I’ve used them four times and only had one good AirBNB experience. Hotels are so competitive in price in the markets I’ve visited that I never bother anymore.
I've gone back to using hotels given the cancellation policy of AirBnB is ridiculous. As we've seen these last days, plans need to be able to change and I don't mind paying a small premium for a cancellation-friendly hotel or serviced apartment.
Airbnb has a variety of different cancellation policies available to hosts.
As a host, I use the strict one because I can’t always schedule a last minute cleaning, and I find that people who plan ahead and don’t need to change are more respectful guests.
For holidays booked without too much time ahead that's fine, but for work which is easily cancelled or postponed, it's impractical. I'd like to see a premium price offered with more flexibility on date changes.
It does vary. I locked in an AirBnB for a May conference before I had access to a room block--and before the current virus craziness started--because standard room rates were insane. But I was able to cancel things a couple weeks back when the conference was canceled.
That said, I've never actually stayed in a room booked through AirBnB (although I've stayed at B&Bs which also list there).
My girlfriend and I used to think the same until we started staying at "shared" airbnbs, i.e. where you're staying at actual bed and breakfasts or someone's house as opposed to just a random apartment held by a Chinese superconglomerate filled with 1ply toilet paper.
Now we get to have really cool experiences - staying on a couple farms and watching our hosts go to work milking cows or feeding horses, staying in a really old Mexican woman's huge mansion and looking at pictures on the wall of her and her family with presidents, popes, all sorts of other really cool art, then having her cook us a delicious breakfast. That kinda thing.
If we wanna stay in a hotel and just have eachother to keep ourselves company, Airbnb can't compete. But for a really cool side-experience to the main vacation, that's something a hotel can't offer.
When traveling with a group where you want more than one room, I almost always find renting a house / flat on AirBNB a better option: "private" (to the group) common areas and a kitchen are especially nice to have.
When traveling alone or with just one other person (with whom I'm sharing a room), I agree, hotels are hard to beat.
Airbnbs are still differentiated from hotels. They are great for large parties whereas hotels are not so much. They are also great for secluded and more local locations.
To add a positive anecdote, I've had 6 experiences with Airbnb and all of them were great. If you're traveling with just 1-3 people, the prices are comparable to hotels, as you say. But when traveling with a large group of people, I've found that Airbnb is a lot cheaper.
Another example why, often the facilities which are advertised making an apartment seem on par with a hotel, often end up being some poorly maintained "home" version.
My family and I use AirBnB almost every time we travel, especially when we go internationally. It's the only way to make sure we get a full kitchen, a necessity with the kids.
We always use Superhosts, and have never had an issue.
The only odd thing we had once was a host telling us that if anyone asks we are his "friends from America".
I think the key is sticking to superhosts. Also read all the reviews for the juicy nuggets. Sometimes there are some big red (or green) flags in the reviews.
My experience is the opposite. I've used Airbnb dozens of times by now (am typing this from one, in fact), have rarely had a bad experience, and always find it cheaper than hotels, especially nice hotels. The only consistent negative, in my experience, is that there's so much variation that I end up spending way too much time comparing listings before picking one. I've gotten good at it but there's a paralysis issue and I don't really want to spend a whole evening on something like that. I think I have less anxiety around picking a hotel because hotels are more predictable. But I'd hate to go back to before Airbnb.
It's kinda surreal to see this happen. A lot of startups which were around the lifestyle sector also the most fragile are possibly going to have a heavy impact.
I'd imagine there's a sizable group of people who think Airbnb is only worth it if the price (and maybe location) is significantly better than a hotel, and that seems to be less true as the company matures.
Here, all my friends and my girlfriend are using airbnb for the reason that it is significantly cheaper than a hotel. If a hotel is only 10-15% more expensive, I also usually take the hotel.
Regarding the loss - airbnb is already mature and still generating so much loss? What a bad way to run a business. Would not invest.
There's also a significant group of people who thinks AirBnb works very well at the 2x-4x hotel price for a much nicer space. Hotels simply don't have enough of those rooms or if those rooms do exist they are considered to be <some ridiculously named set of> suites that are billed at ridiculous daily rate.
Edit - Examples pulled from the notes from 2019:
Paris - AirBNB $650 a night, 3rd story walk-up ~1900 sq feet apartment with a balcony. Hotel price for something similar? $12,442.00/night. Hotel for a basic room ( ~300sq feet) ? $220/night.
Barcelona - 2nd floor apartment in El Born. ~1500 sq feet. $590/night. 1500 sq feet room in a hotel? There were two in the entire city. Price? ~8k/night. Basic room in a hotel? $180/night. King room in a hotel ( ~370 sq feet! Amazing! ) $440.
I can go on and on.
At below hotel prices AirBnb competes with cockroach infested motels.
This is how I see Airbnb in 2020. Big cities have cracked down on people renting out their places and all the idealist hosts have left. Hotels are getting cheaper to compete. The one thing that Airbnb still seems to be great at is ultra-trendy "experience" homes like solar-powered biodomes in the desert or cross-laminated timber cabins in the mountains.
This is it for us as well. We always used to use VRBO for vacations for the same reason (and will likely return based on serial bad experiences with AirBnB).
I feel like a snob but I can't stand staying in hotels any more when I'm travelling for fun.
There seems to be two market segments for solo/duo travelers and families/large groups.
I’ve done the latter with big groups of friends and renting a nice house for a week is a great experience. But I think vacation rental homes of this sort existed well before airbnb
Anecdotally, I've seen luxury/boutique hotels respond to the kitchen/separate rooms appeal by offering those features at competitive prices.
On the other end some hotel brands are pioneering smaller "pod" units to be more competitive with shared rooms/tiny apartments.
I'd generally assume that the economics of maintaining a 10-100 unit hotel are universally better than managing 3 single-family homes if you can maintain "feature-parity".
Just a microwave saves significant money as I only need to order one restaurant meal a day and can easily split it in two. I need to be very picky about what I can eat so if I found something I'd much rather not waste half of it.
So many hotel rooms don't feature microwaves. Sure, full kitchens are a fire hazard but a microwave?? Maybe because some has room service and want to push that instead? Or maybe they had room service it ceased but the lack of microwaves stayed like bugs in legacy codebases.
AirBNB is group if you're traveling with a decent sized group. You can cook meals together, have a place to hangout, etc. As a solo traveler it's less good. Most of the time you either end up renting out an entire place for yourself (usually not cost effective compared to a decent hotel. Especially if you're paying a $50-$100 cleaning fee amortized across a 1-2 night stay), or renting a room in someone's house (which is cost effective but a bit of a crapshoot, especially if you like having your own space to decompress at the end of the day)
I wonder if this is just seasonality for their business. A lot of people travel in Nov/Dec, but mostly it's to see family, so they often already have a place to stay when they get where they're going.
I suspect summer is their big quarter. I wouldn't be surprised if they made their fiscal year start in March so that they can get that strong quarter at the beginning of the year, like how Apple starts their in September so they get Christmas at the beginning of the fiscal year instead of the end.
"The world's biggest home-sharing company reported a loss of $276.4 million excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, compared with a loss of $143.7 million a year earlier"
The loss increased by almost 100% versus the same time last year--and that's before COVID-19. This really makes me wonder how their planned IPO this year will perform.
Serious question, have you ever used AirBnB's customer service? It's so spare as to be nonexistent. They make Google look high-touch. The host is providing 95% of the service. AirBnB is only there if the host won't answer messages or there is some colossal problem with the listing. I've had several dozen stays and only invoved AirBnB service on maybe 5 of them. AirBnB should be making money hand over fist since essentially they're providing a pricey listing service.
My experience with AirBnb has been good but often I feel I miss something. If possible I always almost choose a hotel, because it seems cleaner, service oriented, often has breakfast and a place to have a drink or a coffee.
There are places that is more suitable for renting a private place, but in where there are tourists there are often better offers at hotels.
In the beginning it was nice, you could actually meet interesting people. Now it mostly feels anonymous and impersonal, often you end up sharing an apartment with two or three other tenants and the landlord doesn’t even show up once. I prefer hotels now, price-wise the difference to AirBnB isn’t very large.
In Austin, TX Airbnb incontrovertibly revealed that hotel room volume was insufficient for demand and was suppressing tourism and its inflow of outside cash.
The common complaint about insufficient & overpriced hotels stopped being theory and was proved out by an elastic federated supply that _at least initially_ put more money in the hands of private parties.
High cost of entry for building hotels in the urban core & decrepit central planning suppressed the cities growth for years. At first hotel companies and their "advocates" complained, but then after they realized it wasn't going to go away, the cranes showed up and started addressing the real problem.
I don't know if Airbnb will be forever, but things like it should at least be cyclically introduced to reveal infrastructure and planning failures, then local private parties can solve the problem and profit while planning commissions try to keep up.
I'm the opposite, as well. We recently visited the US for a month - our travel agent booked hotels in Anaheim and San Diego for us, and we used Airbnb for the rest. The first hotel was fine, but barely. The second was horrendous - it stank, the carpets were wet and so dirty our socks turned black. We bailed and booked an Airbnb. All the Airbnbs that we booked were at least as good as we expected them to be, usually better.
It's the same story at home in Australia.
The caveat, perhaps, is that as a family of 6 we have trouble finding hotel rooms. We also usually book out full places, and want no interaction with the host unless things go wrong.
I have used Airbnb probably a little over more than ten times. And I've been very pleased. From renting a room in an apartment with other airbnb renters to renting a room in a hosts house, to renting an apartment to renting a whole house with friends, it's always been a good experience.
The times we rented houses as a group were the best and most memorable.
My experience may be a bit atypical in that I don't care for the services a hotel provides, but I greatly value having a bit more space than a typical hotel room.
I have started using hotels more lately after almost exclusively booking with airbnb for several years.
1 thing that I really appreciate about Airbnb still is that it allows you to stay in areas that usually don't have a lot of hotels, like Manhattan Beach CA or some other mostly residential area that also makes sense for tourist to stay. I would hate for them to fail and lose those options on a large scale
I stopped because the quality went way down. I used to get real hosts and now it’s mass scaled corporate rentals without a front desk to go talk to. Hotels at least have a front desk to go get help from and they are consistent in quality.
Yup, this is why I'm using hotels more now. Too many random problems, hosts who are in another country when I'm trying to solve issues, and accommodations that are often inconsistent with what was portrayed in the listing.
With all of these factors I really need a good deal for it to be worth the hassle
VRBO was Airbnb years before Airbnb decided to take their business model and add white-collar crime on top. Just like computer-dispatched car services existed for decades prior to Uber.
Not quite. VRBO was (and I guess mostly still is) focused on vacation rentals in traditional vacation destinations (beaches, ski resorts, etc.), and even before that there were of course local property-manager managed rentals for decades.
AirBnB was originally about shared rentals in urban destinations. Of course they both grew to overlap in a lot of areas, but AirBnB had a huge advantage in that their business model was much better suited (renters paid a fee for each booking, while VRBO had owners pay a subscription fee) to a Google AdWords dominated world.
Right, VRBO focused on vacation rentals, i.e. places where short-term stays are welcome, customary, and legal. AirBnB decided to apply the same model in cities were the practice is unwelcome, novel, and unlawful.
Site note - VRBO is owned by Expedia through its acquisition of HomeAway. Just last year Expedia consolidated it's homeaway/vrbo products into just VRBo and noticed the experience got significantly better (Booked twice though them for large groups in the last 6 months)
I've had bad experiences with multiple Airbnbs including:
- showing up at night with the key not in the agreed location, and not being able to contact the owner until the next day
- showing up and someone else was already in the unit
- a webcam was plugged in and placed on the bedside table with no warning
- conditions in the unit were significantly worse than those shown in the photos
All these listings had great reviews. Airbnb needs to make some real changes or they will lose further trust among customers.
> And then you give a bad review and those places lose their listing?
1. AirBnB doesn't care about adjudicating these disputes, so the host won't actually lose their listing.
2. And if the stars align, and enough people get ripped off, and AirBnB actually takes action against the host, they'll just re-open under a new listing 5 minutes later.
Last few times I have gone on there, the prices have not been cheap like they used to be. There's always a $50-100 charge for cleaning, and some other bullshit fees in there too. Of course those fees don't show up when you're searching the listings.
Airbnb cheats with bad reviews, so their properties look more attractive.
I came to a rental apartment which was trashed and uninhabitable and left it after a tiring few hours on the phone with Airbnb to convince them not to charge me and finding a place to stay (hotel) in the meantime (They also tried to find a 'suitable' replacement but nothing was comparable).
The host left me a negative review complaining 'I didn't want to vacate the apartment' (!). I was shocked that the host received invitation to write a review on a guest who hasn't stayed.
After numerous emails with Airbnb they confirmed that the host is able to leave reviews in all cases, as well as a guest, but they deliberately didn't e-mail me an invitation. They claimed they did, but after further investigations I found a proof this was deliberate omittance.
I had an experience where an Airbnb host canceled on me at the last minute because they "forgot" they had double-booked the apartment on a competing service. I was unable to leave a bad review because I had not stayed in the apartment. I contacted Airbnb and they confirmed that this is their policy. They claimed an automated message would appear on the listing indicating the host's cancellation -- but it never did.
I do see these “automated reviews” left all the time in properties I’m looking to stay at. In this part of the world it’s quite common for that sort of accident to happen.
Glad I wasn't the only one. I was an early adopter of AirBnB, but had multiple bad experiences in recent years. The fact AirBnB refused to do anything about it ensured I would never use the service again. Rather pay a little more for VRBO or get a hotel.
The problem really seems to be in the nature of the platform. What a market needs to address issues like this is accurate reviews (i.e. informed consumers), but here we have a platform which both maintains the reviewing system and profits when listings are filled -- a clear conflict of interest.
This really stems from the regulations on payment processors. In theory there should be the digital equivalent of cash, where the buyer can easily and directly pay the seller without any third party middle man in between them imposing conditions and taking a cut.
But since regulatory requirements make processing payments, to use the technical term, a giant pain in the butt, it takes a sizeable bureaucracy to do it. Then you get a perverse incentive to have the company that handles listings and reviews also do the payment processing -- and get a cut of every transaction -- which is what creates this conflict of interest. The company whose business is reviews should not be turning a profit from filling listings, or they won't want bad reviews even when they're deserved, and then you don't have accurate reviews.
AirBnB has been my de-facto landlord for about half of the last 18 months, all over the world. I've had two sub-par experiences (both in London fwiw) and one really-actually-bad one that nearly turned into a fistfight with the "host", who was illegally renting the place and furious that I, quite reasonably imho, contacted the condo desk to be let into the space.
AirBnB gave me a refund and a 10% off coupon for that last one. Overall I've been happy with it; must just be luck.
Nice to have my own apartment again though. The nomad life is fun, I just wanted a home after awhile.
As a reminder, the code block formatting you used is only supposed to be used for code. It renders any text of moderate length extremely difficult to read on mobile.
I also had a couple bad experiences with AirBnb years ago and am much more cautious and lean towards a regular hotel more often - despite yearning for the old Bed-n-Breakfast concept.
At this point I'm rooting for them to go bankrupt and fail, because they continue illegally operating in my city. It is illegal to lease entire units in NYC for <30 day spans, yet AirBnb does absolutely nothing to stop these listings and indeed refuses to cooperate with the city government in shutting them down.
I don't mind non-violent civil disobedience like Airbnb promotes, no matter the issue I think it's a great reaction to bad laws and poor infrastructure planning.
I have a friend who got into hosting AirBnbs pretty early. Bought a 4 unit place in a rough part of Toronto that was still pretty close to downtown and lived in one of the units while he AirBnbed out the other three. Occasionally he'd go on a trip and AirBnb out his own unit.
It was enough money for him to cover his mortgage and not have to work if he watched his spending. He's bleeding money now and it started about two months ago. This virus is going to hammer leveraged AirBnb hosts for a while and I think we'll start to see a wave of AirBnb bankruptcies.
That’s basically what I’m doing, except with a 3 unit building in Michigan. In an average month, the two AirBnB units bring in 3-4x the mortgage in revenue. Not enough to retire of course, but it’s a nice side hustle.
That being said, our bookings been hit pretty hard by the coronavirus. We’ve hade multiple cancellations recently, and the month of April is basically wide open. We usually have an occupancy rate for 85%. I think we’ll be lucky to have 50% of the next couple months.
Paying off two dwellings at little effort is a nice "side hustle". No wonder nobody in the west is working! Meanwhile the Fed pumps more money to protect banks from rentiers blowing up, while taxes go unpaid and hospitals are underfunded.
Short term rentals to tourists isn't occupancy, it's occupation. Sorry for the hyperbole I just thought that was good wordplay.
These rentals drive up rents for the people in the community and remove housing stock from the market, making it more expensive and less likely for people to purchase their home and build equity. Rent is non recoverable unlike a mortgage, even if you ultimately take a loss.
Flooding the housing market with units for sale at a bargain would be great for common people trying to build wealth.
And they should build wealth by saving their surplus value, which means adding value. If they buy land at a reasonable price they avoid paying tax to bankers via interest.
Create wealth instead of appropriating it and everyone benefits!
Shouldn't the increased tourism be a net win for the local economy though?
I agree its unfortunate if airbnb units increase rents, even a small amount. Finding good data isn't all that easy, but this study [0] from last year suggests airbnb was responsible for about 20% of total rent increase amounts in the areas studied. But, ignoring other potentially beneficial effects is one sided - if tourism was always bad, people should also be against building or operating hotels that could be apartments instead.
Seeing housing as a vehicle for wealth building is what leads to policies that increase or maintain housing prices. People don't need to put their money in to housing to build equity, they can just build equity. You know, save. Put it in diversified assets not chuck it all in to one asset and then leverage debt to chuck even more in to that asset.
Home ownership is how the system keeps the common man down. It should absolutely not be championed in his favour.
> People don't need to put their money in to housing to build equity, they can just build equity. You know, save. Put it in diversified assets not chuck it all in to one asset and then leverage debt to chuck even more in to that asset.
On paper yes. In practice no. Because the common man will buy a new car, or order some trinket from Amazon, or some other splurge.
> Home ownership is how the system keeps the common man down. It should absolutely not be championed in his favour.
Home ownership forces the common man to save because he knows he’ll be kicked to the curb if he doesn’t pay the mortgage.
If people treated their retirement savings like a true mortgage, e.g. putting it before all other monthly expenses, then yes it’d be possible. But they won’t.
As a home buyer you aren't making the choice between a diversified set of assets without leverage and one highly leveraged asset. You're spending money for another month of shelter while making the decision to keep it when you've paid for it long enough.
A lot of people would love to pump their savings into a diverse portfolio with little debt. Unfortunately we still have to pay rent. Personally if I do the math on it, putting savings into equities to save up for a 20% down payment on a mortgage is by far the most sound plan I can have because it optimizes my returns for my income.
And even without talking about returns, in terms of utility I don't want to raise a family in my expensive and tiny apartment - basically I don't want to save up so I can buy a nice house when I retire, I want to buy a nice house to build my life in then sell it when I retire. You've got the incentives completely flipped in my opinion.
Just the virus? I got tired of playing the game. I might save save 20 dollars in some instances but then have to throw something heavy in the way of the door so that other "guests" didn't break and steal stuff in the middle of the night. A business model without healthy standards isn't much of a business model.
Eh, I'm a bit of a centrist with respect to AirBnb. It should be taxed, but there are advantages. This guy bought right when AirBnb was first starting and long before any of the displacement concerns that started ravaging cities. It's fair to complain about the impact that AirBnb can have, but it's also a bit rich to call these mom and pop owners leachers.
The level of salt in this comment is off the charts. Yes, somebody is able to get a mortgage and make money off their investment. Just because you are unable to do so doesn’t have anything to do with that.
I made the opposite experience. Yes, some bars and restaurants profit. But the there's much more to an economy than food. And other services are rarely used.
I hope it's not the Groupon story repeating, where they went from funky-accounting to GAAP and all numbers had to be re-reported, obviously not in the company's favor.
It's not like Groupon. EBITDA is a totally normal metric to get a sense of how the core business is doing, and positive EBITDA in tech is a good leading indicator of profitability.
EBITDA is basically "how profitable would the business be if they had no debt and their existing assets never lost value?". For companies with factories, airplanes, etc. the physical plant deterioration matters a lot. For biotech companies with patents that expire after 20 years, asset value loss matters a lot too. But tech companies have neither physical capital nor TTL'ed intellectual property, so EBITDA is a good approximation.
What happened here is that the whole travel industry is falling apart, not accounting gimmicks.
Airbnb is a shitty company. Last october we traveled to Seoul and couldn't find the location of the apartment we booked. Even the local taxi driver couldn't find it after circling the area for ~30 minutes. We called the host during the entire 30 minutes and didn't get through to them.
After about 1 hour of time, we decided to call it quits and go book a hotel because it was 10pm at night and our kids needed to sleep. We were just hoping for a refund with Airbnb. What's their policy? "it's up to the host to decide if they want to give a refund". What did the host say? "i have great reviews and i haven't heard of anyone not being able to find the place." What about the fact that you didn't answer your calls? WTF
Similar situation when we booked a place in Tokyo. We asked the host whether it would be okay since we have two young children who are known to be playful/wild/loud. He assured it was okay and assured us the place was big enough to handle all four of us. We arrive in tokyo and and the place is tiny. The bathroom is literally a 3x3 box with a shower right on top of the toilet. The entire room is taken up by 2 beds with no place to move around, let alone space for luggage and two kids. On top of that, the host's apartment is in a building where the walls are paper thin and the neighbors are super sensitive to noise. We did the hosts' neighbors a favor and went and got a hotel room. Refund from airbnb? Maybe a partial refund? NOPE.
Seriously, I'm never booking anything on airbnb again.
You're basically conflating different expectations in living conditions to being dishonest reviews.
Your example of Tokyo feels absolutely tone deaf to me as someone who has been there multiple times. That's just the reality of the Tokyo rent market. The places are tiny and that's how the culture is there.
Not my first rodeo in Tokyo in an Airbnb dude, and I’m not conflating shit. I’ve had good experiences in Tokyo Airbnb as well as in Hong Kong and Taipei where space is just as limited. My frustration is with the host where we clearly asked up front before booking whether this would be a good place for my family. And the pics were definitely not representative of the actual space.
I find it a bit naive to take small children along with you into unknown situations like that. I question your judgement after repeating the mistake. I think Airbnb floats on questionable judgement and people are starting to catch on.
Eh, we AirBnB'd a place for our anniversary when our kid was 4 months old. It was his first night away from home, so we were a little nervous, particularly since he was a pretty noisy baby and had yet to sleep through the night. We only went an hour away so we could bail and come home if it was a disaster.
He ended up having a blast. The hosts had two pre-school age kids, and he was fascinated watching them ride their bikes around the courtyard. He was quiet enough that the hosts didn't even notice him, and he slept through the night for the first time.
Kids are pretty resilient, and if you never stretch into the unknown, you never find out what you can do. We've taken him on another (international this time) AirBnB trip, when he was 16 months, and he had a blast again. Though he did give us a minor heart attack when he woke up from his nap, evaded the baby monitor we'd set up, climbed off the bed, walked across the basement, and ascended a full flight of stairs by himself, only making his presence known by scratching at the kitchen/stair door.
Our kids have been all over the world and enjoy traveling. It’s a bit naive to think every child is the same. I question your judgment regarding other people’s parenting.
It’s not about the children’s capacity to adjust. They always do. That’s what kids do.
I am talking about taking children into an insecure situation in a foreign country to the point where you have to scramble to find housing for the night.
That said, I have a friend who’s mom had a need to travel frequently when she was young. She’s been all over the world. When I asked her whether it was worth it for her her, she said that it wasn’t. She just wanted to be home sometimes. She just wanted her mom to be happy so she went along, smiling.
I friend of mine had her host cancel a couple of days before her several-day Christmas trip. Of course everything else was crazy expensive by then so she ended up missing Christmas. Airbnb refunded her $16.
The host is probably listing the suite on multiple listing sites (Or even just with multiple listings on AirBnB), for different prices. When someone books the more expensive listing, they tell the person who booked the cheaper one to pound sand.
> I assume you were in Seoul for more than 1 day. What stopped you from going to the AirBnB starting the 2nd night? Not answering the call is no proof but I would have insisted to at least see the room I freaking paid for.
Once the person you're transacting with ripped you off, why on Earth would you try to keep engaging with them?
I mean, maybe if you want to waste your time on vacation, by all means, go ahead. I imagine most other travelers have better shit to do.
Everything in Tokyo is tiny. My dad, my wife and I stayed at a reasonably nice hotel there ($250/night) and the situation was basically how you're describing your Airbnb -- bedroom that's completely taken up by the beds, and a bathroom you can barely turn around in.
Kyoto, Hiroshima, etc. are a different story. But Tokyo is pretty much the most cramped place I've ever visited, both indoors and out.
I will stay in airbnb if someone else manages everything, otherwise I'm only in hotels now. I hate having to coordinate key pickups, I've shown up at listed places that weren't supposed to be listed by some middleman company.
When I travel, the place I stay needs as few liabilities as possible, and airbnb cannot provide that.
I still use the for the experience listings sometimes, but never for lodging.
Similar. I used to really like Airbnb and had a few great stays years back. But now I almost never even check it because the extra costs pile up and there are more disadvantages than advantages. I mostly stay in smaller motels where it is often the owner at the front desk, you can bank on someone being there to check you in at 10pm, etc.
The growing loses are mostly likely, ironically due to their growth.
As such companies grow and see huge market in front of them, it makes sense to take on loses to grab bigger market share.
Consider a company that makes widgets, profitably on a unit-basis. If margins are thin and it costs a lot to make said widgets, then they need something called 'working capital' which is the money to pay suppliers etc. before they, themselves get paid by their customers. This 'working capital' is kind of like a permanent need for some kind of debt, and weirdly, it grows as the company grows! So in a similar way, a 'high growth' company can have an ever-increasing need for debt as long as it's growing. Without access to this working capital, it can starve and die. It seems like it's a paradox, but it's not.
COVID could break them. They're at 1B revenue and losing money, on a 30B valuation?
This is bubble valuation, and with WeWork blowing up and now COVID hitting everything, the stock market in freefall - and that COVID will be materially damaging specifically to AirnBnB - not just indirectly ... the party is over.
This is the inflection point at which AirBnB becomes a 'real company' and has to live within the confines of 'non-bubble-valuations'.
Which is fine, think they will survive but not without changes.
There must be some difficult conversations happening at Airbnb leadership/Board right now. IPO has to look like needing to be postponed and I guess they will need to start figuring out ways to reduce their burn-rate until market conditions improve.
I'm currently in an AirBnB which saved me from spending a fortune on a hotel or trying to do the impossible - rent a place for one month in Zürich.
Both the app and website UX are horrid though.
In the long run I prefer this over hotels. Not only the price is better, but you also usually have access to amenities like a kitchen or washing machine.
In Croatia and a few other places, there are a lot of fake Airbnb listings. You can instant book them but they are not available and the host never answers. I once was stranded in a really dark and empty area of town because of this. The host provided a fake number even...
These fake hosts are still active, I can see the green dot indicating they are online if I look into the chat logs.
Airbnb did not pay for the hotel I had to book instead. I also couldn't use the meagre reimbursement I got on top of the full refund (at least...) because it was only valid for a month and I wasn't travelling at that time.
I still like the privacy and cooking my own food, but sometimes it's really terrible.
One day I was just getting drunk with a pal in Istanbul and we decided to see if we could get an Airbnb ... in Mogadishu. Sure enough there was one, a real nice looking place listed dirt-cheap by a new account that seemed to be based in Seychelles. Totally above board, I'm sure.
Croatia is not Somalia, but it doesn't exactly scream "rule of law", either. Airbnb is not inherently safe so should only be used in countries where nobody would even think of breaking a law, like Switzerland or something. I have reservations about using it in America even.
I spent a week in an Airbnb near Dubrovnik, Croatia and it seemed like a normal, if slightly touristy European city in pretty much every way. And the Airbnb was really nice, too.
Not sure where you're getting this stuff about "doesn't exactly scream 'rule of law'".
They're doomed, and the collapse in travel and discretionary spending could take a lot of property owners down with it. On the plus side this might clear a lot of greed out of the property market, allow prices to return to a saner median, and relieve the housing shortage that obtains in many places.
I don't think they're doomed. COVID-19 is a big deal, but eventually it will pass, people will resume travel, and people will get back to work; the world eventually resumed after the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu, and this isn't anywhere near as bad.
Like, I hope the AirBnB trend slows down greatly for all of the reasons you listed, but they exist because people don't have the need or ability to pay for more expensive, temporary lodging.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadNot sure what your experience was like, but I’d be surprised if the host has good reviews.
As a host, I use the strict one because I can’t always schedule a last minute cleaning, and I find that people who plan ahead and don’t need to change are more respectful guests.
That said, I've never actually stayed in a room booked through AirBnB (although I've stayed at B&Bs which also list there).
Now we get to have really cool experiences - staying on a couple farms and watching our hosts go to work milking cows or feeding horses, staying in a really old Mexican woman's huge mansion and looking at pictures on the wall of her and her family with presidents, popes, all sorts of other really cool art, then having her cook us a delicious breakfast. That kinda thing.
If we wanna stay in a hotel and just have eachother to keep ourselves company, Airbnb can't compete. But for a really cool side-experience to the main vacation, that's something a hotel can't offer.
When traveling alone or with just one other person (with whom I'm sharing a room), I agree, hotels are hard to beat.
Another example why, often the facilities which are advertised making an apartment seem on par with a hotel, often end up being some poorly maintained "home" version.
We always use Superhosts, and have never had an issue.
The only odd thing we had once was a host telling us that if anyone asks we are his "friends from America".
I think the key is sticking to superhosts. Also read all the reviews for the juicy nuggets. Sometimes there are some big red (or green) flags in the reviews.
But yea, it was funny. Luckily it never came up. We were only there for a few hours to sleep before moving on.
Regarding the loss - airbnb is already mature and still generating so much loss? What a bad way to run a business. Would not invest.
Edit - Examples pulled from the notes from 2019:
Paris - AirBNB $650 a night, 3rd story walk-up ~1900 sq feet apartment with a balcony. Hotel price for something similar? $12,442.00/night. Hotel for a basic room ( ~300sq feet) ? $220/night.
Barcelona - 2nd floor apartment in El Born. ~1500 sq feet. $590/night. 1500 sq feet room in a hotel? There were two in the entire city. Price? ~8k/night. Basic room in a hotel? $180/night. King room in a hotel ( ~370 sq feet! Amazing! ) $440.
I can go on and on.
At below hotel prices AirBnb competes with cockroach infested motels.
I always choose Airbnb because it is cheaper than an ok hotel but almost always better, never worse.
Outliers: gut feeling says less than 5% over 6 years.
I feel like a snob but I can't stand staying in hotels any more when I'm travelling for fun.
I’ve done the latter with big groups of friends and renting a nice house for a week is a great experience. But I think vacation rental homes of this sort existed well before airbnb
On the other end some hotel brands are pioneering smaller "pod" units to be more competitive with shared rooms/tiny apartments.
I'd generally assume that the economics of maintaining a 10-100 unit hotel are universally better than managing 3 single-family homes if you can maintain "feature-parity".
So many hotel rooms don't feature microwaves. Sure, full kitchens are a fire hazard but a microwave?? Maybe because some has room service and want to push that instead? Or maybe they had room service it ceased but the lack of microwaves stayed like bugs in legacy codebases.
I suspect summer is their big quarter. I wouldn't be surprised if they made their fiscal year start in March so that they can get that strong quarter at the beginning of the year, like how Apple starts their in September so they get Christmas at the beginning of the fiscal year instead of the end.
"The world's biggest home-sharing company reported a loss of $276.4 million excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, compared with a loss of $143.7 million a year earlier"
The loss increased by almost 100% versus the same time last year--and that's before COVID-19. This really makes me wonder how their planned IPO this year will perform.
They dont provide infrastructure or subsidies it should be okay
The number of bookings is decreasing, and they are refunding their cut from bookings made months ago.
BTW Airbnb charge both the guest and the host, they make a commission from both parties.
There are places that is more suitable for renting a private place, but in where there are tourists there are often better offers at hotels.
You really do have to read the reviews, though, both as a guest and as a host.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-airbnb-reviews-are-a-pro...
The common complaint about insufficient & overpriced hotels stopped being theory and was proved out by an elastic federated supply that _at least initially_ put more money in the hands of private parties.
High cost of entry for building hotels in the urban core & decrepit central planning suppressed the cities growth for years. At first hotel companies and their "advocates" complained, but then after they realized it wasn't going to go away, the cranes showed up and started addressing the real problem.
I don't know if Airbnb will be forever, but things like it should at least be cyclically introduced to reveal infrastructure and planning failures, then local private parties can solve the problem and profit while planning commissions try to keep up.
It's the same story at home in Australia.
The caveat, perhaps, is that as a family of 6 we have trouble finding hotel rooms. We also usually book out full places, and want no interaction with the host unless things go wrong.
https://www.airdna.co/blog/coronavirus-impact-on-global-shor...
The times we rented houses as a group were the best and most memorable.
My experience may be a bit atypical in that I don't care for the services a hotel provides, but I greatly value having a bit more space than a typical hotel room.
With all of these factors I really need a good deal for it to be worth the hassle
AirBnB was originally about shared rentals in urban destinations. Of course they both grew to overlap in a lot of areas, but AirBnB had a huge advantage in that their business model was much better suited (renters paid a fee for each booking, while VRBO had owners pay a subscription fee) to a Google AdWords dominated world.
Not sure what you want to do? Pay more so that Airbnb reviews them for you? Are you really up for paying old hotel prices again?
1. AirBnB doesn't care about adjudicating these disputes, so the host won't actually lose their listing.
2. And if the stars align, and enough people get ripped off, and AirBnB actually takes action against the host, they'll just re-open under a new listing 5 minutes later.
I came to a rental apartment which was trashed and uninhabitable and left it after a tiring few hours on the phone with Airbnb to convince them not to charge me and finding a place to stay (hotel) in the meantime (They also tried to find a 'suitable' replacement but nothing was comparable).
The host left me a negative review complaining 'I didn't want to vacate the apartment' (!). I was shocked that the host received invitation to write a review on a guest who hasn't stayed.
After numerous emails with Airbnb they confirmed that the host is able to leave reviews in all cases, as well as a guest, but they deliberately didn't e-mail me an invitation. They claimed they did, but after further investigations I found a proof this was deliberate omittance.
- Had cockroaches and rats scurrying around one my places.
- Another place completely flooded and all the electrical sockets shorted out during a rain storm.
- My host threatened me over WhatsApp because I left a bad review. I showed AirBnB the chat logs and they said they would so something but didn't.
I've stopped using AirBnb.
The trend of all these "regulation arbitrage" startups seems to be to show consumers why the regulation existed in the first place.
This really stems from the regulations on payment processors. In theory there should be the digital equivalent of cash, where the buyer can easily and directly pay the seller without any third party middle man in between them imposing conditions and taking a cut.
But since regulatory requirements make processing payments, to use the technical term, a giant pain in the butt, it takes a sizeable bureaucracy to do it. Then you get a perverse incentive to have the company that handles listings and reviews also do the payment processing -- and get a cut of every transaction -- which is what creates this conflict of interest. The company whose business is reviews should not be turning a profit from filling listings, or they won't want bad reviews even when they're deserved, and then you don't have accurate reviews.
AirBnB gave me a refund and a 10% off coupon for that last one. Overall I've been happy with it; must just be luck.
Nice to have my own apartment again though. The nomad life is fun, I just wanted a home after awhile.
https://www.airbnbhell.com
I also had a couple bad experiences with AirBnb years ago and am much more cautious and lean towards a regular hotel more often - despite yearning for the old Bed-n-Breakfast concept.
On the other hand I only stay at Airbnbs when I travel, and have been for as long as I can remember, and I've never had these issues.
My biggest issue is that they lie about the prices per night.
It was enough money for him to cover his mortgage and not have to work if he watched his spending. He's bleeding money now and it started about two months ago. This virus is going to hammer leveraged AirBnb hosts for a while and I think we'll start to see a wave of AirBnb bankruptcies.
That being said, our bookings been hit pretty hard by the coronavirus. We’ve hade multiple cancellations recently, and the month of April is basically wide open. We usually have an occupancy rate for 85%. I think we’ll be lucky to have 50% of the next couple months.
These rentals drive up rents for the people in the community and remove housing stock from the market, making it more expensive and less likely for people to purchase their home and build equity. Rent is non recoverable unlike a mortgage, even if you ultimately take a loss.
Flooding the housing market with units for sale at a bargain would be great for common people trying to build wealth.
Create wealth instead of appropriating it and everyone benefits!
I agree its unfortunate if airbnb units increase rents, even a small amount. Finding good data isn't all that easy, but this study [0] from last year suggests airbnb was responsible for about 20% of total rent increase amounts in the areas studied. But, ignoring other potentially beneficial effects is one sided - if tourism was always bad, people should also be against building or operating hotels that could be apartments instead.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2019-08-airbnb-affect-rents-housing-pr...
https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/short-term-cities/sho...
Here is the small pox rash over Montreal:
http://insideairbnb.com/montreal/?neighbourhood=C%C3%B4te-de...
Repeated ad-infinitum across the globe by a company that figured out:
1. how to put pictures on web sites
2. regulatory arbitrage of residential housing
Home ownership is how the system keeps the common man down. It should absolutely not be championed in his favour.
On paper yes. In practice no. Because the common man will buy a new car, or order some trinket from Amazon, or some other splurge.
> Home ownership is how the system keeps the common man down. It should absolutely not be championed in his favour.
Home ownership forces the common man to save because he knows he’ll be kicked to the curb if he doesn’t pay the mortgage.
If people treated their retirement savings like a true mortgage, e.g. putting it before all other monthly expenses, then yes it’d be possible. But they won’t.
A lot of people would love to pump their savings into a diverse portfolio with little debt. Unfortunately we still have to pay rent. Personally if I do the math on it, putting savings into equities to save up for a 20% down payment on a mortgage is by far the most sound plan I can have because it optimizes my returns for my income.
And even without talking about returns, in terms of utility I don't want to raise a family in my expensive and tiny apartment - basically I don't want to save up so I can buy a nice house when I retire, I want to buy a nice house to build my life in then sell it when I retire. You've got the incentives completely flipped in my opinion.
Maybe he should work instead of leeching off his community.
I've lived in my building for a decade and the police have only been called twice. In both instances it was because of an Airbnb party gone wrong.
Who creates the value that makes people choose his location?
It's like those SROs in the TL where cheap tourists are thrilled to be close to things and think it will be like a hostel. No.
EBITDA is basically "how profitable would the business be if they had no debt and their existing assets never lost value?". For companies with factories, airplanes, etc. the physical plant deterioration matters a lot. For biotech companies with patents that expire after 20 years, asset value loss matters a lot too. But tech companies have neither physical capital nor TTL'ed intellectual property, so EBITDA is a good approximation.
What happened here is that the whole travel industry is falling apart, not accounting gimmicks.
After about 1 hour of time, we decided to call it quits and go book a hotel because it was 10pm at night and our kids needed to sleep. We were just hoping for a refund with Airbnb. What's their policy? "it's up to the host to decide if they want to give a refund". What did the host say? "i have great reviews and i haven't heard of anyone not being able to find the place." What about the fact that you didn't answer your calls? WTF
Similar situation when we booked a place in Tokyo. We asked the host whether it would be okay since we have two young children who are known to be playful/wild/loud. He assured it was okay and assured us the place was big enough to handle all four of us. We arrive in tokyo and and the place is tiny. The bathroom is literally a 3x3 box with a shower right on top of the toilet. The entire room is taken up by 2 beds with no place to move around, let alone space for luggage and two kids. On top of that, the host's apartment is in a building where the walls are paper thin and the neighbors are super sensitive to noise. We did the hosts' neighbors a favor and went and got a hotel room. Refund from airbnb? Maybe a partial refund? NOPE.
Seriously, I'm never booking anything on airbnb again.
Your example of Tokyo feels absolutely tone deaf to me as someone who has been there multiple times. That's just the reality of the Tokyo rent market. The places are tiny and that's how the culture is there.
As a solo traveler. Nowhere I stayed was remotely suitable for a family of four.
Small, yes. But comfortable, and nothing like what the top of this thread describes.
He ended up having a blast. The hosts had two pre-school age kids, and he was fascinated watching them ride their bikes around the courtyard. He was quiet enough that the hosts didn't even notice him, and he slept through the night for the first time.
Kids are pretty resilient, and if you never stretch into the unknown, you never find out what you can do. We've taken him on another (international this time) AirBnB trip, when he was 16 months, and he had a blast again. Though he did give us a minor heart attack when he woke up from his nap, evaded the baby monitor we'd set up, climbed off the bed, walked across the basement, and ascended a full flight of stairs by himself, only making his presence known by scratching at the kitchen/stair door.
I am talking about taking children into an insecure situation in a foreign country to the point where you have to scramble to find housing for the night.
That said, I have a friend who’s mom had a need to travel frequently when she was young. She’s been all over the world. When I asked her whether it was worth it for her her, she said that it wasn’t. She just wanted to be home sometimes. She just wanted her mom to be happy so she went along, smiling.
Once the person you're transacting with ripped you off, why on Earth would you try to keep engaging with them?
I mean, maybe if you want to waste your time on vacation, by all means, go ahead. I imagine most other travelers have better shit to do.
So you can survive getting second-guesses by random internet people.
Kyoto, Hiroshima, etc. are a different story. But Tokyo is pretty much the most cramped place I've ever visited, both indoors and out.
When I travel, the place I stay needs as few liabilities as possible, and airbnb cannot provide that.
I still use the for the experience listings sometimes, but never for lodging.
As such companies grow and see huge market in front of them, it makes sense to take on loses to grab bigger market share.
Consider a company that makes widgets, profitably on a unit-basis. If margins are thin and it costs a lot to make said widgets, then they need something called 'working capital' which is the money to pay suppliers etc. before they, themselves get paid by their customers. This 'working capital' is kind of like a permanent need for some kind of debt, and weirdly, it grows as the company grows! So in a similar way, a 'high growth' company can have an ever-increasing need for debt as long as it's growing. Without access to this working capital, it can starve and die. It seems like it's a paradox, but it's not.
COVID will hit AirBnB pretty hard.
This is bubble valuation, and with WeWork blowing up and now COVID hitting everything, the stock market in freefall - and that COVID will be materially damaging specifically to AirnBnB - not just indirectly ... the party is over.
This is the inflection point at which AirBnB becomes a 'real company' and has to live within the confines of 'non-bubble-valuations'.
Which is fine, think they will survive but not without changes.
Both the app and website UX are horrid though.
In the long run I prefer this over hotels. Not only the price is better, but you also usually have access to amenities like a kitchen or washing machine.
These fake hosts are still active, I can see the green dot indicating they are online if I look into the chat logs.
Airbnb did not pay for the hotel I had to book instead. I also couldn't use the meagre reimbursement I got on top of the full refund (at least...) because it was only valid for a month and I wasn't travelling at that time.
I still like the privacy and cooking my own food, but sometimes it's really terrible.
Croatia is not Somalia, but it doesn't exactly scream "rule of law", either. Airbnb is not inherently safe so should only be used in countries where nobody would even think of breaking a law, like Switzerland or something. I have reservations about using it in America even.
Not sure where you're getting this stuff about "doesn't exactly scream 'rule of law'".
Like, I hope the AirBnB trend slows down greatly for all of the reasons you listed, but they exist because people don't have the need or ability to pay for more expensive, temporary lodging.