The host's 'dating site style' profile image is a red flag from the outset, stock image or not.
The only practical tip I can offer regards airbnb is to rent places that are also featured on other well known sites, since this does reduce the risk a little.
That's your issue with the whole story, the host did not analyze the profile picture for "red flags"?
From this and the many other stories about AirBnB and its "support", best advice seems to be to immediately close your account, request your data to be deleted and never use any of its "services" again.
Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.
Might be a case of different meaning attributed to a word, whacking don't help, but jiggling often works when the gasket as starting to go bad (I promise I will buy a new gasket any time soon, but right now gently jiggling temporary solves the problem)
> Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood.
In the case where the terms of the living arrangement are “you can stay here 30 days for free, but you’ll need to take care of any issues you come upon yourself.”, this would be an appropriate response.
In this case, as mentioned in the article, they are “you can stay here for 30 days for $3,000”. Totally different story.
Sure, and as a potential home buyer in croatia, I have my qualms with airbnb and wealthy young western tourists causing every dump to be rented out and driving up real-estate prices. I just think that writing about a leaking flush tank like it's some kind of emergency doesn't make the case against airbnb hosts stronger.
You really should read the full article before commenting. The apartment was in breach of several local laws (for example, no working fire extinguisher or first aid kit, inadequate signage, non-working lock), and the electrical wiring was faulty, causing 2 people to be shocked. The lighting circuit had totally failed by the time the OP wrote the article. It certainly wasn't someone moaning about a minor issue, and it's not too much to ask for a $3000-per-month rental to be excellent quality and not...you know, try to kill you.
You seem like you would be the perfect AirBnB customer.
Things don't work as expected, and you simply pay up?
Not sure about you, but if I was staying at a place for a length of time i would expect things like the toilet work properly. As someone paying for a place to stay, "filing a bucket with water" to flush the toilet isn't something i should be doing. Toilets are not expensive and easy to replace, it sounds like this one should have been replaced some time ago.
Funny, I saw the writer's picture first thing and thought hmm that looks pretty fake then later it turns out it is cropped from that same stock photo as "Peter"
The account was clearly created just to share this issue, so using the other face from the picture is meant to help emphasize the false pick in the AirBnB posting.
I'm surprised that the medium account posting this has a profile picture cropped from the exact same stock photo that the supposed villain cropped his profile picture from.
The glory days of Airbnb are over. It's been flooded with dodgy hosts, and the customer support has failed to keep up. Hotels have improved their service and the prices aren't that different any more.
If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
Disagree on the > cost component - the stated nightly rates may be lower than AirBNB, but with all costs AirBNB is generally uncompetive
You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
Pretty par for the course with airbnb support. Twice now I've had reservations cancelled hours before arrival with airbnb absolutely useless at finding an alternative. One time I was able to get some meagre compensation (the difference in price, even though it was inferior accomodation), the other time - nada, nothing.
I'm back to hotels again, with airbnb as a very last resort
AirBnb started out as a company that basically fostered and encouraged illegal, unregulated short term rentals. Many of the hosts were breaking various ordnances and bylaws to rent you their home.
There is also a huge societal cost in terms of increases rents and reduced permanent housing supply because of AirBnb.
So if those type of people at that company screw you over, don’t be surprised.
When I alerted AirBNB about a safety issue, they responded that they had completed their investigation (which apparently did not involve talking to me) and said the hosts were "elite" and basically took their side.
Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.
The last one I went to we walked in and contacted support as they didn’t have the accommodations they promised, and it took AirBnB support four days to get back to us. We waited several hours for a response before just booking a hotel.
Nothing written here makes me feel unsafe about taking my daughter and wife to an Air BNB. Just what on earth is this non-sequitur, "ergo company unsafe" [10 billion upvotes]. There is nothing here even explaining how this is any worse than hotels. Yes, sleeping in some random person's house is inherently less safe than hotels (slightly) but we already knew that. So then what actual tangible point am I missing here? What do you even expect the company to do about it? This entire post and its context just seems like a Simpsons episode where Homer yells at the mayor and demands that it stop raining. I haven't have and don't plan to ever use Air BNB, by the way.
If only there was some regulation for such services that would require some sort of standard. You know some sort of licensing by the state. /s
This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
It seems to work better with Lyft et al., probably because there's a larger supply of "normal people who are interested in driving", better economics around renting the asset (vehicle), and the driver (aka host) having to be physically present in the vehicle.
The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get.
Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
Is that different than a normal taxi? If anything a lot of people find ride shares more safe because you have a digital record of the drivers identity which historically wasn’t the case with taxis.
Artificially lowering prices? You mean basic supply and demand?
The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant.
AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly.
False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP).
More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook.
Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
The issue is that the service that you as a digital nomad enjoy turns the life of permanent residents into misery. Unregulated, private short term rentals are a blight upon cities. Is this a price worth paying for the convenience of vacationers/nomads?
There's nothing wrong with AirBnb in principle, but I strongly suspect if they were properly regulated and actually carried out the necessary checks, provided an adequate level of guarantees and service, suddenly their business model would be much less viable.
In effect, AirBnb externalizes the cost of their business to local residents and authorities, but they harvest the profits. They are not the only industry operating under such framework of course.
It's always a complicated issue. Depending on the city/region, tourists can be the life blood. More than a few places that I've visited you're a welcome addition to the local ecosystem, bringing much needed revenue.
There is always a healthy layer of NIMBY, I want to be a tourist but I don't want tourists to come where I live.
Sure, they should be regulated, and in many places in Europe they are regulated.
Any business/housing has the potential to be bad for neighbours, which is why we have zoning and planning laws. Bars and nightclubs, industrial businesses, apartment buildings. Short term rentals are no different, rules and taxes should apply. Fines should be imposed for rowdy party behaviour (which is one of the more negative aspects of short-term rentals).
And AirBnB skirts these zoning laws by basically allowing hotels in areas not zoned for them. Tourists aren't locals, they shouldn't get housing at the locals' expense, which is exactly what is happening. Housing prices go up for locals, they have to deal with all the downsides of basically living next to a hotel all because tourists feel entitled to not have to stay in places meant for tourists. It's destroying cities - Dublin, for instance, is beyond ridiculous. And at one point there's more AirBnB to rent in city centre Dublin than apartments in the entire country. AirBnB is a big cause on the housing crisis because they circumvent rules and push all externalities to the locals.
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
I work during the week. I like business “aparthotel”. I know I’ll usually have a comfortable desk in the room with an adjustable chair. Decent “premium Wifi” at Hiltons (Diamond member) and a level of consistency.
I used to stay at Hyatt House pretty regularly, and it was a great experience
Lately it's sucked just like every other hotel, since they don't clean the rooms and the employees are all overworked and stressed out. Still better than having to deal with all the huge fees and shenanigans from AirBNB IMO
AirBnBs tend to employ people as well (cleaning, maintenannce, administration).
With many hotels the money is actually flowing out of the local community as the business is owned by a big multi-national. It's not really so cut and dried in favour of hotels.
We need a new AirBnB, what it promised to be initially. A club for ordinary (or extraordinary) people to find/share a room rather than an indistry-scale business platform.
The trouble is that everyone is on the net now, so it will just get corrupted immediately by people trying to commercialize the space.
I think house-swapping gets around this by doing away with any possible financial gain, but this precludes you have a house of your own you're willing to have people live in while you're in their home.
It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they possibly can. They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews.
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
basically, author expects calibrated minimal services, good support, and a minimal standard of quality. This is what you call a classic hotel/lodge. I fully agree with you, and those living close to these miserable BnB businesses surely would agree as well. This "model" is rotting city centers and popular places. AirBnB will never care about that poor lady. AirBnB will know how to make her anger disappear into the zero-star reviews statistics - it is much more important to keep a large density of cheap appts in the center of Lisbon.
Might you tell us about any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support? Yes, it's "a choice". Sadly, it's an overwhelmingly popular choice.
Although I would argue that Zappos didn't "limit profits." Rather they (correctly) surmised that the only way to successfully sell shoes online as a core business was to be seen as bending over backwards from a customer service perspective.
Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.
And it's a popular choice because the consumers often don't seem to care. Many are willing to accept poor customer service in the pursuit of lower prices for goods and services.
> any large, modern, fast-growing businesses which happily limit profits, so they can pay for high-quality customer support?
Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos.
Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.
I don’t know why I’ve had such a different experience to others, but in both cases where I complained to Airbnb when a host was unable or unwilling to offer a resolution, Airbnb made things right for me - in one case even covering the parking ticket I’d ended up with from the host’s crappy instructions, in the other, the listing was removed as the issues were too egregious to number.
Makes me think that there's a market for a 3rd party website for reviews for AirBnB hosts (and probably guests).
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
It's fundamentally a problem of trust. Hotels and big brands work because you can trust them. Why do you trust them? Because they have skin in the game. If their products suck their brand suffers and that's what they want to avoid the most. If Apple releases crappy products they can't just create a new "BtwNotApple" brand. They can sell overpriced products because you're paying for trust/brand.
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
Hmm, I've never used it, but something like Silkroad worked, it did not have trust issues. To me it reads like they try to save pennies on customer support.
The differences between Silk Road and Airbnb is that the former didn't have lots of investors and techbros to pay returns to, so they could actually offer a fair escrow service and still remain profitable, where as Airbnb has to commit fraud by pitching you an "insurance" service that never actually pays out because doing so would lower or even negate the techbros' returns.
Absolutely. That's where bitcoin could help a new platform, as a decentralized trust protocol. The bisq.network protocol requires people to put up significant bonds to perform roles that are trusted, and then if they fail to perform well, they can loose some or all of their bond. The bisq token holders (bisq tokens are simply colored satoshis, i.e. they've built functional governance directly on bitcoin) vote monthly on various governance proposals, and can thus hold people doing bonded roles accountable.
The tough question is whether such a system could make to individual apartment rentals in the real world. Its an oracle question: how to you establish the truth of competing claimed about the state if an apartment? Not an easy problem to solve, but if its solveable it could provide an amazing new marketplace.
> But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
But then won't they have to jack up the price, after earning a sufficient threshold of trust, to compensate for the huge losses their making at the beginning?
i.e. price their beds the same as hotels, or higher?
No, they can't do that, because, you know, competition. Basically, those few weeks/months of below market rate prices are the cost of bootstrapping your business. Of course, if, over time, you acquire stellar reputation, then you probably can price yourself slightly higher than competitors based on that. But that's very unstable state.
They will raise their prices until they are in the normal market range.
That's different from jacking up the price "to compensate" for the losses at the start. They just have to eat the initial costs, and it will take a while for normal market profits to put them in the black.
No, because money has a time value, the break even rate will be higher because a dollar today is worth more than a dollar a few months from now. It by definition will cause the rates to be higher then they otherwise would be. This might be worth paying for to be guaranteed a high trust host. But that doesn’t the change the fact that the costs are shifted around instead of being reduced overall.
Reviews of the hosts are already informally available in the reviews of the rooms and apartments. It's the number-one thing I look for when booking: the reviews should be raving about not only the place, but also the host. If this is not happening, or the reviews are mainly short and neutral, I don't book.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
What AirBnB missed was to include hotels in its listings, which would have allowed them to over a complete experience for travelers in general. booking.com started with hotels and included more AirBnB style listings.
Expanding into different niches like that is difficult. It's like Booking.com expanding into the camping market. They end up trying to shoehorn camping into the same database tables as hotel stays and it just becomes an abomination which misses many of the subtleties in the market.
Depends on the camp grounds. Those with specified and defined places it should be rather easy to do (Italy, Croatia, Germany are among those regions were you tend to have a lot those, France is a mixed bag and I haven't been to GB or Scandinavia recently). Those without defined places, that's gonna be difficult...
It changed when it turned into a big VC thing. All of the “Uber for X” models are fundamentally evil at scale. The founders vision is irrelevant to the investors need for return.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
Post-Google, I don't think there's any excuse for founders of marketplaces / platforms to ignore the ultimate metastasization of their business models.
If you are wildly successful (oh, to be so lucky), what will your company be forced to optimize?
Mid-years Amazon's radically generous customer service refunds and Etsy's seller revolt yanked their courses away from volume optimization for a few years... but it's their inevitable end state for boosting revenue. No public company can resist maximizing revenue by any means available, and especially when no other plausible alternatives are available.
So think really hard on how to set up a marketplace / platform with a business model that mixes in more user-aligned and sustainable goals? Looking at you, Apple...
This sounds like actually healthy productive places to exist and exchange might have to... exist outside of the realm of continuous growth by individuals motivated by ideology over profit.
The the need for cancer-like growth is really a driver of the worst behavior.
As a consumer of B2B services, I’m always amazed by the awful deals companies make to show revenue growth. One in particular a few years ago was particularly amazing. The sales dude was getting paid on revenue, and pushed through a deal that cost the company fortune. The entire sales chain of command retired and bought boats.
It started as being intended for VC, right? I remember YC being an investor and Paul Graham saying great things about the founders. Certainly they must have been counting on growth. Did they plan to just capture every airbed? Or to do to hotels what Uber did to taxis (both good and bad)?
All these (AirBNB, Uber, etc) e-companies do is take what's illegal, add "internet", and somehow is legal until the authorities can see through the shit-show.
Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I'm insane in that no one seems to acknowledge that many of these businesses are simply skirting real regulations because "internet" as you say so succinctly (e.g. PayPal skirting banking laws, Uber skirting Taxi laws, Amazon skirting tax laws etc.). Thankfully, it didn't/doesn't work in every country/case but it's apalling how often it did work.
btw. I'm all for interruption but please... it shouldn't be through these means (at least not on this scale).
Never forget "skirting consumer product safety regulations and trademark protections". Their entire retail business at this point is no more subject to regulation than buying "designer" handbags off some dude's street stand.
No, they hire the authorities, and the shit-show goes on forever. The gig is only up when they've passed their overvalued business on to late investors, who demand to be paid through strategic neglect of core functions, price rises to rational market values (or higher), and moonshot PR.
I am not asking about the founders. I agree we should be generous when considering their experience. I am asking about the investors. They put money in at some estimation of total addressable market.
These always remind me of the Stay Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. Like the most innocuous thing ever becomes terrible at scale. Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, Facebook all seemed like reasonable to great ideas and were really neat at smaller scale. And once they grew they started wreaking havoc in new and unexpected ways.
It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like destroy the world if it became a paper clip maximizer?
Exactly, I was so optimistic that the only path was one of human enlightenment because of the internet's ability to scale up the distribution of information and allow groups to collaborate instantly.
> If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
What I don't get is ... where is the government in all this? As the article points out: the owners of the property clearly violate a lot of laws. So I hear violating the law gets you into "trouble with the law".
I once went to the German police over an illegal listing, after the owner got physical when I asked him to turn on the heat at night.
The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.
To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.
My family went to an Airbnb (basically they were selling themselves as sort of resort) and when my wife saw she had to cook, etc... She was really mad. The listing didn't say it. Long history short, never again. We're going to resorts and hotels ever since. The extra money is not that much since Airbnb basically ramping up their prices.
Well the "Air" part is for air mattress, which is no longer true, if it ever was. The name was supposed to connotate a very spartan take on a traditional bed-and-breakfast. I've never heard of anyone booking all-inclusive travel through airbnb.
In my experience, and I've stayed at a lot of them, BnBs usually have a hot sit down breakfast but it's not universal. I've certainly stayed at BnBs where the host is politely but firmly clear they're not there to entertain you and there will be coffee out in the morning and feel free to grab some yogurt from the fridge. While there is usually fruit and muffins that you can grab for lunch, they don't usually provide a brownbag lunch as such and rarely dinner.
The hotels with free breakfasts in the US tend to be pretty crappy buffets. Generally a lot different from what's served at a good BnB. But at least it's something and I'm not inclined to pay for a full breakfast given I don't normally eat one.
The last two times we traveled, we looked at Airbnb versus hotels. The Airbnb's were all ~$150 for a bedroom in a shared space with shared bathroom/kitchen/living room, or ~1000-~1500 for a house or one floor of a two-story house. The hotel was $325 and $275 for a suite style in both cities.
To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
In many markets the prices are very close, once you factor in Airbnb's fees, cleaning services and local taxes/levies. Airbnb is most useful for non-traditional stays, like a cabin at the lake.
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
Really, in general, any time you want a real "home base" you don't mind spending hours in if, say, some outdoor activity gets rained out, AirBnBs are far nicer than a hotel. Hanging out in a hotel room sucks, hanging out in an AirBnB can be like hanging out at home except... kinda better, in some cases and in some ways.
Or for any getaway kind of situation where the point is mainly to be at the place that you are staying, not necessarily to get out a ton. Hotels are terrible for that, aside, perhaps, from ultra-expensive huge suites (I wouldn't know, I've never tried one, too pricey and I have a suspicion it'd still feel like being in a hotel room).
They're also great in rural areas. Often you can get an AirBnB much closer to some 2nd- or 3rd-rate way-off-the-interstate attraction you're interested in, than a hotel. Otherwise your only options would be camping or an RV.
There are tons of professionally managed rental companies that have been in operation for decades where you can rent houses. Same price as the "internet" grifters without any bullshit whatsoever.
This might be an option in a lot of downtown areas but not on the outskirts of London (the hotels are mostly airport / motel types) or in the middle of nowhere in Scotland where 4 of my sister's previous Airbnb rentals have been.
Her last one was incredible. A lovely little 3 bed home with a hot tub in the garden room.
I had to visit my employer in Ottawa (I live in the UK). They booked me into a suite hotel, because there was an international conference in town, and all the smaller rooms were booked.
So I got a huge TV, a kitchenette, a double bedroom with another huge TV, a bathroom with his-and-hers basins, and a single bedroom. The next morning I discovered a second bathroom, like the first; and a utility room with a washer and a dryer.
The problem was they didn't have a bar, so I couldn't get a bottle of wine. But not a big problem; the suite hotel shared a lift with the regular hotel next door. So I would ring the barman at the regular hotel, and he'd meet me on the second floor with my wine.
The suite hotels in the US often don't have a bar and limited or no food service at night. Though there are exceptions. (Marriott has been upscaling Residence Inn in many cases--probably because they have so many suite brands after acquiring Sheraton.)
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
I'd add the nuance that you can end up with a pretty crappy experience at a 3+ star chain hotel for whatever reason. Usually though it's something that doesn't matter all that much at the end of the day like a room with minimal natural light.
But generally speaking midrange business hotels are utterly unexciting--which is to say they're predictable which is what I'm looking for from my hotel in general when I travel. I'm probably not there for the hotel experience.
There is a budget hotel chain in the UK (premierInn) where if you complain you get a free breakfast and if you make your complaint official you will get a full refund. They have remained profitable for many years despite the obvious incentive for people to make unwarranted complaints.
This, I think, is the critical difference. If I get a hotel room, enter it, and discover anything is out of joint, I can walk downstairs and ask the manager for a refund, or at least a different room. If the same thing happens with an Airbnb, and the host has no interest in helping, you are basically out of luck.
If your hotel reservation is not refundable - you are out of your luck. You can potentially get refund from credit card company, as I once did, but the same is available for AirBnb - never tried though, was no need.
> Some hotels are good/bad. Some Airbnbs are good/bad. Tremendous insight.
I do not know how you’ve managed to extract that insight from my post. The experience I’ve described with AirBnb is not possible with any hotel, Hyatt included.
> The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
Take a look at Hyatt San Francisco, for example. See that the ground floor is occupied by some public areas exclusively? So I should either leave my bike in the place where it can be stolen, or to put it into my room via an elevator. Now it’s starting from $285, and $295 give you are a cottage in San Francisco on AirBnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6523507?check_in=2022-11-29&che...
So to be more precise:
- hotels, I can survive then, no prob. I can even survive Hyatt SF with my bicycle.
- AirBnbs give me pleasure. Get up, open the door to the garden, birds chirping, the creek floating, my favorite turnovers in the stove ready in 20 minutes, my laptop connected to Ethernet, my bicycle ready nearby - I can just jump on it and ride… Which of you “nicely regulated” hotels can give me all that?
To be fair, I’ve managed to get some pleasure from a hotel too. Now and then. A different pleasures though. And all of these hotels were in Japan.
Absolutely. The exception is when you're a large family, or even a not so large one. Most hotels have no good/affordable solution for parties larger than 2.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
We tend to use Airbnbs when road tripping/caravaning with others. It is significantly less expensive than getting two hotel rooms. When its just my spouse and I, we almost always use hotels, because there is far less risk involved (though it is still possible to find hotels that not well-kept).
That said, we've used about two dozen Airbnbs over the years, all in the U.S., and have never stayed in a place that was not exactly what we expected based on the listing.
For over 4 ppl it's insane trying to find a good hotel rental - they're called suites, and they're uncommon and thus often booked or extremely expensive.
I just find a good 4 person room and we make do - or I Airbnb/VRBO.
> They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews.
Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
> App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.
A franchise is very comforting. All of those consistent, comfortable minimum standards constantly checked by employees from checklists; the excellent insurance; the ability to speak to someone in charge when something goes wrong and get a nearly instant reply... comforting. When I stay in them, I don't even have to wonder if I'm raising residential rents in the area (although I'm certainly raising commercial ones.)
You can give me an 80% product, and I won't be impressed. You can give me that same 80% product, but consistently, and I'll be your best customer. AirBNB can be great, but wow they can be very bad, and at the end of the day I'm too old for that type of shit.
Holiday Inn Express might have beds fit for a Baggins, but everything down to the fold of the sheets and the pen/notepad is the same every time, and I cansure appreciate that.
Last AirBNB I was at told me to just not smoke all the 'courtesy items' on the shelf left by previous tenants.
I'd estimate the AirBnB post-fees was roughly 40% higher than HIE post-checkout. I chose to stay there because it was a great location, and like the idea of paying a person rather than a corp. For the record, this was a metro area, there was ample access and selection for corporate alternatives, if anything was not to my liking I'm sure I could have gone somewhere else easily.
Nice people, but just not what everyone might have in mind as far as accommodations go. Or maybe it is, who knows.
People used to buy travel books from known publishers where the author had at least gone to the restaurant or hotel at least once. I haven't bought one in decades, but maybe that is the future.
I've been a big fan of the Lonely Planet travel guides, and it's cheap enough to pick one up for the city - worth it even for just a couple of meals or ideas.
I don't understand how a restaurant being bad at their job, having bad food (a subjective assessment) and charging a high amount is a "scam". That just sounds like a bad restaurant.
You have nailed this. I have been pondering about such anonymous marketplaces and I came to similar conclusion as yours.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
Amazon customers have the benefit of free returns, pretty much no questions asked within 30 days. I want to buy some commodity like an AC adapter or an SD card, I'll buy 3 or 4 different options and usually at least 1 of them will be OK, then I'll return the rest. If I only need 1 item and have multiple that work fine, I'll give positive reviews to the ones I return, which I feel is the least I can do for the seller.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
Ever since the worker shortage started, the quality of traditional hotels has gone down the hole. I have traveled far more this year than any other year in my life and my anecdotal experience shows that below 4 star the quality has just nosedives so much so that you don't know what you are getting until you show up and end up feeling lucky or totally screwed. And I am referring to hotels in America(Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit) and Europe/UK(Amsterdam, Dublin, London).
I spent vacations in California this year, and noticed the same: housekeeping is every 5 days instead of everyday, hotel bars/restaurants are either closed or turned into fast foods (menu consists only of burgers, sandwiches and salads), amenities like gyms are closed. And all that for prices that are significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Hotels have definitely cut back on servicing rooms. Although honestly? I not infrequently stay in "serviced apartments" that are only cleaned once a week. And that's just fine. The housekeeper is more likely to interrupt me to clean the room than provide a service I actually care about.
I'm with you - I don't need (or even want, really) my room cleaned every day. It's friggin annoying. I always happen to be needing to access the room when housekeeping is in there. Just come once every 3-5 days if it comes to that, thanks.
Housekeeping is now largely "upon request" with sometimes a minimum and I absolutely love that. I don't really care for housekeeping everyday, I'll let them know if I need anything. I don't know of any hotel that will refuse to send housekeeping everyday if you request it. You just need to request it.
I've been staying at the same a hotel every few months for the last four years, even during 2020. The last time I checked in instead of saying "let us know when you want housekeeping" like they have for the last 3 years; they started saying "what's your preferred housekeeping interval?" I think that's a better system to ask than question.
The only slight downside for me is that if I'm in a room for a while the toilet paper can start to run low, but that's fixed with a text to the front desk.
That's not my experience. The last two hotels I stayed at -- Doubletree Hilton in Dallas and Shelborne in Miami -- had daily housekeeping without any request. But perhaps that's just a fluke. Maybe it depends on which city you are visiting, too.
Interestingly when I was looking up the info on the Doubletree, they mentioned something about housekeeping every X days (not every day), but when I arrived, it was daily. I didn't make any request for it, it could be that the website is just out of date, as I suspect this is more about staffing than anything else.
But it's also Airbnb themselves. It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited, this is something many people including myself have experienced. Any doubts, spend some time on the Airbnb subreddit, which is run by hosts, and check out both their attitudes and their advice about how to remove bad reviews.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
Hopefully those properties will come back on the market at a reasonable price so that we can offset some of the housing inequity that airbnb is directly responsible for.
Seriously. I can only hope the tide is turning and these AirBnBs will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. Sadly corporations will probably eat them up and let, though hopefully as long-term instead of short!
> will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities.
There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.
No, but it'll force them to go to places that are actually planned to accommodate them. Tourists are included in city planning, believe it or not, but they're not expected to be taking up the actual residential places of the city. That's why areas are zoned for hotels and there's regulation around them.
The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels. There's a huge demand for what AirBnB provides (Serviced and short term accommodation). Hotels are inadequate for longer stays or where you just want the comforts of home, a good middle ground is the "serviced apartment" concept found in some places (entire apartment blocks reserved for short term rentals) however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
> a good middle ground is the "serviced apartment" concept found in some places (entire apartment blocks reserved for short term rentals)
You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.
> The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels.
This is a werid entitlement. Tourists aren't entitled to overrun and impose a serious negative impact upon a town/city's housing supply because they feel like they 'deserve' to vacation there.
>You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.
What about a middle ground. If I go somewhere for 2-4 weeks? For that length of time I kind of want a proper kitchen, which I won't get in a hotel, but obviously it is not long enough to actually rent/buy a home.
>What about a middle ground. If I go somewhere for 2-4 weeks? For that length of time I kind of want a proper kitchen, which I won't get in a hotel, but obviously it is not long enough to actually rent/buy a home.
Not everywhere but at least in the US suite hotels with small kitchens are pretty common. Most of the big chains have one or more suite hotel brands. (Though honestly I not infrequently travel for 2-3 weeks and, while I definitely appreciate a refrigerator I pretty much never find I need a full kitchen. And being able to stretch out on a sofa is nice.)
Compared to what? I'm staying in a Residence Inn in a week for basically the same price as the nearby standard Marriott and Sheraton are. And Residence Inn is probably on the higher end of the big chain suite brands. They're not budget but they're squarely in the same range as midrange business hotels in general. They're generally what I book if they're a good option.
I’ve routinely found that Airbnbs are about 1/2 the price of hotels, with more amenities and classier design to boot, no matter where I visit (assuming Airbnbs are legal there).
This is exactly the entitlement I am speaking of. You want to go somewhere for an extended period. You want a proper kitchen. Your expectation is that the residents of a town or TheMarket should just... accomodate your desires? Regardless of their housing market, QoL, infrastructure, etc.?
Sheesh, jamie. I typically eschew using this term, but someone taking a 2-4 week vacation is already highly privileged to be able to do so. Tourism is a privilege. Not a right.
1. I am not saying the market/residents have to accommodate anything, I am simply stating my preference that if I have to travel for 5+ days I would rather have a full kitchen. If the residents don’t want to provide it, fine. If many other people feel as I do, then that’s kind of what markets are for.
2. I don’t typically take 2-4 week vacations, but I sometimes do travel for work for extended periods.
I recognise being able to travel at all is a privilege but having a personal preference for a full kitchen I don’t really think warrants such a judgemental response.
Well, he wants and he is willing to pay, it's not like he's demanding it for free. The residents and the town should price it accordingly so that both sides benefit from the deal.
Following your logic, going to the bakery to buy bread instead of making it myself is "entitled" and disregards the baker's quality of life since he'd be much more comfortable sleeping than waking up at 5am to start preparing the bread.
No, that was not my logic. You substituted your own. My argument is that under no circumstances is any entity 'required' to accomodate your desired market conditions. There are existing markets (i.e hotels) that towns/cities/whatevers provide. The mere desire from a consumer (or even massive group of them) does not oblige others to service that desire. And, the expectation that those desires are always met is the entitlement.
Many markets have demand, but society prevents their legal existence. For example, organ trades. I'm sure a lot of alcoholics would love just being able to go get a new liver whenever they want or when theirs fails. However, the... issues that creates have been deemed unacceptable and therefore, it's not allowed (obviously, it still happens illegally).
Some people want AirBnBs so they can have all the accoutrements of a home wherever they travel. Other people do not want such a market to exist, for a variety of reasons. I don't think that simply because an economic opportunity exists, it should be serviced or be allowed to be serviced. Obviously, advertisers want to increased the amount and effectiveness of their ads. FaceBook and Google would block out the sky and plaster it with ads if they could. Should they be allowed to?
Most hotel rooms don't have kitchens. It's not unreasonable to want a kitchen if you're staying somewhere for a week or two. But expecting those people to buy or lease a home is unreasonable. Short-term rental of homes is the solution to this.
It might be the solution to that, but it creates a lot more problems for the actual residents of the city. Drives up their rent, lowers their supply, makes them have to deal with neighbours coming in at all hours of the night, often without a care for the fact they even have neighbours who have to wake up and go to work in the morning. Ruins any community in a place. All the negative externalities get hoisted onto the actual residents of a town.
Now, should there maybe be an area of the city explicitly for short-term rentals, included in city planning? That's a different question; but it shouldn't be mixed in normal residential area, as all it does is make life worse for the actual residents.
> tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning
Alternatively, tourists are unhappy that people in some areas don't want unlimited numbers of them and account for them properly with zoning restrictions.
No, they are accounted for. The issue is entitlement on the side of tourists -- thinking they should have access to all the local amenities and stuff they do at home, while on vacation. This was a problem, but it was never a huge problem, from how I understand it, before AirBnB. Basically AirBnB changed the expectations for tourists, at the harm of the local communities.
> however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
It's not your home, why should you deserve a house over someone who lives there?
If a local wants to open their home to me, even if it’s a second home, why should that make me feel “entitled” to enjoy a taste of local life? (Ignoring Airbnb slumlords, which should probably be fought with regulation and/or Airbnb policy changes.)
There's rules and regulations against it, for one. Should locals be allowed to do whatever they want on their property with no regards to how it will impact neighbours and local economy? There's a reason we have zoning laws, etc, in place. There's lots of things we stop locals from doing because it's for the better of the community as a whole, and renting out short-term to tourists should be one (and, again, it sometimes already is but AirBnB allows them to skirt the regulations).
Locals should absolutely have the right and power to change their local laws to prohibit Airbnb. However, I'm not going to feel guilty for using Airbnb in places where it's legal, because it's simply a better product than hotels by a long shot (when it works).
I'd be willing to bet that in most places they're not legal, there's just nobody enforcing it. They're willfully in violation of a lot of rules and regulations that are already in place. And harming the locals so entitled tourists can think they're at home.
What about what the neighbors of the local’s home want? Do you want new neighbors every few days moving in to your neighbor’s house? Wouldn’t you be worried about your family‘s safety given the velocity of people going in and out of your neighbor’s house?
Technically, the reason AirBnB exists is that if you aren't paying for most of the "serviced" part, including obeying the city planning and safety regulations, you can rent a property for less than an actual hotel and still make a lot of money.
There's a real demand, but at one point the cost becomes too steep.
The cleaning and service fees are being universally complained about. It definitely reduced some demand, especially since some of it seemed to have started recently - last year ?
For long weekends, it becomes a very bad deal: the overhead of big service fees that are usually more than 1 day's rental, then you tack on the cleaning which can be 125-225 typically. You put those numbers together and sure, while there's demand, the demand is mitigated by the high cost. There's a demand for all sorts of consumer items in the world but people hit their limits.
And fundamentally, Airbnb competes with hotels. Their niche is to provide a better hotel experience: a bigger space, maybe a backyard, and definitely a kitchen. But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
>There's a demand for all sorts of consumer items in the world but people hit their limits.
That's the thing with a lot of VC-subsidized services. There are a lot of services that consumers would be happy to, well, consume if they were cheap enough. Drivers, personal chefs, weekly housekeepers, lawn services, laundry pickup, etc. Even people with an upper middle class income are pretty selective about that sort of thing.
>But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
Kitchens are not a big deal for me when I travel. A fridge is nice but you get a small one you can use a lot of the time in hotels these days and minibars seem to have mostly gone out of fashion.
> Kitchens are not a big deal for me when I travel. A fridge is nice but you get a small one you can use a lot of the time in hotels these days and minibars seem to have mostly gone out of fashion.
For me this is true if I'm traveling for < 1 week If I'm gone for more than that i don't want to eat every meal out and want to have some food + drink stored in my accommodation.
With 3 kids every meal at a restaurant is closer to $50 than $10, it adds up fast. Then getting 3 kids to sit down and not embarrass you! And then one isn't hungry! I love what airBnB could be. What it is right now sucks. The kitchen / whole house is a big deal. Just walking outside for a few minutes at a real house is a big relaxer that's a lot less manageable at a hotel.
I agree with your point. Cleaning fees tend to make it hard to consider AirBnB for a weekend. That said, assuming the host doesn't just do it themselves, they're going to get a housekeeper in, rates are up for that sort of service, and that's about what it costs.
Then display it in the search criteria in the initial filter on the map view, instead of only when someone has selected the property and begins filling in dates.
It's a bait and switch by selecting which UI components are displayed in that search screen, and hiding the added costs ("service fee" and "cleaning fee").
Also, unlike a hotel an Airbnb host will give you a list of items to do upon leaving. And often passive-aggressively, "And it would be appreciated if you could put the towels and sheets in the washing machine for one wash as you leave so it's less work for the cleaning person" type commentary.
I hate it generally when booking something doesn't make the final bottom line price obvious until you're ready to pay. Rental cars are another bad offender with all the taxes and fees.
If there's a $150 cleaning fee? Not really. Sure, I'll throw a few dishes in a dishwasher and run it. But it's not like I'm staying in a friend's condo for free.
There are almost certainly automatic machines for both of those. Throwing the sheets and dishes into the washers before leaving on your last day isn't an unreasonable request. It only takes a few minutes.
(That said, fining somebody hundreds of dollars for not doing that is unreasonable for the same reason that the request is reasonable; because it's an easy thing to do.)
The question of reasonableness cuts both ways: the high cost for the Airbnb unit plus the added fees including the cleaning ones, and the lists of guest to-do items upon check-out. The two combine and quick it becomes the feeling that you're paying a lot more than a hotel and yet have a lot more servicing to do yourself. If there is a very high cleaning fee, it becomes increasingly unreasonable to ask a lot of your guests to spend time cleaning everything before they leave.
Yeah, I almost never consider an Airbnb nowadays for these extra costs. Hotels do this too (with city tax for example), but that is just a few extra dollars a night, and not almost as high as the cost per night.
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
Well and I don't have to do chores at a hotel. AirBnB says pay us $200 for a cleaning fee but make sure to take the sheets off the bed, cut the grass, and paint the walls before you leave.
>It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
They have a long list of things you can't complain about. One example is things that the seller can't change, like a loud train nearby. At least when I last used it if a single sentence in your review violated one of those policies your whole review was deleted and you couldn't submit a new one.
Interestingly their dispute process is very buyer-friendly, though. When a seller demands money in compensation for damage they often lose. I believe this is because Airbnb is on the hook if they can't collect from the buyer.
While I broadly agree with what you've written here, I think that:
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
It's also exacerbated by a lot of people looking for a bargain however slight.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
You make a great point about the (de)evolution of marketplaces.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
Or just have a lower fine that increases exponentially every time it occurs. That would make it easier for small companies to compete which would otherwise just have to go bankrupt on the first violation.
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
>After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform.
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
I’m an early adopter of things like this and I’ve been using Airbnb since about Day 1. There was so much promise early. One of my best AirBnB memories was staying at a startup hotel in SF through AirBnB, the hosts had purchased a Victorian house to turn into a boutique hotel, seemed young and optimistic, and it was a fun, quirky experience. There was still construction and things happening, apparently we were one of the first few people to ever stay there under its new ownership.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
If I'm traveling on business I mostly just want predictability. I might want somewhere I can leave my bag after I check out. I want to be able to get in at midnight if my flight is delayed.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
> After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform.
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
Accountability, responsibility and minimum standards. Hotels provide these, Airbnb does not. Hotels are direct service providers; Airbnb is a middle-man which does not assume responsibility nor enforces minimum standards effectively.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees as they probably feel the pressure from an environment with increasing interest rates - without improving the service more than before.
Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, but I wonder that in front of the increasing fees for a decreasing added value, the pendulum will swing back and customers will revert back to direct contact with the service providers instead of using middlemen apps. The old way.
> I see more and more "middleman" apps such as airbnb or food delivery apps piling up more and more fees
They're running out of magic investor money and the reality is starting to hit them
> Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive,
Of course, they were totally unregulated, regulation caught up in most countries (airbnb taxes/time limits, better status for uber drivers, &c.). They were only profitable because they were abusing the people working for them
In some cases they even stole tips. Given that the precedent of no significant legal consequences for such theft has already been set, I no longer trust the tipping feature even if I otherwise would've been fine with tipping.
Until I gave up on rideshare apps, I was carrying around a pile of cash and pre-tipping drivers 20% in cash up front in order to get decent service.
Fortunately I discovered a decent local airport ride business that offers car seats and no attitude. It's barely more expensive than Lyft and works really well.
They were running on VC cash until they could go public, now that they actually have to be a solvent company, the reality of the economics come to bare.
In case like this, you must also report the case to the city housing department. European capitals are trying to regulate airbnbs, with mentions of fake ID and electrical hazards, I'm pretty sure Lisbon city will react more quickly than Airbnb
Airbnb is largely incentivized not to report at all, at least in the short term (Q3 earnings call coming up, we need everyone in the support staff to "improve" their numbers).
Airbnb is clearly in the money-extraction phase of the VC-funded b2c cycle, it's not like we haven't seen this before. This turd is usually served with a side of "acquiring every potential competitor", so that the con can go on for as long as possible.
I've been decreasingly satisfied with airbnb (no horror stories). I think I've done roughly a 50-50 split between them and hotels, depending on the area. It's not exactly hard to switch back to hotels either, airbnb which now has premium prices really only makes sense if the service is premium too. Peace of mind is a huge factor for vacations.
When I try to find a place to stay on Airbnb it looks like the prices are higher than what I can find on hotels.com or booking.com.
And the web site is useless. There is no option to sort by price, the filters for maximum price don't work.
It's going to have to be cheaper than a hotel or B&B to make it worth taking the risk and I'll have to be able to find it without scrolling all the way through the site.
So far I haven't found a compelling reason to try it regardless of the horror stories.
Booking.com replaced AirBnB for our travel needs in basically all cases. Only exception when booking.com doesn't show any available results, in which case AirBnB is a potential backup, not that this was actually necessary in the last 2 years or so before Covid, during covid and ever since.
The pictures changes as your family grows, needing two or three hotel rooms or only special family rooms makes Airbnb more affordable.
Unless something has changed in the last months I always found a direct hotel order cheaper and easier than booking/hotels dot com, not to mention fake rates, irrelevant reviews or non existing rooms.
I hope the OP is well and managed to find better accomodation. If it was me, I would bit the bullet and just write off the place and check into the nearest hotel as soon as possible.
But regarding fake hosts: I think this is standard practice on BnB. Nobody wants to expose their real names on Bnb and be subject to abuse by unhappy guests... unfortunately that's the reality of it. From the host's point of view, I can understand that... the host shouldn't matter anyway in most cases, right? Most people who own these places don't look cool and young as in the fake pics you'll see in most listings! But guess what: those cool pics do seem to make the place a bit more attractive to guests, so the incentive to use fake pics is strong (not sure if that's illegal though).
I stayed in a few wonderful places in California through BnB, but clearly, the listings were all under fake people (I think some even go to the effort to pay a real person to pretend they are the owner, as I googled one of them and she seemed like a real person... though I 100% doubt a young artist lady own a 3-storey townhouse in a good, quite central area of San Francisco).
My sister is about to list her apartment on Bnb and she's going to pay a company specialising in this to do all the cleaning, customer support etc... They take a 20% cut I believe... but it's probably worth it. Not sure she'll allow her real profile to be used for the listing, but I suspect that as long as it's not illegal, she should use some kind of AI-created profile or something.
I had a similar (bad) adventure on Booking.com - dirt, crawlies, so I packed and went somewhere else. Booking.com didn't do anything about refunding "oh we contacted the host and he said nah" so I called the credit card company who refunded me the transaction. Lesson learned. From then on I check Booking.com for locations then compare the offers on hotel sites and lo, often they're cheaper when booked directly. And renting directly from people, that's left to you folks more adventurous than me.
This is the reason we stick to the same hotel chains we know that are good whenever we can; cannot really go wrong with higher tier french chains (not only in France; we used them in India, China, Thailand as well).
We often find that all in all the prices are not so different from airbnbs but with a lot more risk; so when you think about it, a E1200 airbnb for a month (which is hard to find in lisbon, by the way) vs a E1500 hotel, I would always pick the hotel; daily cleaning, breakfast included (usually so much I don't need anything further) and easy to cancel, extend or completely just get my money back or get relocated (especially when using the same chain like Accor).
I had awful experiences with booking.com and very good experiences with hotels.com. More than once, they rebooked us in far nicer and more expensive hotels after complaining. I found our favourite hotel that way; our booked hotel was overbooked and pretty crappy; the staff was nasty about it; one call and we got put up in a hotel 5x the price for the same number of days (2 weeks) instead swiftly and at their cost. More or less in the middle of a paradise.
If you cannot trust your client (who pays you) to give you your real name, show a real profile picture, show a recent, accurate picture of the place (every room), or promise a discount based on irregularities then the customer gets screwed. They pay for a place, they depend on you once they arrived.
Can we stop using the PR term "host"? That is only valid if it is a space you live in and are hosting someone, like a guest.
So I don't have statistics behind this next sentence, but my anecdotal data has shown that most Airbnb rentals are not where people live. They are specific spaces purchased and maintained for renting out short term via services like Airbnb. These are renters. They are renting the space. Language is important.
This has definitely changed over time, the first few airbnbs I stayed in had actual hosts who were friendly and helpful but it's been a while since I've found anything that isn't just an empty apartment or the equivalent of a self-service boarding house.
Yeah I have come to realize that you are on your own and be ready for any emergency. Airbnb will not help in a timely manner. Worse, they will make you re-explain the situation while you are in stress of urgency.
Same goes for booking.com these days- no support response until after the problem.
because it used to have excellent support similar to amazon’s - call or message them and they will contact the hotel themselves and resolve issues. they even managed to waive cancellation fees for our family when we screwed it up ourselves and had non-cancellable reservation. so it wasnt a comparison of airbnb and booking, but current booking.com and the way it used to be
Although that seems foolhardy, there should be no chance of electricity flowing through the reset button/switch if regulations are followed (which is obviously why there are regulations around domestic electricity wiring).
Quite surprised by the amount of pitchforks here. I certainly don't think of AirBNB as a failure and I doubt most others would. Is there a problem with scams? Totally. But that's hardly exclusive to AirBNB, wherever there's a market, digital or physical, there will be scammers. This was the case for all of human history and it's on you to vet your stuff.
I've used AirBNB for long and short term stays, in Europe and in the US. Each time I stayed in a delightful places that was a genuine passion project for the hosts. Those places would not exist without AirBNB and similar services.
If you're on a tight budget and just need a place to stay at for a bit, it's obviously easier to go with a Marriott. But if you're willing to spend some time on searching the best place to complement your trip, AirBNB can get you the best experience.
The problem is that Airbnb is the scammer here. They've intentionally misleading customers thinking they will be protected against scams of this type while in reality they are not.
Problem is not scam itself, but how airbnb handles it. If customer with 10 years old history, reports problem, it should by treated seriously. Not stole with "more proof needed" tactics.
If hotel chain electricuted people in shower, it would get fined and closed pronto.
I'm not a huge fan of airbnb but I don't know of a great alternative for their services. When my family and I travel we want something that is a home, designed for kids, with spaces to cook, hang out, and near or in town (but not surrounded by loud drunks) so we can do things without driving. Ideally in a situation where a screaming baby isn't going to annoy too many other people. Hotels are miserable at this, and when I try to find places like this on a site like booking.com I find... the same places I find on airbnb. Perhaps part of the problem is cities forcing hotels to be in locations that suit them, and not the people travelling.
I've stayed in many absolutely wonderful homes on airbnb and as a travelling family it's vastly superior to staying in a hotel. We're staying in one in Utrecht for New Years'; I can't wait.
The author's points are valid (if you have little kids, there's a great Shaun The Sheep episode about a converted sheep barn that comes to mind reading this article) but I can't think of anything remotely as good as airbnb for travelling families, except for airbnb clones like vrbo.
_mostly_ miserable. There are some exceptions. They're usually very expensive.
If you still want/need to use AirBnB for cheaper travel, renting a room instead of a whole apartment is actually better. Then the host is an actual host and the reviews are more meaningful. I’ve gotten to know some pretty cool people that way. It’s a trade-off of course, as the set of potential issues is different.
It's one thing renting a room in the host's own living apartment (like the old couchsurfing) and another renting a room in a shared rented-out apartment. The latter one might be plagued way more by the mentioned fake reviews.
This - I wish they had categories for "host lives here too" and "this is a boarding house." You can usually figure it out by scrutinizing the reviews, but I'd like to see it overtly stated.
Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb.
Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable.
It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
> Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
Since it's the responsability of the municipality it's impossible for me personally to tell, but I've been all over the country and the green (or grey, depending on location) containers are ubiquitous (or drop points with underground deposits, sure). If specific neighborhoods of Lisbon do it differently I'm afraid I wouldn't know. It's not impossible.
Yeah the damp / mold smell is a no-go for me. I rented a place in a popular east coast resort town for the family, and the first thing that hit me was the damp and moldy smell of an existing or recent moisture problem. Not an AirBnB, but some hosts/rental places just don't care about guest comfort.
It cast a pall over the whole stay. It was hard for me to be comfortable, I could not imagine a long-term stay. The kids didn't mind though, and luckily we weren't worse off for it.
This is the problem with the business model of these gig-economy or P2P marketplace concepts with “independent contractors” providing service. They get initial traction with a high focus on consistency and quality, but the model doesn’t scale and eventually the customer experience starts to degrade. I stopped using Uber for similar reasons. It was great for a while, but now it’s total random people turning up in beat up cars with rampant last minute cancelations and other problems. I’ve gone back to plain old taxis in most cases which are better now.
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out long term and if these companies can control quality at scale or if this whole mode of trying to play middle-person just fizzles out over time and we return to more traditional approaches that weren’t necessarily terribly broken in the first place.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadThe only practical tip I can offer regards airbnb is to rent places that are also featured on other well known sites, since this does reduce the risk a little.
From this and the many other stories about AirBnB and its "support", best advice seems to be to immediately close your account, request your data to be deleted and never use any of its "services" again.
Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.
Does it make her opinion less important?
In the case where the terms of the living arrangement are “you can stay here 30 days for free, but you’ll need to take care of any issues you come upon yourself.”, this would be an appropriate response.
In this case, as mentioned in the article, they are “you can stay here for 30 days for $3,000”. Totally different story.
Things don't work as expected, and you simply pay up?
Not sure about you, but if I was staying at a place for a length of time i would expect things like the toilet work properly. As someone paying for a place to stay, "filing a bucket with water" to flush the toilet isn't something i should be doing. Toilets are not expensive and easy to replace, it sounds like this one should have been replaced some time ago.
If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
I'm back to hotels again, with airbnb as a very last resort
AirBnb started out as a company that basically fostered and encouraged illegal, unregulated short term rentals. Many of the hosts were breaking various ordnances and bylaws to rent you their home.
There is also a huge societal cost in terms of increases rents and reduced permanent housing supply because of AirBnb.
So if those type of people at that company screw you over, don’t be surprised.
AirBNB is not safe.
https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexua...
https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sex...
Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.
I was shocked how bad their support was.
This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get.
Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant.
AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly.
False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP).
More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook.
Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
There's nothing wrong with AirBnb in principle, but I strongly suspect if they were properly regulated and actually carried out the necessary checks, provided an adequate level of guarantees and service, suddenly their business model would be much less viable.
In effect, AirBnb externalizes the cost of their business to local residents and authorities, but they harvest the profits. They are not the only industry operating under such framework of course.
There is always a healthy layer of NIMBY, I want to be a tourist but I don't want tourists to come where I live.
Sure, they should be regulated, and in many places in Europe they are regulated.
Any business/housing has the potential to be bad for neighbours, which is why we have zoning and planning laws. Bars and nightclubs, industrial businesses, apartment buildings. Short term rentals are no different, rules and taxes should apply. Fines should be imposed for rowdy party behaviour (which is one of the more negative aspects of short-term rentals).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33286238
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
Lately it's sucked just like every other hotel, since they don't clean the rooms and the employees are all overworked and stressed out. Still better than having to deal with all the huge fees and shenanigans from AirBNB IMO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287435
With many hotels the money is actually flowing out of the local community as the business is owned by a big multi-national. It's not really so cut and dried in favour of hotels.
I think house-swapping gets around this by doing away with any possible financial gain, but this precludes you have a house of your own you're willing to have people live in while you're in their home.
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.
Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos.
Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
Absolutely. That's where bitcoin could help a new platform, as a decentralized trust protocol. The bisq.network protocol requires people to put up significant bonds to perform roles that are trusted, and then if they fail to perform well, they can loose some or all of their bond. The bisq token holders (bisq tokens are simply colored satoshis, i.e. they've built functional governance directly on bitcoin) vote monthly on various governance proposals, and can thus hold people doing bonded roles accountable.
The tough question is whether such a system could make to individual apartment rentals in the real world. Its an oracle question: how to you establish the truth of competing claimed about the state if an apartment? Not an easy problem to solve, but if its solveable it could provide an amazing new marketplace.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
i.e. price their beds the same as hotels, or higher?
Anyone who charges lower then the minimum viable will simply never break even, given that the money spent to accumulate trust has an opportunity cost.
The cheapest hotels will be priced about the same.
Low or zero trust hosts can't compete against high trust folks without a huge discount as already discussed.
That's different from jacking up the price "to compensate" for the losses at the start. They just have to eat the initial costs, and it will take a while for normal market profits to put them in the black.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
If you are wildly successful (oh, to be so lucky), what will your company be forced to optimize?
Mid-years Amazon's radically generous customer service refunds and Etsy's seller revolt yanked their courses away from volume optimization for a few years... but it's their inevitable end state for boosting revenue. No public company can resist maximizing revenue by any means available, and especially when no other plausible alternatives are available.
So think really hard on how to set up a marketplace / platform with a business model that mixes in more user-aligned and sustainable goals? Looking at you, Apple...
As a consumer of B2B services, I’m always amazed by the awful deals companies make to show revenue growth. One in particular a few years ago was particularly amazing. The sales dude was getting paid on revenue, and pushed through a deal that cost the company fortune. The entire sales chain of command retired and bought boats.
And of course, while the grift is going, the execs and shareholders get rich. But everyone knows when the gig is up. Evidence: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/uber-doordash-plunge-as-labo...
btw. I'm all for interruption but please... it shouldn't be through these means (at least not on this scale).
Never forget "skirting consumer product safety regulations and trademark protections". Their entire retail business at this point is no more subject to regulation than buying "designer" handbags off some dude's street stand.
No, they hire the authorities, and the shit-show goes on forever. The gig is only up when they've passed their overvalued business on to late investors, who demand to be paid through strategic neglect of core functions, price rises to rational market values (or higher), and moonshot PR.
I imagine that it could have pivoted in many directions. That’s really the tragedy of AirBnb. It seems like a platform that could have been more.
It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like destroy the world if it became a paper clip maximizer?
It all went horribly wrong.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Well, clearly it doesn't.
The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.
To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.
I knew someone whose family ran a small bed-and-breakfast (pre-web).
I don’t think they cooked all 3 meals but they did at least provide breakfast and brownbag lunch.
I hate staying in hotels, but one benefit is getting a nice hot breakfast served to you.
Edit: If you weren't on that trip then please accept my apologies.
To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
Or for any getaway kind of situation where the point is mainly to be at the place that you are staying, not necessarily to get out a ton. Hotels are terrible for that, aside, perhaps, from ultra-expensive huge suites (I wouldn't know, I've never tried one, too pricey and I have a suspicion it'd still feel like being in a hotel room).
They're also great in rural areas. Often you can get an AirBnB much closer to some 2nd- or 3rd-rate way-off-the-interstate attraction you're interested in, than a hotel. Otherwise your only options would be camping or an RV.
Her last one was incredible. A lovely little 3 bed home with a hot tub in the garden room.
So I got a huge TV, a kitchenette, a double bedroom with another huge TV, a bathroom with his-and-hers basins, and a single bedroom. The next morning I discovered a second bathroom, like the first; and a utility room with a washer and a dryer.
The problem was they didn't have a bar, so I couldn't get a bottle of wine. But not a big problem; the suite hotel shared a lift with the regular hotel next door. So I would ring the barman at the regular hotel, and he'd meet me on the second floor with my wine.
You got to be kidding?
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
> and you get breakfast!
Ok, now I see that you’ve got me.
Did you even read the article? The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
But generally speaking midrange business hotels are utterly unexciting--which is to say they're predictable which is what I'm looking for from my hotel in general when I travel. I'm probably not there for the hotel experience.
I do not know how you’ve managed to extract that insight from my post. The experience I’ve described with AirBnb is not possible with any hotel, Hyatt included.
> The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
Take a look at Hyatt San Francisco, for example. See that the ground floor is occupied by some public areas exclusively? So I should either leave my bike in the place where it can be stolen, or to put it into my room via an elevator. Now it’s starting from $285, and $295 give you are a cottage in San Francisco on AirBnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6523507?check_in=2022-11-29&che...
So to be more precise:
- hotels, I can survive then, no prob. I can even survive Hyatt SF with my bicycle.
- AirBnbs give me pleasure. Get up, open the door to the garden, birds chirping, the creek floating, my favorite turnovers in the stove ready in 20 minutes, my laptop connected to Ethernet, my bicycle ready nearby - I can just jump on it and ride… Which of you “nicely regulated” hotels can give me all that?
To be fair, I’ve managed to get some pleasure from a hotel too. Now and then. A different pleasures though. And all of these hotels were in Japan.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
That said, we've used about two dozen Airbnbs over the years, all in the U.S., and have never stayed in a place that was not exactly what we expected based on the listing.
I just find a good 4 person room and we make do - or I Airbnb/VRBO.
Really? I don't know that this was ever guaranteed, and post-COVID it's definitely not. The ones I've seen are paltry compared to 10 years ago.
Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
And these types of scammers are and know the "right" people.
There is a reason why stolen passports are so valuable.
- Large friends and family network, rotate through other peoples homes
- Own a series of apartment buildings, rotate through addresses
- Unoccupied buildings with accessible mail drops (pick up mail from outside)
Similar tricks exist for non-residential address requirements.
Never underestimate the creativity of scammers.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
Inn!
Express!
Breakfast!
Clean!
Rooms!
Holiday Inn Express might have beds fit for a Baggins, but everything down to the fold of the sheets and the pen/notepad is the same every time, and I cansure appreciate that.
Last AirBNB I was at told me to just not smoke all the 'courtesy items' on the shelf left by previous tenants.
Nice people, but just not what everyone might have in mind as far as accommodations go. Or maybe it is, who knows.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I've been staying at the same a hotel every few months for the last four years, even during 2020. The last time I checked in instead of saying "let us know when you want housekeeping" like they have for the last 3 years; they started saying "what's your preferred housekeeping interval?" I think that's a better system to ask than question.
The only slight downside for me is that if I'm in a room for a while the toilet paper can start to run low, but that's fixed with a text to the front desk.
Interestingly when I was looking up the info on the Doubletree, they mentioned something about housekeeping every X days (not every day), but when I arrived, it was daily. I didn't make any request for it, it could be that the website is just out of date, as I suspect this is more about staffing than anything else.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.
The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels. There's a huge demand for what AirBnB provides (Serviced and short term accommodation). Hotels are inadequate for longer stays or where you just want the comforts of home, a good middle ground is the "serviced apartment" concept found in some places (entire apartment blocks reserved for short term rentals) however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.
> The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels.
This is a werid entitlement. Tourists aren't entitled to overrun and impose a serious negative impact upon a town/city's housing supply because they feel like they 'deserve' to vacation there.
What about a middle ground. If I go somewhere for 2-4 weeks? For that length of time I kind of want a proper kitchen, which I won't get in a hotel, but obviously it is not long enough to actually rent/buy a home.
Not everywhere but at least in the US suite hotels with small kitchens are pretty common. Most of the big chains have one or more suite hotel brands. (Though honestly I not infrequently travel for 2-3 weeks and, while I definitely appreciate a refrigerator I pretty much never find I need a full kitchen. And being able to stretch out on a sofa is nice.)
$300 or more a day is beyond the pale IMO.
I'm guessing you're a high income individual with no kids then?
Sheesh, jamie. I typically eschew using this term, but someone taking a 2-4 week vacation is already highly privileged to be able to do so. Tourism is a privilege. Not a right.
1. I am not saying the market/residents have to accommodate anything, I am simply stating my preference that if I have to travel for 5+ days I would rather have a full kitchen. If the residents don’t want to provide it, fine. If many other people feel as I do, then that’s kind of what markets are for.
2. I don’t typically take 2-4 week vacations, but I sometimes do travel for work for extended periods.
I recognise being able to travel at all is a privilege but having a personal preference for a full kitchen I don’t really think warrants such a judgemental response.
Following your logic, going to the bakery to buy bread instead of making it myself is "entitled" and disregards the baker's quality of life since he'd be much more comfortable sleeping than waking up at 5am to start preparing the bread.
Many markets have demand, but society prevents their legal existence. For example, organ trades. I'm sure a lot of alcoholics would love just being able to go get a new liver whenever they want or when theirs fails. However, the... issues that creates have been deemed unacceptable and therefore, it's not allowed (obviously, it still happens illegally).
Some people want AirBnBs so they can have all the accoutrements of a home wherever they travel. Other people do not want such a market to exist, for a variety of reasons. I don't think that simply because an economic opportunity exists, it should be serviced or be allowed to be serviced. Obviously, advertisers want to increased the amount and effectiveness of their ads. FaceBook and Google would block out the sky and plaster it with ads if they could. Should they be allowed to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_hotel
Now, should there maybe be an area of the city explicitly for short-term rentals, included in city planning? That's a different question; but it shouldn't be mixed in normal residential area, as all it does is make life worse for the actual residents.
I lived in a Homewood Suites for three months. It was fine.
Alternatively, tourists are unhappy that people in some areas don't want unlimited numbers of them and account for them properly with zoning restrictions.
> however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
It's not your home, why should you deserve a house over someone who lives there?
The cleaning and service fees are being universally complained about. It definitely reduced some demand, especially since some of it seemed to have started recently - last year ?
For long weekends, it becomes a very bad deal: the overhead of big service fees that are usually more than 1 day's rental, then you tack on the cleaning which can be 125-225 typically. You put those numbers together and sure, while there's demand, the demand is mitigated by the high cost. There's a demand for all sorts of consumer items in the world but people hit their limits.
And fundamentally, Airbnb competes with hotels. Their niche is to provide a better hotel experience: a bigger space, maybe a backyard, and definitely a kitchen. But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
That's the thing with a lot of VC-subsidized services. There are a lot of services that consumers would be happy to, well, consume if they were cheap enough. Drivers, personal chefs, weekly housekeepers, lawn services, laundry pickup, etc. Even people with an upper middle class income are pretty selective about that sort of thing.
>But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
Kitchens are not a big deal for me when I travel. A fridge is nice but you get a small one you can use a lot of the time in hotels these days and minibars seem to have mostly gone out of fashion.
For me this is true if I'm traveling for < 1 week If I'm gone for more than that i don't want to eat every meal out and want to have some food + drink stored in my accommodation.
I agree with your point. Cleaning fees tend to make it hard to consider AirBnB for a weekend. That said, assuming the host doesn't just do it themselves, they're going to get a housekeeper in, rates are up for that sort of service, and that's about what it costs.
It's a bait and switch by selecting which UI components are displayed in that search screen, and hiding the added costs ("service fee" and "cleaning fee").
Also, unlike a hotel an Airbnb host will give you a list of items to do upon leaving. And often passive-aggressively, "And it would be appreciated if you could put the towels and sheets in the washing machine for one wash as you leave so it's less work for the cleaning person" type commentary.
Ah yes, and then you read in the notes that you also have to do the laundry and wash the dishes.
Like at a cafe, it's socially accepted that you put away (bus) your finished utensils.
I haven’t encountered this before.
I’m way down in New Zealand.
(That said, fining somebody hundreds of dollars for not doing that is unreasonable for the same reason that the request is reasonable; because it's an easy thing to do.)
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
They can slap vacation ads on it and now they have a stable source of income!
Could Airbnb challenge it legally though?
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
Interestingly their dispute process is very buyer-friendly, though. When a seller demands money in compensation for damage they often lose. I believe this is because Airbnb is on the hook if they can't collect from the buyer.
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
1. The incentives of the platform
2. The incentives of the individual
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
See "We become what we behold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 and https://ncase.me/trust/ from the first comment. A high trust society, or marketplace, is an opportunity for the defectors to extract value. Unless they can be punished somehow ...
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, but I wonder that in front of the increasing fees for a decreasing added value, the pendulum will swing back and customers will revert back to direct contact with the service providers instead of using middlemen apps. The old way.
They're running out of magic investor money and the reality is starting to hit them
> Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive,
Of course, they were totally unregulated, regulation caught up in most countries (airbnb taxes/time limits, better status for uber drivers, &c.). They were only profitable because they were abusing the people working for them
I dont mind paying for a real service, but these apps have also encouraged tipping culture, which was already going crazy. Now everyone wants a tip.
Just charge me the real cost, pay them a real wage, and if no wants to pay for it, then society doesn't want it.
Until I gave up on rideshare apps, I was carrying around a pile of cash and pre-tipping drivers 20% in cash up front in order to get decent service.
Fortunately I discovered a decent local airport ride business that offers car seats and no attitude. It's barely more expensive than Lyft and works really well.
Airbnb is clearly in the money-extraction phase of the VC-funded b2c cycle, it's not like we haven't seen this before. This turd is usually served with a side of "acquiring every potential competitor", so that the con can go on for as long as possible.
I've been decreasingly satisfied with airbnb (no horror stories). I think I've done roughly a 50-50 split between them and hotels, depending on the area. It's not exactly hard to switch back to hotels either, airbnb which now has premium prices really only makes sense if the service is premium too. Peace of mind is a huge factor for vacations.
And the web site is useless. There is no option to sort by price, the filters for maximum price don't work.
It's going to have to be cheaper than a hotel or B&B to make it worth taking the risk and I'll have to be able to find it without scrolling all the way through the site.
So far I haven't found a compelling reason to try it regardless of the horror stories.
Unless something has changed in the last months I always found a direct hotel order cheaper and easier than booking/hotels dot com, not to mention fake rates, irrelevant reviews or non existing rooms.
Which it is, which is why on my trip to London in a month I rented over booking and not AirBnB.
Why would I choose a more expensive service with zero additional benefits? Because their app is more cool?
But regarding fake hosts: I think this is standard practice on BnB. Nobody wants to expose their real names on Bnb and be subject to abuse by unhappy guests... unfortunately that's the reality of it. From the host's point of view, I can understand that... the host shouldn't matter anyway in most cases, right? Most people who own these places don't look cool and young as in the fake pics you'll see in most listings! But guess what: those cool pics do seem to make the place a bit more attractive to guests, so the incentive to use fake pics is strong (not sure if that's illegal though).
I stayed in a few wonderful places in California through BnB, but clearly, the listings were all under fake people (I think some even go to the effort to pay a real person to pretend they are the owner, as I googled one of them and she seemed like a real person... though I 100% doubt a young artist lady own a 3-storey townhouse in a good, quite central area of San Francisco).
My sister is about to list her apartment on Bnb and she's going to pay a company specialising in this to do all the cleaning, customer support etc... They take a 20% cut I believe... but it's probably worth it. Not sure she'll allow her real profile to be used for the listing, but I suspect that as long as it's not illegal, she should use some kind of AI-created profile or something.
We often find that all in all the prices are not so different from airbnbs but with a lot more risk; so when you think about it, a E1200 airbnb for a month (which is hard to find in lisbon, by the way) vs a E1500 hotel, I would always pick the hotel; daily cleaning, breakfast included (usually so much I don't need anything further) and easy to cancel, extend or completely just get my money back or get relocated (especially when using the same chain like Accor).
I had awful experiences with booking.com and very good experiences with hotels.com. More than once, they rebooked us in far nicer and more expensive hotels after complaining. I found our favourite hotel that way; our booked hotel was overbooked and pretty crappy; the staff was nasty about it; one call and we got put up in a hotel 5x the price for the same number of days (2 weeks) instead swiftly and at their cost. More or less in the middle of a paradise.
So I don't have statistics behind this next sentence, but my anecdotal data has shown that most Airbnb rentals are not where people live. They are specific spaces purchased and maintained for renting out short term via services like Airbnb. These are renters. They are renting the space. Language is important.
Same goes for booking.com these days- no support response until after the problem.
I've used AirBNB for long and short term stays, in Europe and in the US. Each time I stayed in a delightful places that was a genuine passion project for the hosts. Those places would not exist without AirBNB and similar services.
If you're on a tight budget and just need a place to stay at for a bit, it's obviously easier to go with a Marriott. But if you're willing to spend some time on searching the best place to complement your trip, AirBNB can get you the best experience.
If hotel chain electricuted people in shower, it would get fined and closed pronto.
I've stayed in many absolutely wonderful homes on airbnb and as a travelling family it's vastly superior to staying in a hotel. We're staying in one in Utrecht for New Years'; I can't wait.
The author's points are valid (if you have little kids, there's a great Shaun The Sheep episode about a converted sheep barn that comes to mind reading this article) but I can't think of anything remotely as good as airbnb for travelling families, except for airbnb clones like vrbo.
_mostly_ miserable. There are some exceptions. They're usually very expensive.
If you aren't willing to accept some kind of reduction from hotel accommodations, you aren't willing to save money.
Thanks for explaining!
Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb.
Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable.
It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
It cast a pall over the whole stay. It was hard for me to be comfortable, I could not imagine a long-term stay. The kids didn't mind though, and luckily we weren't worse off for it.
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out long term and if these companies can control quality at scale or if this whole mode of trying to play middle-person just fizzles out over time and we return to more traditional approaches that weren’t necessarily terribly broken in the first place.