do the research myself (and I will often do so), but it's nice to get all this stuff for basically nothing.

I used to "commute" to the Bay Area every 6-8 weeks for a couple of years. I'd stay a week each time. A hotel offered me a certain expected standard of service, which might not be great, but it was there. It offered me regular cleaning. It meant I had a reasonable expectation of a room of the standard expected of the hotel whenever I came over, as the number of rooms available meant I did not have to deal with people who had a single room or a handful of units available that'd regularly book up.

After a handful of trips, I had my list of 3 preferred hotels in the area, and knew I'd generally get one of the types of rooms I liked best every time I came over.

And every now and again I made use of room service or laundry services, and those few instances were themselves often worth it. But most of the time I spent a total of perhaps 10 minutes dealing with hotel staff over the course of a 1 week stay.

For a lot of people, hotels offers a certain set of expectations that might very well not include "great service" to be worthwhile. Not having the risk of suddenly dealing with some owner flaking on me would alone make picking a hotel worth it. When arriving after 16 hours of travel (11 hour flight + annoying time on both ends), I wanted to be able to walk up to the desk at the hotel, present them my details, including my bonus card, and know I'd be in the room and relaxing five minutes later, with no hassle.

"Walking through a beautiful neighbourhood" or chatting with a host would be far down the list of things going through my head at that time. In fact, my boss at the time lived nearby, in a beautiful, expensive house in Palo Alto, and I did stay with him once and it was nice as a social thing. But the hotels, while far less personal have what for many travellers is an advantage of being extremely predictable.

So no, hotels are not doomed at all. Some hotels might lose some types of customers. Likely the type of customers that are fickle and leave money in local breakfast places rather than in their restaurants, care about the cost of extras because they pay for it out of their own pocket, and otherwise generally contribute less to their profits anyway.

I infrequently use VRBO to rent a house somewhere without great hotels (and have tried AirBnB but outside SF, never worked out really well), but otherwise, the hotel experience is basically awesome for me. There is one set of tweaks I'd like to do (maybe to make a brand-within-a-brand for Westin or something), where guests get a standard network config in any room once they sign in, with MFC device in-room, VoIP phone, their own wifi settings, etc.), but otherwise it's awesome.

Being able to basically trust an international 5-star hotel to have a certain level of physical security and functionality (or to be able to add it) even in a place like Myanmar or Pakistan is great.

Being able to show up at 0200 and reliably know there will be people to check me in, that my stuff won't get stolen, that I can leave luggage and equipment, that a meeting with ~16 people won't be a problem with short notice, that the building meets basic fire safety, ...

The crappy hotels like Motel 6 or Super 8, sure, suck, but I avoid those.

"Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole."

You know, you may have a tremendously challenging job, are jet-lagged and still have to give 100%. Then you pay 400 Euro for a hotel and they charge you another 30 or 40 Euros per day for Wifi. You get annoyed but you don't care because you will get reimbursed. Wifi will be unreliable and you can only connect four devices at a time. And while this did not bother me, it bothered some of my colleagues that were travelling with an extended family (I mean, Computer, Phone and eReader may eat up already 3 out of 4).

And then you have the fancy shower. I tried for five minutes to get it to work. Manged to get water for a few seconds twice. Finally, while having a PhD in engineering, called the front desk to send somebody to show me how the shower works. No, it was not me. "plumbing problems, please wait 15 minutes". And another 15 minutes, and another 15 minutes. Finally it was time to go to bed without a shower.

So, yes, hotel guest can be annoying and can be "picky". But if I pay 400 Euros for a night then a working shower with preferably warm water and a reliable internet connection can be expected.

My one Airbnb experience was massively negative because I value my time.

Hotels are not remotely doomed. Demand for them may go down, though.

doubt it.

1. Corporate business and negotiated rates (a large % of business) 2. Groups (unless you cram 20 - 40 people in an airbnb room?) - this includes conferences, conventions, aircrew, functions, tour groups) (another large % of the business)

This assumes we're talking about city hotels with a normal(ish) business mix, but individual travellers often don't make up the largest portion of business for the hotel (this really does vary, but outside of pure tourist and transit areas it's roughly accurate). Add into the mix the zoning and health & safety requirements, and I'm not sure you could call "doomed" just yet.

There is scope for (ahem) disruption in booking and distribution, which we already see - but the physical product is probably going to be around for some time. Sometimes, you just need a big building with lots of rooms...

I have to agree with the upstream commenter's general sentiment that this idea gets all the support here because it lends itself to an easy narrative of armchair libertarianism #winning

Letting someone live in your apartment while you're temporarily away (or while you're still present) is a very different thing from regularly renting out a unit in which you don't reside. If you can't see the difference between those situations, I don't know much more clearly I can make it.

Engineer-ish types take this to mean that the line is arbitrary and therefore irrelevant, concerns addressed by that distinction are invalid, and efforts to circumvent/exploit it are victories in the battle against analog logic. Other people understand that fuzzy definitions do not mean that the distinction therein is imaginary, merely difficult to identify.

If you've ever heard the phrase "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater," it applies here.

Yes, that's part of the point of it. I live in an apartment building. My neighbor, who lives the next door down from me, lives in another residential apartment. We get along fine. However, we would get along considerably less fine if he were to open a dance club, a restaurant, or a hotel in his apartment. It is zoned residential, so this is not an issue. But I would be very interested if there were a proposal to change this zoning, because the situation of sharing a thin wall with a household, versus sharing one with a techno club or a hotel or a cinema, differs considerably. And indeed, there is a mandatory public notice and comment period if there were a proposal to change the zoning. If it were allowed at all, they would likely be required to upgrade the noise insulation, in the case of a hotel to have regular inspections for bedbugs, etc.

I am not aware of AirBnB running a similar consultation process where they give me public notice that my neighbor plans to turn his place into a full-time hotel room, and allows me to file objections. I also suspect the rigor of their health oversight is lacking.

Are you referring to the glut of available real estate, or the tourist attraction? Or is there some other thing that makes Las Vegas special?

Section VIII:

"Short term leases (leases with terms less than 30 days) are prohibited."

All costs of a business are passed to the consumer. Where do you think the money a business makes comes from? Sure, if there's a cost increase, a business can decide to lower the profit margin to avoid increasing the price, but the costs are still being passed on.

which in fairness should then be variable based on its usage

Why? When did it become wrong to charge flat fee for a service? The cleaning lady is also charging a flat per hour fee even though it's cheaper for her to do a single 3-hour job instead of 3 1-hour ones, is she being unfair too?

Nobody who offers a service can or should be required to charge proportionally to the costs. It's irrational to demand that.

That 'fee' should be rolled into the rental cost/cost of doing business.

I suggest he eliminates the cleaning fee and raises the prices by $35/visit. Apparently the morality of a fee depend on whether it's itemized.

He is using it to augment his profit

The nerve.

So if you stay one night you pay $35 and if you stay seven nights you still pay $35. Raising the per night rental fee would mean penalize people who stay longer than the average stay.