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Show HN: A website for remote workers to find Airbnb's with good Internet (thewirednomad.com)

25 points by idoescompooters ↗ HN
I created this website about a month ago to solve a problem I was facing myself as an aspiring digital nomad. It is very important to find an accommodation with fast and reliable Internet. I also specifically wanted places with Ethernet access to minimize latency as much as possible since I (and many others) use a VPN hosted back at home.

The database is in its infancy but covers 11 countries so far. I realize the UX is very basic and a minimum viable product. I intend to have someone help me overhaul the design (with ReactJS perhaps) to make it mobile friendly and more appealing.

64 comments

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barbazoo
Congrats for building something!!!

Too bad it feeds into the affordability crisis though.

idoescompooters
People often forget that locals are actually willingly choosing to host their places on these platforms themselves to make money. It's not as one-sided as you think.
Thin_icE
You forget that the people who can afford to have a place to rent, usually are not the majority of the population of the place where the rental is located. I live in a city that was very welcoming to tourists before airbnb, and where locals are now starting to behave in a hostile way towards non-locals, due to the affordability crisis (myself included, I had a 70%+ rent increase this month). You can try to make yourself feel better by saying you're not the problem, but you are, and locals everywhere are starting to hate people like you. My advice, unsolicited as it might be, is to relocate yourself to near where you're working for, as it's the economy for which you are being paid, and continue building great software, but with the world (and not yourself) in mind.
idoescompooters
Tourism is providing these local economies with money. Shoo-ing away the tourists is not the answer. They are providing significant money into some very bad economies, and in some cases such as resorts, hiring locals and paying them decent wages (I see this in Indonesia). I assure you suburban US does not need your money.
Thin_icE
Tourism provides money to these local economies, true. But what airbnb, and digital nomads, did was to subvert these local economies to depend on the to survive, turning whole cities (some of which are world heritage sites) into amusement rides for tourists. Have you ever stopped to think what is life like for the locals who work in the resorts (to take your example), and can't afford to live nowhere near their workplace, having to commute for over an hour (in the best case scenarios) only to smile at tourists that become upset because they can't speak their language? It's lovely to say that businesses should pay locals a decent wage, but that very rarely happens, the "decent" is a very debatable number. And anyway, no one in the world needs your suburban US money, please keep it to yourself and your suburban US economy.
midasuni
How does a “digital nomad” differ from a resident that works from home?
Thin_icE
A resident that works from home earns a salary that is calculated according to the economy where he resides, whereas a digital nomad, tipically chooses a destination with a lower cost of living, while earning a salary that was calculated for the economy of his original whereabouts. The digital nomad creates inflation and makes it impossible for locals to live on their own region, while someone who works from home does not have that ability to tip the economy.
oldtownroad
That’s not true. The Airbnb industrial complex is mature, “locals” renting out a spare room have been replaced by profiteers evading tourism taxes. Ethical tourism involves using locally licensed accommodation (which is mostly hotels).

Any money you save by using Airbnb is pushing the cost of your tourism onto locals. Pay for a hotel (or other licensed accommodation) or stay home.

constantly
We Airbnb our furnished basement sometimes. I am not a profiteer evading tourism taxes, but a resident of the city and active on my city council.

So your assertion is not true for all Airbnb rentals.

oldtownroad
Yes, you’re right, there are exceptions to the rule, but they’re few and far between. Compare the number of airbnb hosts with just 1 room rented out today vs. a decade ago and you’ll see that nowadays most hosts have multiple exclusive properties. You exist but you’re not representative.
ktosobcy
So because there is a tiny minority that rents out own place ocassionaly then it means that what Airbnb does is OK? o_O
constantly
That’s a pretty big leap in logic. Can you walk me through how you got from “I rent out my basement occasionally” to what you said?
jazzkingrt
I am an airbnb host, and exclusively rent out my own apartment on the handful of weeks per year that I'm traveling.

If airbnb was banned, my apartment would be vacant during that time. This would push tourists into hotels, driving up the cost of a hotel room, and furthering the affordability crisis since developers would see more upside in hotels rather than residential development.

jjulius
Sample size: 1
constantly
A single counterexample is thankfully enough to disprove a false statement.
monsieurbanana
It would only be a false statement if the person meant that it's true for 100% of the time, always, rather than some kind of majority of the time.

Which is the least charitable way of interpreting their comment and as such against hn guidelines.

jjulius
Only if the counterexample is the majority. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
oldtownroad
I assume you’re joking but if you’re serious: hotels must go through extensive planning processes that include considerations for the local economy. Hotels provide jobs. Hotels do not increase the cost of living in an area and assuming local government is operating effectively, hotels should be a positive for the local community.

Residential development and hotel development is very different, both as a business and a practice. You would not choose to build a hotel in place of a residential building. That’s why Airbnb is so problematic: people are taking residential housing and turning it into a business.

There’s certainly some “ethical” Airbnb property owners but they’re a dying breed. If you’ve spent any time on Airbnb in the last few years, you’d see the majority of listings are for property specifically owned/rented to Airbnb it. There are public companies that are entirely focused on Airbnb.

monsieurbanana
Out of maybe the couple dozens Airbnb reservations I've made, only 2 that I can remember where for places that had a long term tenant living there and rented through Airbnb ponctually. Everything else was about half obvious disguised hotels (whole floor / building rented that way), or belonging to a particular but rented short term the whole year.

It just feels dirty to me now to use Airbnb, but that's not even why I stopped. It's now not necessarily cheaper than a hotel and with little recourse when you get a dud.

midasuni
I’m staying in an Airbnb style holiday cottage at the moment. I hd to register and pay tourist tax when I got here.

Maybe the problem isn’t Airbnb, it’s your jurisdiction.

627467
Whoa. Travellers are now responsible for all political and macroeconomical decisions on all countries/cities in the world.

#shutdownTravelling

ajmurmann
If locals would vote to relax zoning and simplify regulations we wouldn't have the crisis in the first place.
ktosobcy
I'm sorry but what are you rambling about?

Barcelona for example is flooded with tourists and "nomads" and save for basically banning short term rentals and eradicating cancerous Airbnb there is not that much that can be done...

kjkjadksj
If there is demand for a thing and its exceeded such that people who want that thing can’t get it, just make more of that thing. Barcelona should build like Tokyo does until demand is satiated. The solution exists, people are just generally in favor of how things presently look and feel like and fear the unknown, so policies on land use tend to reflect these feelings.
ajmurmann
Is the problem in Barcelona that the ration of tourists to locals is broken (I agree it is and didn't like it there when I visited because of this) or is the problem affordability as called out by the parent comment? If the issue is affordability this can be addressed by increasing supply.

If the issue is simply too many tourists flooding the city and changing the character, it's a different point than I was responding to and I don't have any well-formed thoughts on potential solutions and causes.

ktosobcy
It's both actually and they are compounding.

For the latter one there exists tourist tax that could curb a bit the overflood but AFAIR it was harder to enforce / collect with Airbnb and short term rentals (as opposed to typical licensed hotels and hostels) that only exasperated the situation by pushing more people to try to cash on the airbnb

kjkjadksj
The surprised reactions from airbnb taking up housing stock are from people who don’t piece together what you describe. Basically if the airbnb is taking needed housing stock, why not just zone for more housing? Or regulated hotels that these days are able to compete with airbnb on cost once again? That’s never mentioned though, people just stick fingers in their ears and repeat “screw airnbnb” without thinking of penciling this sort of stuff out to its logical conclusions.
chongli
Locals are incapable of that because property owners are the majority of voters and unwilling to vote against their own interests. Furthermore, if one municipality solves its affordability crisis a ton of people will move there and gobble up the affordable housing stock. It’s a problem that can’t be solved locally.
nonethewiser
> Locals are incapable of that because property owners are the majority of voters and unwilling to vote against their own interests

This seems unlikely to be true. Especially In the places where housing is most expensive. Do the majority of voters in NYC and SF own homes or other real estate?

chongli
The places where housing is the most expensive are the same places where people who cannot afford housing are forced to commute from somewhere else. Commuters don't get to vote in the place where they work; they have to vote where they live.
nonethewiser
People do commute from outside but they are irrelevant. Do you think more NYC residents rent or own?
chongli
They are not irrelevant. If they didn’t have to commute they would be able to vote in local elections.

Property owners vote at much higher rates than non-owners. Property owners are the only ones with the right to put up election signs. Property owners are far more politically connected than non-owners.

throw__away7391
If you are a digital nomad you are still only occupying one space at a time.

Bigger picture though, there’s a major contradiction in housing around the world and that is that owners who tend to be older and more likely to vote benefit enormously from rising home prices and governments which collect property tax as a percentage of property value receive more revenue when prices rise. Both groups have grown to depend on perpetually rising property values and factored it into their long term financial plans. There are numerous ways this is achieved that vary somewhat from location to location but the result is the same. After years of housing simply eating up more and more of renters and new homebuyers income we are reaching a breaking point and governments are looking for something other than their own policies (which they have every intention of continuing) to blame.

Governments if so motivated have numerous tools at their disposal to reduce home prices, which all in all is probably easier than the reverse. There are a handful of governments which have successfully done this, but the ones that haven’t won’t do this because they’d simultaneously anger both property owners and recipients of government spending which would need to be cut.

midasuni
In the U.K. there is no tax related to house prices, just relative prices. If prices double from 250k to 500k government doesn’t get any more money.

The fault is entirely with those who don’t want more housing built. The government can use this as a wedge issue and blame immigrants (the ones who work and pay taxes) rather than the wealthy retirees

throw__away7391
I don’t think we disagree. The details do vary from place to place, but I think the overall dynamics remain. The established lot has grown accustomed to feeding on ongoing price increases in an unsustainable manner. Any changes that would make housing more affordable would disrupt their financial expectations in ways that are unthinkable to them, so they’re trying to squeeze every other option available.
jimmychoozyx
This is a really good idea. For years I've wanted to know:

- Which AirBNB hosts actually have a good "dedicated workspace". Criteria: at least a 30" deep desk, and a comfortable adjustable height office chair.

- Which AirBNB rental units actually have fast internet. Ideal in a perfect world: Let me ping their router, or somehow get the airbnb host to visit https://speedof.me or a similar site, then upload the results. (i.e. -- once per day or once per week, live wifi speed data from that Airbnb Host's rental unit is uploaded to a site where I can access the speed data publicly)

- (This one is more of a "local cafe" functionality) Which AirBNB rental units have a cafe with strong, reliable wifi within <toggable> distance. i.e. let me toggle a .5 km, 1km, 2.5km, etc radius. Show cafes within that radius as well as their wifi

idoescompooters
I definitely plan to add some sort of data input for workspace that includes decent criteria (i.e., not a coffee table and wood stool).

Yep, I give the user several different options to post speeds including speedof.me. Contrary to what many might think, different speed test websites function differently and will reveal different types of speeds such as a max (under high load) or best "stable" speed.

The cafe idea is another good one that could be built into this site. Though, as someone who needs the ability to take voice calls, I certainly don't want to try doing that in a public environment. Thanks for your comment!

ajmurmann
I spent hours and hours in 2020 clicking through AirBnB listings trying to find a viable place to work remotely from for a month. Sitting on a dining-room chair at a "desk" that cannot even fit a screen is not viable and arriving somewhere with the expectation to work remotely and then you cannot is a complete disaster and untenable risk. I wonder how it is that AirBnB still hasn't solved this. Intuitively I'd expect that they must have missed out on so much money during the pandemic due to this shortcoming.

Edit: Another alternative to the cafe would be which AirBnBs have a good co-working space in walking distance.

idoescompooters
I can speculate one reason Airbnb hasn't/refuses to solve this issue is similar to the reason YouTube got rid of the dislike button. It has the potential to decrease views, and in this case, decrease bookings if things are not good enough.
kjkjadksj
Its telling that all the advertising in the media you see of the prototypical digital nomad is someone at a cafe or in a hammock with a laptop, versus someone with three monitors and a herman miller chair.
ajmurmann
I wonder how much this feeds into the negative image many people have of "working remotely" as barely working. It might fall into a pattern where framing something as nicer than it is makes it less likely that we as a society continue to permit the thing. A similar case would be all new housing being positioned by developers as "luxury housing".
nantersand
I've been meaning to build smth like this for a while. Reach out at [username] @pm.me!
awb
On AirBnB hosts can record their internet speed and guests can filter for high speeds.

So what data are you collecting outside of what AirBnB already provides?

idoescompooters
My About page attempts to explain this a bit. Basically, barely any hosts actually use this feature. And it also doesn't give detailed results. It simply gives you a download speed. Nothing about dropouts or ping. Searching the comments can be hit or miss and laborious. Also, I created this originally to see which Airbnbs had ethernet access to minimize latency as much as possible for the purpose of using a personal VPN back at home as well.
tripdout
If hosts don't use the feature on AirBnB, why would they use this 3rd party website?
idoescompooters
Hosts don't use it. This is for guests. Crowdsourced data.
KomoD
Because guests submit, not the airbnb owners themselves (I guess they technically could if they wanted to)
nantersand
This is awesome! Would love to chat more, wanted smth like this for a long time! Your reddit user seems down tho? Email me at [username] @pm.me!
idoescompooters
It got banned... Because the /r/digitalnomad subreddit is so toxic and they claimed I evaded a ban. Long story. Very dumb.

Please PM me at /u/TheWiredNomad1

KomoD
"Uncaught (in promise) FirebaseError: Quota exceeded."
idoescompooters
HackerNews squeeze of death. OpenCage API key may have also gotten used up.

EDIT: It's back. Upgraded FireBase account

paxys
Your site is a blank map with zero data points. How are you planning on populating it, other than "AirBnb guests will fill it out themselves" (which will never happen)?
idoescompooters
It was Firebase exceeding 50k reads daily limit. I upgraded my account now and it's back.
dutchbrit
Still showing nothing on my side.

Edit: Cool idea though, edit because I don’t want to come over negative!

KomoD
Same here, even tried force-clearing cache.
dutchbrit
Possibly Fastly that has an old cache.
idoescompooters
Nope. "Uncaught (in promise) FirebaseError: Quota exceeded."

I could upgrade the account but I don't understand how much I'd actually get charged.

pawelwentpawel
Apart from knowing that an Airbnb has a good internet, I'd love to know / be able to filter for good office chairs and work setup. They do have the "dedicated workspace" checkbox but unfortunately this can be anything - from an office chair to a hammock with a desk.
friend_and_foe
You should add hotels to the map.

I personally wouldn't want to use airbnb as accommodation anymore. I don't generally like hotels and like tye idea of airbnb, but in the end you overpay to have a bunch of extra rules and chores imposed on you, hotels have become cheaper (wild I know) and they make your bed. Hotels are often pretty awful with the internet though.

Side note: one thing I do like about airbnb is that it has really forced hotels to step their game up. When they were the only game in town they could just coast doing the bare minimum that the worst hotel in town was doing and call it industry standard. They're starting to realize they actually have to do what it says on the box, "hospitality", because they can't compete with a house on a lake otherwise.

idoescompooters
I will definitely consider adding hotels as an input option. It's definitely regional for whether I book an Airbnb versus a hotel, but most times for me it is an Airbnb based on the customer support, ratings system, and ease. However, in places like Indonesia, the hotels/resorts are a better deal than most of the Airbnbs which are not that great and have no service.