Seems to me that a remote safety division is simply cheaper than contracting on-call security. They’ve been settling lawsuits when something happens beyond their control.
Many hotels, to me, resemble offices (in the UK cities at least). They're in buildings with glass fronts, no opening windows, because they want to offer A/C but want to save money^H^H^H^H^H^H^ "the planet". With A/C I get a sore throat, with it off, I suffocate.
In my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open.
I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself.
And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk").
So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.
I prefer Airbnbs over hotels because it's more fun, and it's nice to have all the amenities in a home. Proper kitchens with pantries, washing machines, backyards or balconies, etc.
Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.
It’s really a nice option when traveling with a large family. If you’re spread across four or five hotel rooms, you really spend much less time together than in a large house with a big common space.
Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.
For some reason it isn't common in the US but elsewhere you can rent a flat specifically for this purpose usually with less ammenities like you'd expect from a hotel and hence not as expensive.
Or a group of friends. Pre-AirBnB, multiple times a group of us rented a house for a long weekend. Much nicer than being in a bunch of hotel rooms. AirBnB didn't pioneer vacation rentals but it did make it take off.
And they've also helped completely destroy housing for locals in plenty of locations in the process as owners over-leverage themselves to buy up more and more property since they can rent it on AirBnB for more than they can rent it to locals.
Theres a bunch of reasons. If you have a group of people or a family the experience of having a place of your own in a real neighborhood is way better than being in a vanilla hotel.
Me and my family have used Airbnb a bunch of times in various countries, and every time has been a great experience. Biggest issues with hotels are lack of space, privacy and noise.
I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season.
One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!
So you would never stay in a beach house, lake house, or mountain lodge? Also in urban environments, the locations of private houses are sometimes much better: near parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, etc.
I remember doing house rental vacations with my family in something like 1987. Why do so many people seem to think Airbnb invented this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Airbnb provides more ratings, a standardized format for listings which makes it easier to review and compare them, and an easier online booking process that does a great job at handling currency conversion and different payment options.
Have you tried it? Prices have shot up, but back in the day, you could get a whole small house with a kitchen, laundry room, and multiple bedrooms, nicely appointed and clean for less than a three or four star hotel room.
It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.
I was always skeptical but once I started travelling with kids it became clear to me the giant holes in the hotel business model that AirBnB has disrupted.
Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.
We’re also starting to find that out now that we have kids ;). There’s also just odd situations that don’t fit into the hotel model.
Right now, I need a place to stay in Denver for 8 weeks with my wife, child, mother-in-law, and 2 dogs.
We’re staying with my MIL for her knee replacement surgery recuperation. So, there can’t be any stairs, has to have a walk in shower, must have a kitchen and have 3 bedrooms.
Impossible to find a hotel like this. We found a suitable AirBNB in about an hour.
I enjoy it when traveling alone, I usually look for hosts that are more open to interacting with their guests. Have met loads of interesting people through the app, some I still talk to occasionally.
After doing airbnbs I since have usually decided to stay in hotels when I travel because I just like the reliability in having things provided as well as other things like location, services, etc. Airbnb is always a hit or miss honestly, despite the cheaper price.
There’s really no other way to get an experience like a private pool away from home, for example. The surroundings can often be much more peaceful too, e.g. a house may be in a quiet street and not in the middle of downtown.
Hotels are the sanitized way to visit a place, which is fine for a lot of folks.
But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.
You do this in AirBnB by actively harming the locals. You do realize this right? Every AirBnB in a 'local' area is one less house for the actual locals to live in. It's becoming a huge problem in many cities in the world.
The article mentions a rape in an Airbnb in New York. The suspect had keys, presumably picked up from a lax key exchange in a nearby bodega. The cops were called and Airbnb was notified. Airbnb payed for a hotel, offered to fly the victim's mother out, paid for their return flight, and paid $7 million to the victim. The perp was caught by police shortly after the incident. Part of the payout was that she couldn't talk about the incident and potentially implicate Airbnb.
The alternative would be no payment and immediately drag this out in court very publicly. If I were the victim I would definitely prefer the option above or at least prefer to have that as an option. These kinds of things are incredibly rare and I'm glad we didn't have a news-cycle obsessing over something like this.
The article mentions a RAPE at knife point, not a robbery.
"By the time she realized she wasn’t alone, the blade of a kitchen knife was pointing down at her. The stranger grabbed her, shoved her onto a bed, and raped her. Drunken revelers were wandering the streets outside, but the woman was too scared to scream."
That Airbnb take responsibility for its service offering end-to-end, in this case the key exchange. From the article it's obvious the company has no ethics and has tried to cover up shoddy/lax business practices from the beginning, so another alternative that could have helped is Airbnb being liable for damages in the millions/billions until they learn their lesson, or fold if they don't. Oh, it might also have been helpful to not wait two years to hear about this, but as we all know, those who use NDAs are always the best of people/organizations.
The did take responsibility. That's what the money was for. Except it went to the victims rather than Attorney General and regulatory agencies.
Do you feel the same moral indignation about crimes committed in hotels? Here are NYC stats from 2017:
> In 2017, there were 2,656 hotel crimes reported city-wide, compared to 2,223 in 2015, a 19.5-percent increase... This includes felony assaults, which soared 51.9 percent, from 81 to 122, and third-degree assaults, which jumped 38 percent, from 255 to 352.
How much should the hotel where the 2017 Las Vegas shootings be liable for?
Do you feel the same moral indignation about crimes committed in hotels?
Yes. Sorry, I would share stats about Airbnb crimes with you but the company keeps most secret by paying people off.
Second, if you want Airbnb compared to hotels, then the firm should be paying all applicable hotel/rental taxes and following all respective hotel regulations, but they don't because Airbnb markets itself as a "platform".
A trivial issue is I don't know of a hotel in New York that would have the key exchange be at a bodega.
Is it an option to go back in time and put the Airbnb genie back in the bottle before a tech company decided to get around hotel laws, disturb the housing market and profit while creating harms by failing basic security and safety?
It's great that the perpetrator was caught, and I don't think there's anything more that Airbnb could have done in this specific instance.
But the article then highlights more (separate) incidents where Airbnb potentially has more responsibility because it was the hosts themselves taking the actions, highlighting weaknesses in Airbnb's background check process:
"Lapayowker’s lawyer, Teresa Li, says the suit was able to proceed, despite the arbitration requirements in Airbnb’s terms of service, because the company hadn’t done a thorough background check of the host. Airbnb only flags prior convictions, and though the host had previously been charged with battery, he wasn’t convicted."
The article then goes on to explain that Airbnb had under-resourced their trust and safety teams. As part of the 2020 COVID layoffs, Airbnb also laid off their entire trust and safety team in Portland, Oregon.
I don't want to quote more from the lengthy article, as it's not my piece, but it seems like Airbnb could be doing more to improve the safety of their platform; such as mandating keyless entry (which would have prevented many incidents, including the aforementioned rape in the lead of the article).
Being charged with a crime but not convicted shouldn't be held against anyone, even if in this case they were to commit actual crime later. To do otherwise is an injustice.
This kind of thinking is not, in the end, going to make you safer. Shunning actual criminals out of polite society - let alone people who have merely been suspects - guarantees they will turn to crime for subsistence.
Since you brought up convictions-- I'm pretty confident choosing not to co-share an Airbnb with a convicted violent criminal is in fact likely to make me safer.
There's a discussion to be had about how criminals can be reintegrated to society- but shared sleeping accommodations on vacation may not be the best scenario to have it.
Whatever shortcuts ABB is taking, how are they responsible for a rapist?
Let’s say i absentmindedly leave my door unlocked at home and someone comes in and raped me. Am I partially responsible for my own rape because I left the door unlocked?
Buying a transportation ticket or renting a room from a hotelier is a frightfully risky activity on its own. There have historically been limited reasons to trust either transporters or hoteliers as you'd only interact with them once and you may never have come into contact with someone who used their services.
Hence there is a "duty to guests" in most hospitality law. That requires that the proprietor maintain a property reasonably free of forseeable risk.
Why do you think they're rare? As the article mentions, they only paid $7m in this case because the victim wasn't the one who rented the apartment (and therefore aren't bound by Airbnb's ToS) and we're only learning about it because a journalist went digging into court records.
> Anyone registering on the site is required to sign this agreement, which bars legal claims for injury or stress arising from a stay and requires confidential arbitration in the event of a dispute. Former safety agents estimate the company handles thousands of allegations of sexual assault every year, many involving rape.
That being said while I have never had an AirBnB nightmare. I have had some lulz. If I were female I would hesitate to use one if I were traveling alone.
If Airbnb actually cared they would have invested in their operations already; Chesky giving "a promise to verify the photographs, amenities, cleanliness, and safety of all the listings on Airbnb", which the article notes is underway, is ridiculous -- Shouldn't this be a bare minimum of this type of business before they start operating? Basically what the "safety team" does is how Logan Roy from the show Succession works -- do whatever you want, skirt ethics and laws, and then pay money and have people sign NDAs.
* Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.
* Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in.
* Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs.
I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources.
It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.
> * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.
The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.
My roommate, who was hired for disaster response at Airbnb at the beginning of covid (January) was thought by us to be un-layoff-able due to her important role. months of her working 12 hour days go by, and she ends up laid off in the mass lay off that Airbnb did around June.
I saw how hard she worked. I saw how important her role was, and they threw her aside. AirBnB is a disaster when it comes to anything involving safety, health, or disaster response.
The problem is that Airbnb and a ton of other modern high-scale companies is that they only work when they don't require humans on site. It's simply not economically possible to send a human being to an off-site location for 14% of $200. Similarly, if each person on your social network generates $5 in ad revenue per person per year, automatic bans and community moderators are the only way to go, because you can't afford to pay someone to read all of the posts. Or if you have an 800 number, you'd better hope that the robot answering machine can solve almost every problem, because any time even a minimum-wage call center employee has to spend 15 minutes on the phone with a customer one-on-one that customer's account is no longer profitable for the company.
As a consumer, I appreciate the low prices and high purchasing power that I currently enjoy - I can get trinkets from distant lands on a whim and have many things done on my behalf without my lifting a finger, hedonistic luxuries that would have been only accessible to a king in centuries past. And obviously, the powerful AI-like corporations that optimize for profit above all else are profiting from the situation. But as a human being it kind of sucks.
low prices are a certain optimization. Others can optimize for experiences. I personally haven't used AirBNB because I don't like the risks associated with the use of their product. Some people love it.
The free market at its best. You can choose the cheap-but-cuts-corners option, or pay more to get more.
Of course, this implicitly depends on informed consumers, so it’s a bit troubling that Airbnb is leaning so heavily on NDA-based settlements. I don’t have a feel for how common that strategy is in competitors, say hotel / VRBO.
People will definitely pick hotel/hotel chain based on price vs. quality.
In the case of AirBnb, while you certainly have some people looking to pick a particular kind of property/experience vs. a hotel, my sense is that most people are going with AirBnB vs. hotel to save money.
The problem is that the cheap option kills off the pay more to get more option. Informed consumers, especially those who have perfect knowledge of the effects of their actions on future and who can optimize for cooperate-cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma, are largely a myth. The general store only works because a significant number of people were buying their weekly groceries at the high-quality price, it withers away when the only consumer surplus left in the market is at the tippy top of the demand curve. Even if they were viable in the long term, it would be easy for competitors to temporarily undercut them and put them out of business. It's easy to observe that small-town general stores disappear when WalMart and Dollar General arrive.
It may be even harder for these niche businesses to survive on the Internet, where instead of clinging to existence through the local customers who don't want to drive to the big city Walmart, the more local source for Internet customers is the first ad from the Amazon conglomerate they already have an account with. That's a lot easier than drilling down through the search results to the specialty site (that you've vetted as an actually more valuable option, not a scam forwarding cheap junk) and creating an account there.
Rational, informed consumers do not exist, human beings do. Capitalism does not create an infinite spectrum of a free market where all needs are met, there are winner-takes-all effects that distort the result. I don't claim to know of a better system, and I don't have the power to change the current system, but I can imagine some changes to resolve various injustices that the system's current incentive structure will never arrive at.
While this is indeed a terrible thing, I fail to see a strong correlation to the fact that the attacker entered the building due to the keys being at the counter. That is a possible reason along a million more, such as the fact that the attacker could force the door's lock, get someone else from the building (an accomplice?) to give him illegal access.
Pointing the blame at Airbnb therefore feels odd. Things like these can also happen (and they do, probably even more often) at your own place, and would you sue your landlord if so? Whether these things are more probable to happen at Airbnb is also a very hard thing to prove. IMO your own place might be riskier as an attacker can study your routine over time, which opens up more security holes.
These type of attacks are probably outside anyone's control and I don't think the Airbnb places have an implicit responsibility to ensure a higher level of security than you have at your own place (it can be a Airbnb luxe feature, though?)
"They caught him and emptied his backpack, pulling out three incriminating items: a knife, one of the woman’s earrings, and a set of keys to the apartment."
>[...] difficult to draw useful conclusions about the correlation between the short-term rental industry and crime. Academic researchers say [...] limitations have frustrated their efforts to study the link. Only about a half-dozen scholarly studies have been carried out on the subject, and their findings are contradictory.
Contradictory findings are a positive and useful result: They're evidence that there isn't in fact a link, that the two are uncorrelated. This is some tragic ignorance of statistics on the part of the journalist...
I've used Airbnb a lot. I've had really incredibly bad experiences with customer support and hosts. I've had a few good experiences. Overall I wish there was a better way to do 1-2 month rentals in the USA. Airbnb is a total coin toss on if the 1-2 months will be great or a nightmare.
Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_.
I've found myself just using hotels now, there's less hassle - but probably less good stories to tell.
I don't know if there's a special tax in place in Chicago, but AirBnbs have been almost double the price of hotels recently.
Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.
I don't use Uber much and haven't used them at all for probably a couple of years now. But I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal stories about pricing shooting through the roof. Business travelers mostly won't care. However, anyone who was depending on the subsidized prices for day to day usage may have to make significant adjustments.
As a Chi resident, Uber/Lyft is super expensive because lack of drivers due to COVID and carjackings. A couple months ago people would call Uber/Lyft just to jack the car and it scared a lot of drivers away.
If it's just you or a couple then hotels are generally better. AirBnBs are great for groups or families where it becomes cheaper per room and you get a common space. Also for things like remote cabins.
We've taken to using AirBnB as a search and then booking directly with the provider. AirBnB's fees are exorbitant and they cost per night is marked up as well. I think we saved $600 or so with the last stay and got more favorable terms.
Are you sure the daily night rate is marked up? I haven’t heard that anywhere else.
How do you book directly? We find that anytime we’ve tried AirBNB strips out all portions of conversations that would allow the two parties to get in contact (email addresses, phone numbers, websites, addresses)
I have the same experience. It's fun for a holiday week with friends, and that's it. The prices are no longer attractive and it's way less convenient than a hotel. Arranging the key exchange on arrival and departure has always been a hassle for me.
Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitchen is a huge plus. So for that, its really good.
Probably not American middle class ;-) . In Asia it is (was?) common to have a driver, servant and yes even a dedicated babysitter for the kids.
To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the US consider middle class to be anything between barely putting food on the table and flying around in private jets. It's probably fair that people hiring au pairs/nannies are on at least the upper range of middle class income but that doesn't make them "rich" in typical American parlance.
You have to be in some serious denial or have complete lack of perspective to think having the means to bring a babysitter on your holidays is "solidly middle class"
There are literally dozens of comments elsewhere in this thread about how an au pair can be extremely affordable, borderline cheap. Feel free to read some of them, it's actually pretty enlightening if you're able to get over your unwarranted knee-jerk anger :)
You're entitled to believe that bringing a cheap babysitter on a family road trip a few times means we couldn't possibly have been middle class, but the assertion that I'm in denial or have a complete lack of perspective is uncalled for.
Who would describe their parents (the kid’s grandparents) as “babysitters” in this context?
(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
> Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.
Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?
Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
Depends what you mean by domestic staff. With the at least somewhat common exception of au pairs if both halves of a couple work, people in the West don't typically have full-time dedicated staff because income disparities are mostly not that great until you get into the 1% or smaller slices of the population.
What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.
> use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.
A quick Google tells me that there are 17,500 au pairs in the US in a given year. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things but probably doesn't capture all live-in or otherwise more or less full-time child care arrangements. And of course, it's only an arrangement a couple will need for a bounded length of time.
It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.
In the bay area, I actually know a very surprising (shocking, to me) number of people with au pairs. It would never even have occurred to me that people would do this. But it’s common at least as far as I can tell, among people in their late 40s who’ve made a modest amount of money.
I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.
Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
My sister has an au pair in the bay area, and she pays less for child care than I do at a in-home daycare.
The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.
Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
I knew a girl on tinder who did that. It's really neat and definitely takes away the "very rich" thing. I mean 1 extra plane ticket is expensive, but not prohibitively so if you want a babysitter that also gets a free ride to a new place.
In my case, its just my father in law who lives with me and watches my daughter.
But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much.
Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
I don't have personal domestic staff but I have the same requirement: somewhere I really can live like at home and cook for myself and my family. In Switzerland this is called «Ferienwohnung», «résidence locative» and «appartemento per le vacanze». Even my parents rented holiday homes when I was a child.
This is true, I usually travel with friends and we’d rather be in the same house then the same hotel. Also there’s more options as far as locations and houses can be a lot more unique than a hotel
Have you ever priced it out? Probably not as expensive as you think. Like travelling with an extra kid, plus some extra overtime for the baby sitter you would have paid anyway.
Some random site here in NZ quotes $400-500 per week, say $25k per year which is quite ok.
Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.
I prefer Vrbo for this - unlike Airbnb it's for whole homes only (not rooms in someones house) so thats one less filter you need to select when searching.
They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher
And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.
While we are piling on Airbnb, I just discovered like an hour ago that browsing image gallery of houses/apartments on Facebook Group/Marketplace is actually a lot pleasant and smoother than on Airbnb. This can't be possible.
Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
Sorry for all the hate you're getting from your comment. If you have even a slightly larger family - say five - good luck trying to find hotel rooms that have occupancy greater than four. Even LARGE hotel rooms inexplicably are limited to occupancy of four or below. Think rooms 800 sq ft and larger... it's ridiculous.
I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.
Complete speculation - they operate multiple properties and were short a bed in another house. They may have had someone checking in and balking because there was no bed. Since you had already checked in, it would be much more difficult for you to claw back your money. So the incentives are to short you in favor of the new money.
Hotels are more reliable and organized, but I prefer AirBnB in general. I like feeling a part of the neighborhood or city, I like the home-y vibe of most AirBnBs. Hotels in contrast are a bit sterile and cookie-cutter, for obvious reasons, and some may prefer this vibe. Different strokes for different folks.
I'll often stay in B&Bs in less urban areas, but especially for urban business travel, the hotel is not really a big part of my experience and I just want to keep things simple, maybe have a place to leave my luggage after I check out, a usually 24 hour desk, etc.
> I like feeling a part of the neighborhood or city,
As long as you know that you're getting those cute feelings at the expense of contributing to screwing everyone that actually lives there (who isn't a landlord) by contributing to a market that creates a situation ever more hostile and unaffordable to renters.
Converting hotels to apartment buildings would also lower costs for renters. Staying in a hotel has exactly the same effect (the hotel would not exist and might be an apartment building if there was no demand for hotels, just like airbnbs might be rented traditionally if there was no demand for airbnb)
Except hotels don't drain the existing supply like AirBnB does. Hotels are built to be hotels, not to be rented to locals. AirBnBs were built to be homes for residences of the area...and instead are being rented to locals, thus draining the existing supply that's already there, which hotels don't do.
Seconding the last reply: hotels are a single, vertical property (ergo: does not take up a ton of real estate), dedicated to travelers in cities who need accommodations. They are built into the city planning for the most part to allow people to visit the town. It also supports the local economy by providing transient business to local businesses.
I don't think you thought your reply through before typing it out.
Clearly Airbnb is, even with the best of intentions, harming local economies by making housing unaffordable and/or unavailable to locals and has been documented over the past decade[0]. It's only recently (last few years) that cities have even caught up to tech like Abnb so for years they were and active drain on the local economy by dodging taxes and regulations[1]. It does NOT support the local economy in the same way as hotels and its benefits don't seem to out weigh its costs to the local economy[2].
Have you thought about how the things you like out of AirBnB come at the expense of those things for actual residents of the city? Each home that's in AirBnB is one that's not on the long term market for locals, pushing them further and further out for tourists' convenience.
If locals really cared about affordable housing, they would loosen up those zoning laws because that is the real reason most areas don't have affordable housing, not Airbnb.
No, because hotels don't remove existing supply from the market like AirBnB does. Nor at the rate that AirBnB is. It's not like the AirBnB owners are just making all newly built houses into AirBnB, they're actively lowering the supply already in the area, which hotels don't do.
In many ways we can thank competition from Airbnb for making the hotel experience better. Nothing gets industries to clean up their act like an existential threat.
Uber and taxicabs I see. Hotels apps and websites have probably gotten better but I'm not sure how much of that is AirBnB vs. a general trend in the industry.
Ya, hotels have always had to be highly competitive. But i suppose in areas where the number of available rooms had been somewhat fixed for a long time due to the difficulty of building any new hotels, you would see a difference as the hotels start to see their vacancy rates go up.
One way to think about it the pre-Airbnb rates of improvement. Alas, I’m not qualified to comment, except anecdotally that I feel hotels have gotten much better with technology recently. 15 years ago, Expedia was faxing reservations to hotels.
Yeup, I went to book, and got a $600 for a couple nights, when I clicked through, it was actually almost $1K with cleaning fees, airbnb fees, and local taxes. At that rate, I'm going back to traditional hotel rooms, and for the longer week stays, I'm just going to go back to using the other sites I used to use for booking longer-term rentals.
Hotel rooms have also shot through the roof in rates. There's huge pent up demand for vacations, given the year of lockdown people have gone through. I booked trips to San Diego and Honolulu recently, and prices were close to double what I would have expected. It will be interesting to see how this all ends up.
One option for saving a few bucks on fees is to try to disintermediate on booking. Especially where I tend to look (Oregon coast), most properties are run by a management company that will include their name in the listing. Once I find something I like on AirBnB, I search the property name on Google and typically save 10+%.
I’ve long wondered why there isn’t a voluntary open database somewhere for hosts to register their AirBNB name and city and allow people to look up their direct contact details.
In Iceland, I would look at guesthouses on booking.com, and look them up on a database called Google Maps.
Airbnb tries to scare the hosts about the lack of insurance if they rent out their place directly to the guests... but I guess reading the stories about how Airbnb fights insurance claims all the way, it's not like this insurance cover is worth much after all..
I'm very tired of the property investors that snatch up duplexes and turn them into quadplexes and then post them all on AirBnB with deceiving photos of the room layouts and amenities.
The number of airbnb's that I've stayed at that have awkward rooms or incomplete amenities has been increasing year over year (such as a counter that prevents a refrigerator door from fully opening due to a hasty remodel, or a kitchen with a full set of pans but no silverware). The toiletries are almost always lacking, the bed sheets are always of the lowest quality - whatever the minimum the host can do to check the box on their AirBnB profile. The photos, reviews, and amenity lists on the host's profile never tell the fully story.
This is more the norm than the exception in my recent experience.
I had two bad hotel stays in big US cities during peak covid pandemic, 2 hotels in DC had taken in people who needed housing so smoking could be smelled in the building, cleaning crews were not running at full capacity, bars/restaurants closed, i had two overpriced airbnbs around the northeast that were good experiences.
Agreed! I lead a nomadic lifestyle between my campervan and staying in short term rentals and it has gotten to the point that all of the various sites are now a minefield on many fronts. Between scams, poor pictures and fees, it really is a huge challenge.
My last rental in West Seattle was a super cute little house that I found on Zillow and I was lucky because it was owner rented, which saved us both on all those pesky lame fees.
The days of VC-backed low prices are over. Now we get to experience the joys of paying them back for their investments.
Would you mind talking a bit about your lifestyle? I've been tossing around the idea a bit and in particular I'm curious about how much the van cost to setup and what you do for Wifi.
Sure! As for cost... well... it really depends on what you get. I'd say a decent starter is cost of the van + 30-60k for the build out (including labor).
AT&T has an unlimited 4G for business plan that is only about $100/month. They accept 'consultant' as a business (I went into a store to simplify the process of setting up the account). Get a mifi (Netgear M1)... it has 2 ports for a mimo antenna. Get an omni directional antenna and the shortest cables you think you need. That should get you coverage in most places. I've taken my daily zoom calls on the tops of mountains in the middle of nowhere. There is a newer Netgear 5G mifi out now too, but I haven't looked into it yet as I'm ok on 4G and 5G coverage, especially in remote areas, isn't that great yet.
I spent 2 years on a small motorbike going all through super remote areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and living out of hotels and short term rentals. Living in a van is easy after that. =)
Is it truly unlimited? Or does it slow way down after x gb a month in traffic? I'm having trouble finding a truly unlimited hotspot on att's site right now.
That was my concern too. It appears truly unlimited. They send me threatening emails every once and a while when I do a whole bunch of big downloads, but they don't actually limit things.
I doubt you can find information on the website...
1. Do you have pretty good lawyers? Those threatening emails don't make you think about stopping having that lifestyle?
2. Why is it that you decided to live that life in Vietnam? What area within Software Development do you work with?
I've had much more luck with VRBO/HomeAway and smaller regional sites (e.g. https://www.seashorevacations.com) than with AirBnB. Also looking forward to trying the Marriott vacation rentals as an option.
Feels like you get a more "traditional" type of vacation rental owner. More professional? More likely to outsource all the management to a professional management company? I've been scammed on AirBnB, never through any other site.
(The AirBnB scam was fortunately "only" the one where they switch you to a property in a different building because the one in the pictures is "under repairs". I didn't make too much of a stink about it because we had been traveling for a long time. But it's still fraud.)
I think airbnb is great for month long stays, anything shorter doesn't make too much sense once you factor in all the fees (p.s. use Australian version to see the prices with all fees included on the search page).
I really like their direction of enabling month-long/flexible stays and considering whether I replace my lease with that so that I can move around more easily and see different places rather being stuck at the same place for 1+ years.
I did a month long stay with AirBnB in Miami and had an awesome time. I got a nice studio in a great location for $80/night. The various fees were offset by the discount for the long-term stay -- it would be really hard to do that with hotels.
Browse on the Australian TLD, where regulations require showing the total price inclusive of all fees, not the per day price. you can still set the currency to USD (or whatever you pay with)
Why doesn't AirBNB just vertically integrate to make some of these issues go away? They could have AirBnB locks, which only open via the app after payment and approval for the guest is received.
For cleaning, they could hire out cleaning to the hosts or even the guests for a discount, or they could acquire someone like TaskRabbit or an Uber-for-cleaning type app.
To me, it seems they're taking the easy way out by not doing much about the issues and letting hosts deal with it.
One Fine Stay did this in London, NY, Paris, maybe a few other cities. Locks, cleaning, laundry, even an iPhone with local maps and unlimited data (big deal in 2015). I think they found it hard to make money on, even though they were targeting the high end ($$$-$$$$ per night).
AirBnB will always take the side of hosts; their business model depends on cornering the market on hosts. Where there are hosts, there will be guests, or so they think.
This is why they remove reviews which are negative. I stayed at an AirBnB in Hawaii once, which was filthy. In the middle of the night I decided to just leave, and I told the AirBnB CSR that I couldn't stay there. They agreed and refunded me that day's cost. But they wouldn't let me leave a review, claiming that since I had not stayed, I couldn't leave one. If only I had read a negative review before booking, I would not have booked it.
And recently, I tried to book a place to get away into the boonies for a bit. I noticed that none of the reviews of that place were more recent than May 2020. I put in a request, and never heard back from the host. How rude! Once again, if they had some reviews in there about hosts, I wouldn't have wasted my time.
I've been an early user of AirBnb since they first introduced themselves on this site. And prior to that I was a couchsurfing host, and occasional guest.
I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events the price goes up the closer the date arrives. A host that cancels on you can cost you hundreds of dollars in higher charges. I've never had a hotel cancel my reservation to upcharge me down the line.
A memorable one was where we booked a Airbnb for my family. The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. Since it was a small town there were few places to go except a small, 1-star hotel [0] under partial renovation.
One of the things I found was even with its billions in valuation they didn't have anything in place for these delivery problems. When Airbnb ran out of Airbnbs they couldn't fix that. When Hyatt runs out of rooms they send you to Hilton.
I found the site after my own bad experience: bait-n-switch in Hong Kong ("executive suite" was really a nasty cockroach infested mess). Airbnb was utterly useless.
I still occasionally use airbnb, but am much more cautious and revert back to using a hotel if anything about airbnb's offerings look off.
We traveled to Japan for 3 weeks and used Airbnb exclusively. 2 out of the 4 places we visited were sub par. While the images and the reviews made us believe that we were getting an awesome place, reality was starkly different. In one of the places we left in the middle of the night with a 1 year old in tow! The bugs, general cleanliness of the place, lack of AC got to us. Airbnb CSR was not cooperative at all saying, despite me juggling between international calls/messages and we lost the full fee for 3 days. Because we didn't give the host a chance to fix the issue, a situation we thought couldn't be fixed. Mind you we spent ~$5K with Airbnb on that trip alone. Though I live in the Bay Area and have friends working at the company, I was done. I will stick to hotels unless Airbnb develops better mechanisms to handle these situations or builds consumer friendliness into its ethos.
Interesting use of history manipulation on that site - back button takes me first to their landing page of stories before letting me go back to HN.
Ideologically it's a bit annoying, but I'm more than a little impressed at 1) the idea (think less of HN and more of sites like this struggling with Facebook/Reddit/Google), and 2) the relatively unobtrusive implementation of it.
This is horrifying. I know we feel like there's nothing we can do and this type of thing is old news, or maybe a risk no matter where you are... but I can't do business with a company that reacts this way.
Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains? I would expect most operators to call the police and hire lawyers to ensure that their liability stays at 0, and not much else.
AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
>Do you have a reason to think AirBnB is doing anything less moral than existing hotel or motel chains?
I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
I'd take millions of dollars over unencumbered free speech!
That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident.
The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
I think the 4 incidents a day is an exaggeration, but each "incident" is also not a rape or murder. Most are going to be for stuff like "the toilet overflowed" or "the power went out". $1k is not at all unreasonable for most "routine" emergencies.
It was a best guess with large error bars, not an exaggeration.
My assumption is that minor incidents would take 5-15 minutes (e.g. in your case of the toilet overflowing, perhaps a refund). If this dominated, you'd be looking at 30+ cases per day per agent.
More serious incidents would probably take a few days.
I kinda took a geometric mean, but I have no idea the threshold for incidents escalating to this team.
It's one thing to offer support, it's something else to use support to make silencing someone palatable.
I will disagree with this no matter who does it.
Even feeling as strongly as I do about this, I would personally have a hard time turning down millions of dollars — the power imbalance is so large here that it's the illusion of a choice.
These scenarios were why a lot of investors missed out of AirBnB. It was a matter of when and not if. The only big surprise to almost everyone was how long it took for this to happen. The rate of occurrence was also surprising. It was low enough that AirBnB could keep up.
This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway
And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart
Rapes, robberies, burglaries and lots of other bad things happen at Hotel chains too. They just have a structured management and PR department to do a better job of keeping it under wraps.
It's a matter of frequency, opportunity, and deterrence. Do you have statistics to compare, or are you just making conjecture?
It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.
I like hotel chains as well,’but beware that they may not be as clean as we’d like to believe: nypost.com/2020/06/29/high-end-nyc-hotels-not-sanitizing-rooms-changing-sheets
In my experience, boutique hotel chains are much more likely to overcharge you. With AirBnB, you pay ahead of time and the host does not have access to your financial info. Totally different situation with a hotel, where I've had to resort to legal threats to get deposits returned after waiting over a year. AirBnB has downsides on some risk in having the unit not be as described, but it is much safer than hotels when it comes to payment, overcharges, undocumented charges, refunds, etc.
>>And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway.
If you are single with no kids and usually eat out, then yes. But is this still true if you are traveling with your family ? Just the ability to cook breakfast in an AirBnB seems like a huge money saver. It's likely why some AirBnB hosts claim that properties with more bedrooms have a much lower vacancy rate than smaller properties.
You don't get space in a hotel unless you're a zillionaire. An AirBNB apartment offers a kitchen with a fridge and stove and a separate bedroom and living room area. A hotel offers a small fridge filled with the hotel's overpriced items and no room for ours on purpose, no stove, and a generic little desk with laminated cards on it and mirrors in front as the table-for-it-all.
Screw hotels unless the company pays (if it ever does). That's the appeal of AirBNB - unfortunately. They've offloaded customer service but they have the upper hand due to the superior real estate over the hotels with their tiny rooms - did I mention the lack of soundproofing between rooms.
After living next to a house that was on AirBnb for 3 years (rented at least 4 days a week), I want nothing more than the complete outlaw of the company and these types of rentals.
You're being downvoted, but in all seriousness, I've lived next to someone who was a nightmare for years. I wish there had been a rotating cast of folks who came through, at least that would have given me a break from her.
Crappy neighbors can exist in many different forms, whether they live there full time or their renters do. I see lots of shit raised regarding bad AirBnB neighbors, but I think they're just an easily identifiable target - there is no big company to blame if you just have a plain shitty neighbor.
I lived next to an Air BNB for two years and never had a single issue (and I'm a fussy, generally antisocial, very light sleeper). I dont think either of our experiences really suggest anything, other than people need to be responsible for their property. If an owner is letting something happen that disturbs those around his property, he should be held accountable. No need to outlaw general concepts.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadIn my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open.
I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself.
And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk").
So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.
Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.
Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel
I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season.
One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!
It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.
Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.
Right now, I need a place to stay in Denver for 8 weeks with my wife, child, mother-in-law, and 2 dogs.
We’re staying with my MIL for her knee replacement surgery recuperation. So, there can’t be any stairs, has to have a walk in shower, must have a kitchen and have 3 bedrooms.
Impossible to find a hotel like this. We found a suitable AirBNB in about an hour.
But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.
You do this in AirBnB by actively harming the locals. You do realize this right? Every AirBnB in a 'local' area is one less house for the actual locals to live in. It's becoming a huge problem in many cities in the world.
The alternative would be no payment and immediately drag this out in court very publicly. If I were the victim I would definitely prefer the option above or at least prefer to have that as an option. These kinds of things are incredibly rare and I'm glad we didn't have a news-cycle obsessing over something like this.
"By the time she realized she wasn’t alone, the blade of a kitchen knife was pointing down at her. The stranger grabbed her, shoved her onto a bed, and raped her. Drunken revelers were wandering the streets outside, but the woman was too scared to scream."
There is a HUGE difference...
The perpetrator was caught and presumably prosecuted. Again, what alternative chain of events would you have preferred?
Do you feel the same moral indignation about crimes committed in hotels? Here are NYC stats from 2017:
> In 2017, there were 2,656 hotel crimes reported city-wide, compared to 2,223 in 2015, a 19.5-percent increase... This includes felony assaults, which soared 51.9 percent, from 81 to 122, and third-degree assaults, which jumped 38 percent, from 255 to 352.
How much should the hotel where the 2017 Las Vegas shootings be liable for?
https://nypost.com/2018/06/04/crime-in-nyc-hotels-has-skyroc...
Yes. Sorry, I would share stats about Airbnb crimes with you but the company keeps most secret by paying people off.
Second, if you want Airbnb compared to hotels, then the firm should be paying all applicable hotel/rental taxes and following all respective hotel regulations, but they don't because Airbnb markets itself as a "platform".
A trivial issue is I don't know of a hotel in New York that would have the key exchange be at a bodega.
But the article then highlights more (separate) incidents where Airbnb potentially has more responsibility because it was the hosts themselves taking the actions, highlighting weaknesses in Airbnb's background check process:
"Lapayowker’s lawyer, Teresa Li, says the suit was able to proceed, despite the arbitration requirements in Airbnb’s terms of service, because the company hadn’t done a thorough background check of the host. Airbnb only flags prior convictions, and though the host had previously been charged with battery, he wasn’t convicted."
The article then goes on to explain that Airbnb had under-resourced their trust and safety teams. As part of the 2020 COVID layoffs, Airbnb also laid off their entire trust and safety team in Portland, Oregon.
I don't want to quote more from the lengthy article, as it's not my piece, but it seems like Airbnb could be doing more to improve the safety of their platform; such as mandating keyless entry (which would have prevented many incidents, including the aforementioned rape in the lead of the article).
Is the implication here people should be punished for pre-crime as well?
There's a discussion to be had about how criminals can be reintegrated to society- but shared sleeping accommodations on vacation may not be the best scenario to have it.
Let’s say i absentmindedly leave my door unlocked at home and someone comes in and raped me. Am I partially responsible for my own rape because I left the door unlocked?
Why isn’t it 100% the fault of the rapist?
Hence there is a "duty to guests" in most hospitality law. That requires that the proprietor maintain a property reasonably free of forseeable risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_law
It certainly indicts ABB for not meeting their obligations here.
I am assuming after the victim decided to file a lawsuit. I would be surprised if that was a preemptive offer.
> Anyone registering on the site is required to sign this agreement, which bars legal claims for injury or stress arising from a stay and requires confidential arbitration in the event of a dispute. Former safety agents estimate the company handles thousands of allegations of sexual assault every year, many involving rape.
That being said while I have never had an AirBnB nightmare. I have had some lulz. If I were female I would hesitate to use one if I were traveling alone.
* Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.
* Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in.
* Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs.
I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources.
It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.
The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.
/s but I kinda want to see such a tech and head-explosions of the announcement.
I mean, would you be cool with letting someone charged with a violent crime work at a daycare until found guilty?
I saw how hard she worked. I saw how important her role was, and they threw her aside. AirBnB is a disaster when it comes to anything involving safety, health, or disaster response.
As a consumer, I appreciate the low prices and high purchasing power that I currently enjoy - I can get trinkets from distant lands on a whim and have many things done on my behalf without my lifting a finger, hedonistic luxuries that would have been only accessible to a king in centuries past. And obviously, the powerful AI-like corporations that optimize for profit above all else are profiting from the situation. But as a human being it kind of sucks.
Of course, this implicitly depends on informed consumers, so it’s a bit troubling that Airbnb is leaning so heavily on NDA-based settlements. I don’t have a feel for how common that strategy is in competitors, say hotel / VRBO.
In the case of AirBnb, while you certainly have some people looking to pick a particular kind of property/experience vs. a hotel, my sense is that most people are going with AirBnB vs. hotel to save money.
It may be even harder for these niche businesses to survive on the Internet, where instead of clinging to existence through the local customers who don't want to drive to the big city Walmart, the more local source for Internet customers is the first ad from the Amazon conglomerate they already have an account with. That's a lot easier than drilling down through the search results to the specialty site (that you've vetted as an actually more valuable option, not a scam forwarding cheap junk) and creating an account there.
Rational, informed consumers do not exist, human beings do. Capitalism does not create an infinite spectrum of a free market where all needs are met, there are winner-takes-all effects that distort the result. I don't claim to know of a better system, and I don't have the power to change the current system, but I can imagine some changes to resolve various injustices that the system's current incentive structure will never arrive at.
Pointing the blame at Airbnb therefore feels odd. Things like these can also happen (and they do, probably even more often) at your own place, and would you sue your landlord if so? Whether these things are more probable to happen at Airbnb is also a very hard thing to prove. IMO your own place might be riskier as an attacker can study your routine over time, which opens up more security holes.
These type of attacks are probably outside anyone's control and I don't think the Airbnb places have an implicit responsibility to ensure a higher level of security than you have at your own place (it can be a Airbnb luxe feature, though?)
They aren't spending money out of some altruistic intention.
for additional fee
>[...] difficult to draw useful conclusions about the correlation between the short-term rental industry and crime. Academic researchers say [...] limitations have frustrated their efforts to study the link. Only about a half-dozen scholarly studies have been carried out on the subject, and their findings are contradictory.
Contradictory findings are a positive and useful result: They're evidence that there isn't in fact a link, that the two are uncorrelated. This is some tragic ignorance of statistics on the part of the journalist...
I've found myself just using hotels now, there's less hassle - but probably less good stories to tell.
Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.
We've taken to using AirBnB as a search and then booking directly with the provider. AirBnB's fees are exorbitant and they cost per night is marked up as well. I think we saved $600 or so with the last stay and got more favorable terms.
How do you book directly? We find that anytime we’ve tried AirBNB strips out all portions of conversations that would allow the two parties to get in contact (email addresses, phone numbers, websites, addresses)
Yep:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/48602487?check_in=2021-07-16&ch...
https://www.brett-robinson.com/search-results/?startDate=202...
>How do you book directly?
You can usually find out the building and then look to see if they have their own site.
To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.
If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.
(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)
Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?
Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???
Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?
I don’t think you are..
What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.
How often are these people brought on holiday?
Wow this blows my mind TIL
It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.
I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.
Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.
The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.
Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.
We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.
I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.
Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips.
Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich.
[For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]
But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much.
Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.
Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.
It's a job, sometimes you do in the family sometimes you outsource. No need to be super-rich for it.
what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me
Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.
They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher
And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.
Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.
I'll often stay in B&Bs in less urban areas, but especially for urban business travel, the hotel is not really a big part of my experience and I just want to keep things simple, maybe have a place to leave my luggage after I check out, a usually 24 hour desk, etc.
As long as you know that you're getting those cute feelings at the expense of contributing to screwing everyone that actually lives there (who isn't a landlord) by contributing to a market that creates a situation ever more hostile and unaffordable to renters.
I don't think you thought your reply through before typing it out.
Clearly Airbnb is, even with the best of intentions, harming local economies by making housing unaffordable and/or unavailable to locals and has been documented over the past decade[0]. It's only recently (last few years) that cities have even caught up to tech like Abnb so for years they were and active drain on the local economy by dodging taxes and regulations[1]. It does NOT support the local economy in the same way as hotels and its benefits don't seem to out weigh its costs to the local economy[2].
[0] https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
[1] https://curs.unc.edu/2015/03/26/a-roadmap-to-regulating-airb...
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...
Many times Hotels are located in areas that are zoned commercial and not residential.
So no, hotels really are not competing with housing the way AirBnb is.
(Unless they're zoned exclusively commercial - but I don't know how common that is.)
Airbnb tries to scare the hosts about the lack of insurance if they rent out their place directly to the guests... but I guess reading the stories about how Airbnb fights insurance claims all the way, it's not like this insurance cover is worth much after all..
The number of airbnb's that I've stayed at that have awkward rooms or incomplete amenities has been increasing year over year (such as a counter that prevents a refrigerator door from fully opening due to a hasty remodel, or a kitchen with a full set of pans but no silverware). The toiletries are almost always lacking, the bed sheets are always of the lowest quality - whatever the minimum the host can do to check the box on their AirBnB profile. The photos, reviews, and amenity lists on the host's profile never tell the fully story.
This is more the norm than the exception in my recent experience.
It makes me quite furious as I've had tame reviews removed.
My last rental in West Seattle was a super cute little house that I found on Zillow and I was lucky because it was owner rented, which saved us both on all those pesky lame fees.
The days of VC-backed low prices are over. Now we get to experience the joys of paying them back for their investments.
AT&T has an unlimited 4G for business plan that is only about $100/month. They accept 'consultant' as a business (I went into a store to simplify the process of setting up the account). Get a mifi (Netgear M1)... it has 2 ports for a mimo antenna. Get an omni directional antenna and the shortest cables you think you need. That should get you coverage in most places. I've taken my daily zoom calls on the tops of mountains in the middle of nowhere. There is a newer Netgear 5G mifi out now too, but I haven't looked into it yet as I'm ok on 4G and 5G coverage, especially in remote areas, isn't that great yet.
I spent 2 years on a small motorbike going all through super remote areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and living out of hotels and short term rentals. Living in a van is easy after that. =)
I doubt you can find information on the website...
2. I love a good challenge.
3. I write software that optimizes a large amount of GPU hardware.
Feels like you get a more "traditional" type of vacation rental owner. More professional? More likely to outsource all the management to a professional management company? I've been scammed on AirBnB, never through any other site.
(The AirBnB scam was fortunately "only" the one where they switch you to a property in a different building because the one in the pictures is "under repairs". I didn't make too much of a stink about it because we had been traveling for a long time. But it's still fraud.)
I really like their direction of enabling month-long/flexible stays and considering whether I replace my lease with that so that I can move around more easily and see different places rather being stuck at the same place for 1+ years.
It's like a hammer.
Useful in certain circumstances for me.
For cleaning, they could hire out cleaning to the hosts or even the guests for a discount, or they could acquire someone like TaskRabbit or an Uber-for-cleaning type app.
To me, it seems they're taking the easy way out by not doing much about the issues and letting hosts deal with it.
This is why they remove reviews which are negative. I stayed at an AirBnB in Hawaii once, which was filthy. In the middle of the night I decided to just leave, and I told the AirBnB CSR that I couldn't stay there. They agreed and refunded me that day's cost. But they wouldn't let me leave a review, claiming that since I had not stayed, I couldn't leave one. If only I had read a negative review before booking, I would not have booked it.
And recently, I tried to book a place to get away into the boonies for a bit. I noticed that none of the reviews of that place were more recent than May 2020. I put in a request, and never heard back from the host. How rude! Once again, if they had some reviews in there about hosts, I wouldn't have wasted my time.
I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events the price goes up the closer the date arrives. A host that cancels on you can cost you hundreds of dollars in higher charges. I've never had a hotel cancel my reservation to upcharge me down the line.
A memorable one was where we booked a Airbnb for my family. The hosts lived there with her pets and I'm allergic to cats and dogs. I reached out to Airbnb and the host and we were basically sent packing. Since it was a small town there were few places to go except a small, 1-star hotel [0] under partial renovation.
One of the things I found was even with its billions in valuation they didn't have anything in place for these delivery problems. When Airbnb ran out of Airbnbs they couldn't fix that. When Hyatt runs out of rooms they send you to Hilton.
[0] they have 2-stars now! post renovation
What else could have happened? If you have special needs you should send a small message to the host prior to booking to confirm it's compatible.
I found the site after my own bad experience: bait-n-switch in Hong Kong ("executive suite" was really a nasty cockroach infested mess). Airbnb was utterly useless.
I still occasionally use airbnb, but am much more cautious and revert back to using a hotel if anything about airbnb's offerings look off.
AirBnB is offering victims sometimes millions of dollars to settle claims, but they cannot force the victims to do anything. It turns out that as individual agents with free agency, the victims sometimes prefer to have millions of dollars.
I don't know about their morality, but their ethics appear to built upon Not Invented Here syndrome, where they don't allow themselves to learn from the (long) history of hotel and motels.
That said, it's rarely millions. Total settlements = $50M. They have 100 full-time safety agents. This means each agent handles an average of $500k per year. If we assume each agent handles 4 incidents per day, times 200 days, that's 800 incidents, or under $1k per incident.
The scale of the problem, per the article, is striking.
My assumption is that minor incidents would take 5-15 minutes (e.g. in your case of the toilet overflowing, perhaps a refund). If this dominated, you'd be looking at 30+ cases per day per agent.
More serious incidents would probably take a few days.
I kinda took a geometric mean, but I have no idea the threshold for incidents escalating to this team.
I will disagree with this no matter who does it.
Even feeling as strongly as I do about this, I would personally have a hard time turning down millions of dollars — the power imbalance is so large here that it's the illusion of a choice.
And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart
It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.
You mean they spend millions of dollars to make nightmare PR go away?
If you are single with no kids and usually eat out, then yes. But is this still true if you are traveling with your family ? Just the ability to cook breakfast in an AirBnB seems like a huge money saver. It's likely why some AirBnB hosts claim that properties with more bedrooms have a much lower vacancy rate than smaller properties.
Screw hotels unless the company pays (if it ever does). That's the appeal of AirBNB - unfortunately. They've offloaded customer service but they have the upper hand due to the superior real estate over the hotels with their tiny rooms - did I mention the lack of soundproofing between rooms.
Crappy neighbors can exist in many different forms, whether they live there full time or their renters do. I see lots of shit raised regarding bad AirBnB neighbors, but I think they're just an easily identifiable target - there is no big company to blame if you just have a plain shitty neighbor.