They were making guests wash dishes? That would've been a real problem.
My maid service will not wash dishes. They need me to clear the sink every time before they arrive. It's often a point of contention, because I leave dirty dishes quite often, and I simply forget what needs to be done. I don't have a problem with doing it for them, I just forget.
But I believe that the reason they will not wash my dishes is because of food safety. In a commercial kitchen, even the dishwasher needs to hold a Food Handler's card or certificate. The sanitizing of dishes and utensils is serious business. If they're not clean enough to eat from, you could be passing foodborne illness.
I would never want to stay at a place that didn't professionally wash its dishes. I've never stayed with AirBNB and I plan to keep it that way. Thankfully, the hotel industry is still a quite viable business, and hotels have staff, insurance, and regulation on their side, even now. I recently had a "staycation" in a 98-year-old classic hotel, and it was so wonderful, worry-free, and pleasant, and cost-effective. I am thankful that they are still operating like that.
When I rent a shore house for a week on the east coast (direct from owner rental, not Airbnb), it’s been customary for at least 30 years to clean the house and wash the dishes you use for the next people. We would usually wash them anyway when we arrived because I’m crazy.
When we had little kids we used disposable plates because we didn’t want to break the plates in the house. I don’t do Airbnb but disposable plates might be one way if you needed to stay in a short term rental.
I think that AirBnB just feels much more annoying because of the fee structures. Yes, renting private homes at a lake cabin, shore house, timeshare or ski lodge have their own customs. AirBnB feels much worse (to me) because you select $200 a night, and end up paying $400 after all of the fees. So it used to make it difficult to search for places in your price range because of all the absurd fees piled on top most of which is cleaning. Then you have to clean yourself via a list of chores they give you, then you could be fined by them. All the while a massive corporation makes a ton of money simply matchmaking. It is much different when you are paying it forward in a small community. I didn't articulate it well, but for me the feeling is entirely different. Less that you participate in a community and culture and more that you are disposable labor for what is increasingly a luxury experience typically provided by a rich landlord.
AirBnb is camping. I have been travel camping with and without people for 50 years. The longer you camp the better the experience. Almost all of the first 25 years involved a tent (or bivy sack), and maybe a camp kitchen. Then you surface again, happy minded, into a world where people travel but they expect everyone touching their utensils or even maybe food(?) have a "Food Handler's card or certificate". Whatever that is. Back into the bush.
A maid service does not require a Food Handler's card to wash dishes. They won't do it by default because they can charge more if they offer it as an addon.
They literally will not do it at all. They refuse, and they will make me pick up the dishes and move them out of the sink.
Yes, if it were an add-on service, they would ask me for permission and then go ahead and charge me for the service. That is something they do with cleaning the oven and such other things. They simply will not wash dishes at all, period, full stop.
It's got to the point now, where if I forgot and left dishes in the sink, I will take them out and hide them somewhere, like the fridge, before the team arrives at my door. And then, hopefully I do not forget to retrieve them and properly clean them immediately.
Same. I have consistently left feedback that even the idea of such policies makes me choose airbnb less. Haven’t used them in several years now due to the possibility.
Thing is, the cleaning fee is "just" a fixed fee that goes down, as a proportion of your total bill, the longer you stay. Not really a bad deal.
People would have accepted this principle just fine if they just put it in the damn total price shown, so you could do a fair comparison between your lodging options.
They could have structured their reservations system the same as say, Hilton does - when you book 5 nights, and the nights vary in price due to demand, say it's $100, $100, $200, $100, $100, they just show "$120 per night (avg)".
Instead AirBNB thought they could get cute and pretend that this fixed part of the charge is not part of the price at all, it's this one separate purpose. Well, of course people are going to expect that if they're literally paying $200 for a cleaning crew (a cleaning that will take maybe 90 minutes max and cost the owner far less than $200), why the F can't they take the trash out? They did this to themselves.
I've stayed in some places where no one had rented the place for a few days beforehand. I get in town early and want to at least drop off my bags or maybe just shower or nap. In a few of these cases, there's been a cleaning crew there finishing up. I don't think the cleaners are always showing up right after you leave. They obviously will if there is someone else checking in that day but I think it's more likely cleaners will come before you arrive rather than immediately after. I think this is especially true for the places that ask you to dispose of trash and wash any dishes before you go, they don't want rotting food sitting around attracting pests.
I've been an Airbnb host for the last 3 years. We've never expected guests to do any cleaning or washing of dishes (although it's always appreciated when they do!) We charge a small cleaning fee to cover the costs of cleaning our studio which only takes an hour. We also have maintained a really high rating over the last few years (currently at 4.96). I would hope that other rentals that have ridiculous rules and high cleaning fees would suffer from average ratings?
The market is more complicated than that, unfortunately. Some properties can sustain high ratings on their other strengths (e.g. location, decor, view, heritage) regardless of the host rules and the clientele that's interested in them. There's also a problem with the rental market getting very thin for some locations and property types (e.g. 3+ bedrooms), so ratings effectively stop mattering.
As a personal example, I once stayed at a place that charged a $150 cleaning fee, but also required dishes + taking the trash out and down the street, which wasn't known until we opened the door. And of course there was a threat that failure to do so would incur a fee. Also a bit of ceiling plaster fell on my wife during the night. Still had a fantastic rating because it was a castle and I'd stay there again if someone else paid.
Oddly this will probably let prices be raised, even though there's a cleaner usually there right after..
Most guests of AirBNB like clean homes, and usually tidy up pretty well themselves. Maybe there's a way to incentivize those who choose to, or want to and offer a discount if they want it.
Contrarian view here but honestly I can't imagine not cleaning up after yourself by default. Of course I am not saying that I do a deep clean at every place I stay but if I'm staying in an AirBNB the very least I do is to leave the place in a civilised way. For example, if I use kitchen utensils I either clean them or put in the dishwasher when available. I seriously never understood people that just leave completely dirty things behind, especially when they are travelling with their kids.
You can still do that. The host just can't require you to do that - especially after charging a mandatory cleaning fee.
I mostly stopped using AirBnB due to the impact of their existence and lobbying on cities and affordable housing, but after my final few stays I was ready to quit over the huge fees, the fact those fees were hidden when searching, and the absurd rules BS.
I can see both sides of the issue, that is, hosts protecting themselves (to an extent) from dirty guests. I've seen once the huge pile of dishes in a shared stay, and it wasn't nice.
I think it's not a big issue for people who clean up after themselves daily, but on the other hand, sparing those last 10 minutes on the checkout morning... ;)
I would never be expected to clean my dishes after ordering room service in a hotel. The price of an AirBNB would have to be much cheaper than a hotel in order for me to do my own cleaning. And in my city at least, it never was.
but you are paying extra for the room service. the price pf washing is included in that. when i bring my own food then i totally expect to clean the dishes i use from the host myself.
or they factored the cost of cleaning into their price. doing the cleaning as a host myself is not a reason not to charge a cleaning fee if that is the way i make my money.
the whole thing with a cleaning fee is either to allow the advertised room price to appear lower (but doesn't airbnb now factor the cleaning fee into the price shown?) or alternatively to make longer stays cheaper because the cleaning fee is not applied for every day).
ok, yes, it depends how high the cleaning fee is. and i would also consider what is normal usage.
for example if i spend a several days or longer in a place and instead of washing and reusing dishes as i would at home, i never wash any dishes but use up all the available dishes instead then i would not consider that normal.
dirty dishes also contain leftover food which can rot, or dry up, making it hard to clean, etc, you don't want to leave that stuff out for to long.
bed sheets on the other hand i wouldn't wash unless i am there long enough that i want to reuse them myself. the rest is just keeping things tidy and not leave chaos behind.
There's a difference between putting dishes in the dishwasher and doing the dishes. I'm glad to put trash in the trash can. I'm not willing to take the trash down two flights of stairs and find the right dumpster. I'm willing to put my sheets in the washing machine. I'm not willing to do the laundry.
My issue is the double dipping. You want me to clean? Fine, waive the cleaning fee. You don’t get to charge me the fucking cleaning fee and also ask me to clean. Pick one
I do these sorts of things all the time for cabin rentals. It's pretty standard there. But the cost typically also reflects it. I'd be fine with the same sort of situation on AirBnB, but the fees and such change the calculations really quickly.
+100. Airbnb hosts in he PNW region (incl BC area) have unreal expectations. The cleaning costs are "island typical" i.e. high and they expect you to : i) do the dishes & unload the dish washer , ii) load the sheets into the washer and leave it running, iii) take the trash and recycling to the bin, and iv) make sure there is no residual smell from anything you might have cooked in the kitchen and more.
I've got no issue with tossing trash bags into the can outside and running the dishwasher before I go. Airbnbs are not cleaned immediately after you leave so it's reasonable not to leave rotting food around. I also don't stay in luxury airbnbs, it's usually just when I want to stay with others or the nearby hotels are more expensive or too far away. I've also never stayed someone that some has expected cleaning from me beyond what I think is reasonable (see above).
I did have someone once ask me to strip the bed but that's just boomer hospitality etiquette expectations. It takes no time to strip a bed and the cleaners will need to touch the sheets anyway so why am I doing it?
I think the hassle lies in uncertainty. Different hosts have different stands on house chores. One may expect me to simply put dishes in the dishwasher, while another may expect me to wash and dry all their bedsheets. Many people would rather just get out of this worry all together.
I'd prefer not to wash sheets of course, but also because I wouldn't trust previous guests to acually do it instead of just shaking the sheets out and putting them back.
I do favors and chores for friends & family, or at a hostel where you pay nothing & get nothing and everyone has to diy, not for someone who charges me money.
The new rules already clearly and explicitly describe leaving things "in a civilized way". No one is suggesting it's ok to destroy a place.
In Finland, summer cottage rental self-cleaning (and bringing your own towels and bedding) is common - with an additional fee if you don't want to do it yourself.
It really brings down the price of a single night or weekend stay when you're just using the bed and bathroom and cleaning is a 10 minute job.
Yes, Sweden is the same, there’s often an optional upcharge to get linens and towels etc, and it’s often quite reasonable and in line with the amount of labor involved
I’ve seen linens and cleaning be two separate line items and I think it’s quite a reasonable approach, people don’t ask for a deep clean but sweeping, trash etc
I think it only works in a high trust society, my fellow American countrymen are mostly incapable of actually doing what they promise in this regard, the nordics have enough societal responsibility and shame involved that you can reasonably expect people to do what is asked of them. A system like this in America would probably fall over from abuse by people who would not pay for the cleaning and then not do it
My father runs a few guest suites out his house and the cleaning cost, wear and tear of washing linen makes single night stays really impact his bottom line, hence him having a cleaning fee which is per stay rather than per night.
Prospective guests can then choose for themselves if they feel the overhead of the cleaning fee for such a single night is worth it for them and my father doesn't land up with uneconomical stays.
In August I was renting Airbnb for 2 weeks. On departure day I left all trash sorted in the bags in the kitchen, and dishes collected from all the apartament in the sink.
18 days later I’ve get notice from Airbnb that I’ll be charged $50 (45 EUR) for damages. The host decided that this required deep cleaning. What’s more important for $50 you can find a cleaning company for 2-3 hours in Warsaw.
It's interesting how Airbnb has diverged from its original vibe of "staying at somebody's house." When I "stay at somebody's house" I wash the dishes, take out the trash, etc. Essentially, leave it as I found it, if not a bit better. I also expect "somebody's house" to be cleaner than a hotel.
Granted, Airbnb has taken on the hotel industry, and so I'm not surprised that their rules have evolved.
I agree about how one should conduct themselves in someone else's home, but is it really that interesting how they progressed as a technology company? To me it seems like the tried and true formula of enshittification. It's the startup playbook.
You do those things when you’re staying at a friend or family member’s place. But your friends and family aren’t charging you hundreds of dollars a night, plus a $250 cleaning fee.
It’s not just Airbnb the company that moved away from it, it’s the Airbnb hosts that moved away from it as soon as opportunists started becoming mega landlords renting out ikea-furnished party houses. It hasn’t been the original “person with a spare room for a weekend” Airbnb in a long, long time.
In Tacoma, a "party house" suffered an arson attack recently. The theory/rumors, etc., are that it was a neighbor, pissed off with the constant noise, traffic, etc. The home is right by the Narrows bridge, views, etc., and rentable.
The other part of the theory is since it is owned by a former NFL player (and a Seahawk, at that), that local police were reluctant to rock the boat too much. Neighbors got frustrated, and well, maybe?
Staying with my family and friends and helping with common household chores, the same as I would be doing at my own home, is a completely different thing than paying $150-350 a night to some rando.
I recently used airbnb quite a bit in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and found quite a bit of that old vibe, ranging from a spare room in a young brother & sister's house, to more suite-style accomodation. I was very happy with all my stays, specifically the hosts who balanced privacy with friendly helpfulness.
Not sure what it’s like elsewhere but at least in Australia it’s not objectively cheaper to use airbnb than a hotel. So if you’re paying the same rate, you don’t expect to have to follow a bunch of extra rules that wouldn’t apply to the other
I also expect "somebody's house" to be cleaner than a hotel.
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Why would you expect that someone’s entire house is cleaner than a small hotel room that professional crews clean every single day?
Granted I don't stay in the most expensive hotels. But the "professional crews" may very well be overworked and understaffed, and not managed with sufficient attention to quality.
These are all self-inflicted wounds by AirBnB. I have used AirBnB a few times in the past, but these days opt for a hotel instead if I can.
They could take user feedback seriously, but chose not to. Case in point: we booked a place in Hawaii. We (2 people) arrived the day of, tired as heck from the beach activities. Place looked fine, except for the crumbs of food in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. No big deal. We crashed almost right away, too tired to do anything else. An hour later, my wife jumped up, claiming some insect was walking on her legs. I turned on the lights sleepily, and lo and behold, there were cockroaches on the ceiling, scurrying about (and one had fallen and landed on my wife's legs). In the middle of the night, I contacted AirBnB help. They wanted proof. So I took a video and sent it, along with photos. Finally around 2AM they agreed that we should get out of there. We packed up and left for the beach, to wait things out.
My first reaction was: I should leave a review telling people about the roaches. But guess what? AirBnB cancelled our reservation, so there was no way to rate the place or leave a review! They did refund me, but we wasted a day trying to catch up on the lost sleep.
After that experience, I stopped booking AirBnBs if I could help it. They (and VRBO) are a last resort for me (no pun intended).
There seems to be the same by symmetrical issue going on as well. where guests who lie without proof can leave a retaliatory review when not getting a refund. For problems that never existed of course.
It happens to host with hundreds of spectacular reviews.
Toward the tail end of the pandemic, well after vaccines and the average person even remotely cared about it, I stayed in a small studio apartment.
The cleaning fee was $200.
The host gave me a list of at least 30 things I needed to do, including vacuum the floors & washing all the dishes and returning them to their exact initial positions - along with photos of where everything should go, exactly, along with a list of fines as high as $100 PER ITEM for each infraction the cleaning crew could find.
I have never stayed in an AirBNB since outside of hosting a large group, and I never will again.
They've banned this now.
What about all the hosts using AI to pretend guests trashed their place?
No thanks.
Hotels are just fine. I hope all these get-rich-quick scumbag AirBNB speculators get wiped out by high interest rates and lose every penny they have so that people who actually need housing can afford it, and people who actually know how to run a hospitality business can keep doing that correctly.
I tend to agree, nothing of value would be lost if AirBNB disappeared tomorrow. Vacation rentals have always existed anyway, and the cheesy operations that do nothing but rent out each of the bedrooms in a random house in Daly City are just converting normal rental homes to mediocre hotel rooms, a service literally no one was asking for. Enough normal hotel rooms already exist.
You really take your chances with AirBnb. I have so many stories where I got burned by Airbnb. As a customer they are pretty lousy about handling snafus. From Airbnb’s perspective they are a marketplace so their users and both the buyers and sellers. These two groups interests naturally conflict. They need to balance this tension and they don’t want to burn the renter who make the platform work. That said they do a lousy job of building trust. You can never be sure a listing will have what you think it will and Airbnb does very little to investigate what a property offers. Having a kitchen and decent WiFi is nice, but hotels win in terms of reliability and service and often price.
You hit the nail on the head with the problem. It’s not actually that interesting of a problem, it’s classic incentive misalignment. Airbnb is going to continue to not give a fuck as long as it makes them money. And why wouldn’t they? It’s the American way
Airbnb has the incentive to not tank their marketplace and they seem to be slowly responding to the increasingly negative sentiment to their brand. I somewhat suspect that their leadership lives in a bubble that insulates them from how lousy their brand is these days. I’m sure they have thought of lots of things but these would all cost money and require them to admit that their product is basically seen as a sketchy black market with a lot of sleazy behavior.
I'd argue that it is that interesting of a problem because it gives outsiders (us) insight into AirBnB's marketplace dynamics.
It has long been obvious that many scammy hosts exist on the platform, and it ought to be easy to detect such hosts if they bother to try. Yet, that never happened until now.
So what changed? I would bet that until now they have always worried about having enough inventory to sell, and that now they are noticing they have too much inventory. That changes the dynamics from "be extra nice to those who bring the inventory, and even tolerate a little fraud from them" to "be extra nice to those bringing the dollars".
I do wonder if this is an early sign of a coming recession.
I've had success with airbnb in the past. Lately, however, I am using booking.com more. AirBnB isn't reliable to handle issues. My wife, her kid and some friends tried a few places a couple of years ago. Most were fine, I had to book them a hotel in Italy from the US (they were tired and not really super focused) because 2 adult and 2 teen women felt extremely uncomfortable and the "room" wasn't as described.
We stayed in one last week in Seoul, only because hotels are prohibitively expensive. (We book last minute.)
On leaving, the host offered us a discount on future bookings if we left a 5-star review. This 'beg for a 5-star' practice is common in every Asian business. We got it from a Hilton in Vietnam. (It's probably global. Our recent experience happens to be in Asia.)
In fairness, hotel ratings are the same. My SOP now is to ignore all 5-star ratings. Simply don't read them. Instead, sort by lowest and that gives you the true measure of a place.
I got this once when visiting an airport lounge in Asia. Like beyond begging, the person asked for a review and wanted to stand there until I finished it.
I remember once in India I took an Uber, and the driver asked for a good rating. He had been nice and I wanted to give him a 5-star anyways. But as I took out my phone, he helpfully grabbed the phone from my hands and proceeded to enter the 5 stars himself: "click this, and then this, and this ...". Just made me chuckle. He knew what needed to be done, and proceeded to do it.
They really are. Across every platform. Ratings are 90% cheating of one kind or another. There's just no way to have people leave honest feedback that isn't subject to begging by the parties whose KPIs those ratings are, or prone to lying/exaggeration/sabotage by people with an axe to grind :(
My experience in Japan is quite the opposite. A good place gets 3 stars because it's up to expectations, while any perceived social slight from staff can easily get that down to 2 stars. Any spot beyond 4 stars from locals tend to do something special.
Japan is unique in the world for the stringency of its service standards, in my experience. However, if you use western review services instead of their domestic versions, all bets are off. Google Maps, Yelp, etc., are packed with stuff tourists love, which no local would touch. Things that locals find unbelievably rude get 5 stars on Yelp.
Tourists think that this stuff is still higher quality than what is found outside of Japan (which it usually is), but things have definitely begun to degrade with the tourist boom.
Japanese customers are very harsh with ratings on Google as well. When I was living in Japan I learned that restaurants with like 4.2 stars were often really good. It's calibrated differently inareas with a lot of foreign tourists though.
I rated a place 3-star overall after a subpar experience. The review stood for some time, but has since been edited to a 5-star, presumably at the request of a host. Totally broken indeed.
I forgot about my other Airbnb experience. The place was mediocre, I rated it so. The guy called me and offered me money, just cold hard cash, to change my review. I refused.
Prices for higher-end lake homes/cabins/vacation homes etc., for AirBnB and VRBO are roughly equivalent where I live. This is pretty much the only kind of AirBNB I'll consider, and it is usually more about the the location of the home (on a lake, near skiing, etc) and it being large enough to split amongst others. Also many are managed by property management companies and list across multiple platforms. If I can track down the company I'll directly contact to see if there are cheaper rates.
IMO this is basically the only category of AirBnb that's worth considering and it doesn't seem like a big growth area.
The property management companies are great - you can even haggle with them. I love how clearly they identify themselves on both AirBNB and VRBO. You just have to be willing to give up the (false) security of booking through AirBNB.
I've had a similar experience. Everything looked okay until I found rat droppings, and not just a few either. Customer support was insisting on minimizing it, though I got a refund too. I know it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it sours everything and reminds you that you are taking a gamble.
> AirBnB cancelled our reservation, so there was no way to rate the place or leave a review! They did refund me, but we wasted a day trying to catch up on the lost sleep.
This is most peoples experience.
I was a big fan of AirBnB. Why spend money on big hotel chains, people should make money, they have large houses with empty bedrooms anymore.
Staying at any AirBnB is the worst. All the pictures are heavily photoshopped, making crappy places look decent. AirBnB not only encourages hosts to do this, but also makes money off of it: Airbnb hosts in the US can book the official Airbnb Pro Photography Program.
Initially, it was just homeowners renting out bedrooms. Then the investors came. Passive investing. Real estate. Leverage. Accelerated enshittificiation. All the ratings are fake. It is impossible to tell from the photos and ratings if the places matches any minimal expectations.
And there is another consideration. AirBnB investors consume the scarce supply of housing. This is a big problem in US and in many countries. The supply of decent housing in decent places is limited. Its a combination of zoning + nimby. Removing that supply has done to housing what Sam Altman did to RAM prices. Cities everywhere should ban AirBnB and think about the people living there.
While AirBnB might be bad, my mom booked a place using Agoda. It was a NIGHTMARE. Admittedly this was in Egypt, but the unit was filthy and seemed to be owned by a company in the UAE.
If it was just the filth, it could be like any other terrible experience, but this mid-rise was standing next to the rubble of a razed building beside it and there was literally an open gas pipe hanging upright two floors down with people smoking above. The doorman who showed us the unit seemed unconcerned and it was nearly impossible to get our money back until we literally threatened to sue Agoda. We had sent them all our evidence (we took pictures) and even had the doorman talk to them on the phone and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to refund us.
To add insult to injury the place was more expensive than nearby hotels and I just checked and the place is still listed (we went a year ago)!
I've never been a host but I can't see why this would be a problem that AirBnB should make a call on. I've travelled to places where they have different social norms and visitors should adapt to local culture.
They’re a two-sided marketplace where the parties are incentivized to be adversarial. Every renter want to pay less / get money back, every landlord wants to minimize cost and stick renters with extra costs.
There’s a reason municipalities have landlord/tenant laws, and Airbnb’s whole thing was offering hotel-like services at sub-hotel pricing, without hitting landlord/tenant.
They’ve arbitraged themselves out of existence (but not before making a nice profit for Airbnb shareholders).
Maybe it's a regional issue. I have over 150 stays in my account (digital nomad for the last 10 years), and I've not once had any unreasonable charge or conflict with a host.
"Airbnb" is a label that represents a massive range of situations. Different guests, different properties, different expectations.
I'm a host, I've had hundreds of stays over several years, and I have stellar reviews. It's a large house so there's a $250 cleaning fee. I ask guests to start the dishwasher and take their trash to the dumpster at the end of the street.
I'd say I have two types of guests. The first type is the 99% - they are friendly, grateful, and make the whole thing worthwhile. People who ask for recommendations on the area, leave a nice note in our guest book, and are grateful and respectful of our home. They never complain about taking care of a few things before they leave, and often ask what else they can do. It's honestly a source of positivity for everyone involved to have them stay in our home.
I can count on a single hand the number of times I've had the second type of guest. Exploitative people who have it out for us the second they check in and won't be satisfied until they've extracted money and apologies. As a host, I have literally zero recourse against these people. The system is set up to let them behave this way, and they make me more cautious and my home more expensive for everyone else.
Getting to my point - everyone comes to conversations about Airbnb with an enraged, polarized point of view. It's still a thriving platform with absolutely everything in a single place. The homes range from bare bones crash pads and neglected side projects to true luxury experiences. The guests range from people you are happy to have met to true predators.
Unfortunately, Airbnb and Vrbo have created an absolute race to the bottom. As a host I have next to zero ability to screen who stays with us, and I'm basically at the mercy of bad actors. They extract huge fees and are unhelpful to me and barely helpful to my guests. They introduce ham-fisted rules like this every few months and are revenue optimizing themselves off a cliff.
This is a market that could benefit from more choice.
On leaving negative reviews of guests, it's widely known among hosts that leaving a guest who you've had a poor experience with a review at all is a guaranteed path to getting a negative review yourself. The guest sees I've left them a review, they are relatively sure of what it will say, so they leave me a negative review preemptively. It's best to not review them and hope they choose to not leave me a review.
And no, I don't have the ability to see a guests' reviews before they book. To have any hope of visibility on the platform I need to have instant book turned on, and they've removed the ability to require any sort of floor in terms of a guests' rating.
The platforms have intentionally engineered both hosts and guests into all sorts of prisoner's dilemma situations to drive booking volume at any cost.
I'm not sure it's "intentional": in the distant past AirBNB let you read the other's review before leaving one yourself, and they changed that to avoid exactly the sort of dilemma you're pointing out. It is genuinely surprising to me that mere presence of a review of a guest by a host is interpreted as a bad review; when I was hosting it was generally expected that hosts would review everyone.
I'm not running a hotel - it's a large house in a rural area, and it's not uncommon for it to take a day or two before a house gets cleaned after you depart, which means that trash and dirty dishes left behind become a problem.
Again these are clear expectations set up front before someone books, and I've never had a guest complain about them. If you are really that averse to taking out the trash and sticking your dishes in the dishwasher, my property probably isn't for you and you probably aren't the guest for me.
If I don't have the ability to make simple and reasonable requests like this, I'm going to have to work around it. In this case that means telling my cleaners I need them there immediately after someone checks out, which almost certainly means my cleaning fee is going up to $350.
I sell a lot on eBay and this is reminiscent of the experiences I have with the worst eBay customers. There are folks out there who will just push and push and push for whatever it is they want; they're the reason policies exist, and they ruin it for everyone else.
There's an inherent tension between the person providing the service and the person consuming it that has to do with fairness and leverage; each person always feels they are on the wrong side of the deal. In reality, it is the aribtrator, who sets the rules, who gets the upside of both deals, so they're right, ish, but they blame each othner.
The AirBnb model just fell apart with bad customer experiences. Customers want something closer to a hotel experience. The moment Airbnb started letting hosts treat guests like children doing chores they lost a huge chunk of the market.
It’s ultimately an issue of consistency. If I book with a name brand hotel I have some comfort knowing they have corporate standards that tend to be enforced consistently across properties. If a Hilton, Marriott etc hotel has issues it tends to get dealt with quickly because those brands know consistency is their brand. In extreme cases they will kick hotels out of their brand. That randomly named hotel that used to be a brand name was likely kicked out of the portfolio for compliance issues.
With an AirBnb it’s a total crapshoot. Sometimes it’s totally fine, other times you’d end up in the dirty lair of a psychopath.
Several years ago, I had to take a very early flight so wanted to stay near the airport. I rented an Airbnb VERY cheaply. This was a room within an apartment of an old lady who was renting his son's (gone to university) bedroom.
It was a great experience, very kind, comfy and she even made me breakfast.
But nowadays, prices are crazy. A hotel room is usually only 10% higher (if higher). And I have also been victim of last minute cancelations.
If the room is unavailable, the hotel makes it its problem. But in the case of AirBnB, they make it YOUR problem. So that's worth 10% or more for me now. After they ruined a new year's eve vacation.
I no longer rent Airbnb. I might try if they hardened host's rules and gave me a cancelation guarantee of 'we will put you in the closest hotel if necessary ' . Kind of like car rentals: if the car is unavailable, we give you a better one.
As a host, I feel like this issue is mostly just ragebait for TikTok. Same for the cleaning fee complaints (which has been gone for over a year but you still see ppl talking about it). There are absolutely bad hosts out there (I've dealt with it as a guest myself), but most hosts are totally fine and the guest review system absolutely works to filter out egregious behavior.
There's also quite a big perception bias towards guests when it comes to discourse about Airbnbs. As a host I have to deal with so many unbelievably disgusting and disrespectful people renting my places on a regular basis, but nobody is ever talking about that. Social media would have you believe all guests are victimized angels and hosts are greedy and evil. I would love to see some of these people host and find out what it's really like. If you've worked in retail or hospitality you know.
Airbnb has actually gotten extremely sensitive about this perception the last couple years. They've changed a lot of policies to bend over backwards for guests to avoid the PR. Anyone guest you see complaining online about a recent experience should be taken with a _large_ grain of salt because Airbnb very rarely sides with hosts anymore and it likely means the guest did something very egregious to get penalized.
I travel for work a lot and was forced to use airbnb by my former company.
Nothing about this is ragebait. Clean after yourself was the norm, cleaning fees often a full days cost or more, and I had bookings that I never checked into make claims about stains or damage!
Most hosts were bad by hotel standards. I will never use one on my own volition.
How is asking the cleaning company to run the dishwasher and take out the garbage “bending over backwards?” I’ve paid the fee to do the minimum amount of cleaning necessary.
I wonder if the bloom is coming off the Airbnb rose (probably not, because these kinds of things are always made a big deal of in tech forums but the company in question usually sees their revenue go up and up).
For me personally I only ever use Airbnb's now for big trips with at least 3-4 bedrooms needed. These types of Airbnbs usually have more professional management in any case. But otherwise I think Airbnb just offers a poor value:
1. For a long time Airbnbs skirted hotel taxes and other fees. Those days are long gone, so I often find Airbnbs to be just as expensive or more than hotels when you factor in cleaning and other fees.
2. Like this article points out, quality control and rules can be all over the map, and people are sick of it. With a hotel you usually know what you're getting, with an Airbnb it's always a crapshoot.
3. A huge benefit with a hotel is that if something goes wrong you can almost always be moved to another room, sometimes a different hotel. With Airbnb, while they may help you rebook it's much more fraught and you don't know what the next place will be.
So for me I use hotels for most stays now, though I am curious about house swapping for longer overseas trips. I have friends that have raved about it so it just seems like a better option.
Enshitification at its best. I've used Airbnb almost since inception, but the degradation of offering quality has been so noticeable that I totally quit using this two years ago. Last time the host did not only ask me to do all house chores, and still charge a cleaning fee, but wasn't going to provide bed sheets without an extra fee (W(ho)TF thinks I'm renting and possibly coming with my own sheets), but didn't have the room officially ready until 5pm, and had me out at 10am. F*k this "industry"
I had two hosts cancel on me (last minute, both times around Christmas) and haven't dared to use Airbnb since (it was very inconvenient to find alternate accommodation last minute, to say the least.)
I understand that there can be exceptional circumstances. However, I've stayed in more hotels by a factor of at least 25, and this has never happened once. In fact, any minor inconvenience at a hotel is usually remedied promptly, and user reviews generally feel accurate.
Airbnb wouldn't share any information about why the host was allowed to cancel (I understand there may be privacy concerns, but I'm left wondering if they simply found a better paying private offer, given it was for the holiday season and booked well in advance). In one case I found an alternative in the same building, so there was no widespread issue.
Those two are enough to put me off Airbnb forever. I just don't want the additional stress of wondering whether I'll receive a last minute cancellation, even if they're exceedingly rare.
This has also happened to me twice. In both cases, it was when we got a good price booking well in advance for a known-busy season, and the cancellation was last minute and left us totally screwed because there were no alternative accommodations available within our budget.
In both cases, Airbnb would only offer us a refund plus maybe like 10%. They would not make any effort to rebook us at an equivalent property.
My theory is that because Airbnb does not sufficiently penalize hosts for these sort of late cancellations, hosts are incentivized to cancel cheap bookings to get a more expensive booking on another platform if prices meaningfully increase.
I've only had two instances where a hotel was unable to accommodate my reservation. The first time, they booked me in an room at the nearest hotel with space, which happened to be a competitor and an upgraded room. The second time, the hotel booked me into the largest room they had available, which happened to be their Presidential suite. (I booked through my credit card's "The Edit" program.)
I've had several AirBnb hosts cancel. Airbnb provided an alternative option the first time but the second time did not. Luckily my credit card's travel insurance treated it like a hotel booking and was able to secure a reservation at a nearby hotel. And that was the last time I used AirBnB.
> they simply found a better paying private offer, given it was for the holiday season and booked well in advance
This happened to me on booking.com, twice. The host didn't allow prepayment, and when the payment time arrived, they cancelled saying there is a problem with the credit card. I tried to contact them but they didn't respond. Booking.com didn't care. From that time on I generally prefer hotels than private apartments.
> cancel on me (last minute, both times around Christmas
I don't think it ever makes sense for an AirBnB host to honor early reservation for holidays. The price they lock you in advance is just their stoploss, while the actual market closer to the date provides an almost guaranteed upside. Bonus points if they collect your payment in advance: free credit!
Man, that's like buying a buying an options contract 6 months out, and then your broker calling the day before you cash in to inform you that the firm which sold it to you has declared taksies-backsies. You sell something that far out, you're entering a contract to trade a hypothetical profit margin for a certain payout.
The same happened to me some time before Covid. I booked a nice villa half a year in advance when it was reasonably priced, for summer vacation. Booking was accepted by host. Everything was silent for months and then they cancelled with only weeks remaining until the trip. So of course I had to pay 50-100% more for the similar rental and have only 1/10 of the offers because everything was booked by then. No refunds, no excuses, no explanations.
Never opened AirBNB site again after that. Zero customer protection plus shitty fees and hidden traps (no linen/towels rental was a nasty surprise one time).
Most of the AirBNB I have tried to book recently are some kind of scam. I get a message immediately from the host that the property is undergoing renovations, but they have another property available. The host tells me to cancel it and pay them via some other platform.
To be honest/fair, this is an old issue. They now penalize landlords who do that, which means if your host did, they probably have a very good reason. Not saying there aren't a host of other issues with airbnbs and that for many situations having a hotel is a better deal.
I think the correct incentive alignment in this case would be that Airbnb (instead of the customer) takes responsibility for finding and booking an alternative of the same quality, whatever the cost.
That would, in turn, incentivize them to minimize this behavior. And it would alleviate my concerns. Yes, they'll eat the cost occasionally, but they'd arguably still have my business - so they can weigh the benefits of that
Reminds me of megabus, a discount greyhound type bus. The last time I used it it didn't show up, with no refund, and an obnoxious runaround on the phone. I was amazed anyone would run a business like that; not surprised to see they went bankrupt in 2024. I've since given up on buses entirely. Greyhound shows up on schedule but is still a thoroughly unpleasant experience
We had an airbnb cancel on us for Thanksgiving back in september, because it was "double-booked" it was the last AirBNB in the area. We have (had, rather) people flying in from out of country to meet for Thanksgiving at the AirBNB (it's one of those big 7 room things designed for that sort of thing) and it's completely up-ended our holiday plans. I couldn't be more disappointed in the platform.
Same reason I never use Airbnb any longer. Used it exclusively for years, 10–15x per year. Not sure how they even stay in business doing this on the regular plus all the other craziness you have to put up with
My extended family rents a beach cottage for one week (saturday-saturday or sunday-sunday) every summer at a family oriented beach in North Carolina. We have done this at the same beach since the early 90s. There are local vacation rental agencies that have offered one week rentals with various packages of linens under similar terms and seasonal pricing for decades. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer houses are available directly from these rental companies and more and more are only listed on Airbnb or VRBO, with nightly pricing that is much higher than the weekly pricing from the local rental agencies.
The vacation rental companies offer very consistent cleaning services and local contacts for any issues with the house, and were relatively cheap because they were typically able to fill these houses with weeklong rentals all summer.
With Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes they are just a marketplace for the exact same rental companies that already existed, under the same terms and conditions, but a higher nightly price, and sometimes they are far less professional operations, and it's not easy to tell which is which when you are initially paying.
Last summer we rented a house directly through a vacation rental company that was also listed on VRBO for a third of the nightly price it was listed on VRBO for. We're dreading the day when the only option left is VRBO.
All holiday rental platforms charge somewhere between 17-22%. Responsibility of a platform is zero. As a guest all you can do if something goes wrong is to shorten the stay after hanging 1 hour on the customer service phone line. Everyone would be better off with some local message boards and visitors taking few extra steps to find holiday rental.
That's hasn't been my experience at all with at least some local rental companies. A popular vacation area near me has a local rental company with significant market share and they have a local office and local staff that can come out to help with things like maintenance issues.
I've used them a lot and have found them very responsive with none of the Airbnb type horror stories. For vacations where you want a house instead of a hotel room, companies like this are a VAST improvement over Airbnb because they offer the type of local service that Airbnb will never be able to do at scale.
We did the same with a vacation rental in Hawaii this year. The properties in the neighborhood are owned by individual investors as vacation rentals, but they ultimately contract with a handful of full-service vacation rental agencies. Seeking out the agencies’ websites was worth a 25% discount over renting the same property on AirBnB.
Exact same setup here though I realize I didn't quite state it directly, the cottages are owned by individuals but all rented out through the agencies.
We got a much steeper discount, I'm assuming because we were solidly in shoulder season (a couple weeks after kids return to school in North Carolina, and during hurricane season), which the vacation rental company accounts for in their seasonal pricing, but VRBO didn't seem to. At this beach in particular, it is a summer vacation for families and you get a steep drop in prices if you don't have to schedule around school holidays, but VRBO didn't price that in in the same way that the local companies do.
I found some hair in my Mariott bed sheets. I didn't think it was a big deal but decided to see if I could get fresh sheets. The hotel changed it at 9pm within 10 minutes. Offered me points. Apologized profusely.
What do you think would have been my experience at Airbnb?
Should that Marriott have used their time machine to retroactively keep the hair out of the bedsheets? They did what they could in the moment, because they realized that it was a fuckup.
The Marriott had a great response for the mistake, I'd not expect more in that regard - or even that much. I just wouldn't set that mistakr as the normal starting place for making comparisons was my point.
If you cannot accept that a hair was on a bed sheet and it was fixed promptly when reported, I cannot even imagine what your hotel bills look like. Every hotel room I've been to at $100-$2000 per night have had some issue I would consider beyond a hair on a bed sheet.
I've used Airbnbs for group trips only. The past few years, I have been leaning towards hotels for trips. But the newer hotels with the "open concept" bathrooms are not great for sharing a room with a friend. As a consumer, these changes puts Airbnb back in favor for me.
If I had places that would ask for a copy of my ID before giving me access codes to enter the place but wasn't mentioned on the listing. Also listed there was a kitchen but there weren't any plates or glasses... They charged $10 for bed linen etc. Also wasn't mentioned in the listing. AirBnB can be really annoying. Often they aren't cheaper than apart-hotels.
i wish they would ban additional “rules” in the check in/out instructions. all rules should be up front before booking or after booking with free 24 cancellation or something.
Potentially unpopular opinion: The renting of short term residential property should be taxed at 15% of revenue. Digital advertising should be taxed at 20% of revenue.
If I were supreme leader? Both of these models create a tragedy of the commons of sorts and meaningfully distort incentives. So I would have the tax revenue go to public good like universal health care. Again, not a policy that could ever occur but it would be great to raise funds for something positive while incentivizing business models that actually charge for value. It would be good to stop advertising be strapped into previously purchased products or subscriptions, or stop incessant stalking for attribution of sale.
As for short term rentals: the first time the housing market was financialized the economy crashed. People with money bought up all the pieces and are ransoming back what used to be the American dream. You pay money for a quasi-luxury experience and in reality you fund airbnbs profits and become an employee in someones REIT and are fined for the pleasure.
Not totally serious, but not totally unserious about it either.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadMy maid service will not wash dishes. They need me to clear the sink every time before they arrive. It's often a point of contention, because I leave dirty dishes quite often, and I simply forget what needs to be done. I don't have a problem with doing it for them, I just forget.
But I believe that the reason they will not wash my dishes is because of food safety. In a commercial kitchen, even the dishwasher needs to hold a Food Handler's card or certificate. The sanitizing of dishes and utensils is serious business. If they're not clean enough to eat from, you could be passing foodborne illness.
I would never want to stay at a place that didn't professionally wash its dishes. I've never stayed with AirBNB and I plan to keep it that way. Thankfully, the hotel industry is still a quite viable business, and hotels have staff, insurance, and regulation on their side, even now. I recently had a "staycation" in a 98-year-old classic hotel, and it was so wonderful, worry-free, and pleasant, and cost-effective. I am thankful that they are still operating like that.
When we had little kids we used disposable plates because we didn’t want to break the plates in the house. I don’t do Airbnb but disposable plates might be one way if you needed to stay in a short term rental.
Yes, if it were an add-on service, they would ask me for permission and then go ahead and charge me for the service. That is something they do with cleaning the oven and such other things. They simply will not wash dishes at all, period, full stop.
It's got to the point now, where if I forgot and left dishes in the sink, I will take them out and hide them somewhere, like the fridge, before the team arrives at my door. And then, hopefully I do not forget to retrieve them and properly clean them immediately.
Call me lazy but I’ve always wondered why I need to take out the trash when a cleaning crew was coming in 10 minutes after I checked out.
People would have accepted this principle just fine if they just put it in the damn total price shown, so you could do a fair comparison between your lodging options.
They could have structured their reservations system the same as say, Hilton does - when you book 5 nights, and the nights vary in price due to demand, say it's $100, $100, $200, $100, $100, they just show "$120 per night (avg)".
Instead AirBNB thought they could get cute and pretend that this fixed part of the charge is not part of the price at all, it's this one separate purpose. Well, of course people are going to expect that if they're literally paying $200 for a cleaning crew (a cleaning that will take maybe 90 minutes max and cost the owner far less than $200), why the F can't they take the trash out? They did this to themselves.
As a personal example, I once stayed at a place that charged a $150 cleaning fee, but also required dishes + taking the trash out and down the street, which wasn't known until we opened the door. And of course there was a threat that failure to do so would incur a fee. Also a bit of ceiling plaster fell on my wife during the night. Still had a fantastic rating because it was a castle and I'd stay there again if someone else paid.
Most guests of AirBNB like clean homes, and usually tidy up pretty well themselves. Maybe there's a way to incentivize those who choose to, or want to and offer a discount if they want it.
I mostly stopped using AirBnB due to the impact of their existence and lobbying on cities and affordable housing, but after my final few stays I was ready to quit over the huge fees, the fact those fees were hidden when searching, and the absurd rules BS.
I think it's not a big issue for people who clean up after themselves daily, but on the other hand, sparing those last 10 minutes on the checkout morning... ;)
the whole thing with a cleaning fee is either to allow the advertised room price to appear lower (but doesn't airbnb now factor the cleaning fee into the price shown?) or alternatively to make longer stays cheaper because the cleaning fee is not applied for every day).
for example if i spend a several days or longer in a place and instead of washing and reusing dishes as i would at home, i never wash any dishes but use up all the available dishes instead then i would not consider that normal.
dirty dishes also contain leftover food which can rot, or dry up, making it hard to clean, etc, you don't want to leave that stuff out for to long.
bed sheets on the other hand i wouldn't wash unless i am there long enough that i want to reuse them myself. the rest is just keeping things tidy and not leave chaos behind.
I think if homes were presented as a home, not a residential hotel, along with lower processing, cleaning would be perceived differently.
I'm not seeing it. If there isn't a dishwasher then you do the dishes.
I'm not a fan of Airbnb but I agree with the GP that you should clean up after yourself in this respect (cleaning dishes that you have used).
But it should never be on the tenant to ensure that the property is prepared for the next guest.
I did have someone once ask me to strip the bed but that's just boomer hospitality etiquette expectations. It takes no time to strip a bed and the cleaners will need to touch the sheets anyway so why am I doing it?
The new rules already clearly and explicitly describe leaving things "in a civilized way". No one is suggesting it's ok to destroy a place.
It really brings down the price of a single night or weekend stay when you're just using the bed and bathroom and cleaning is a 10 minute job.
I’ve seen linens and cleaning be two separate line items and I think it’s quite a reasonable approach, people don’t ask for a deep clean but sweeping, trash etc
I think it only works in a high trust society, my fellow American countrymen are mostly incapable of actually doing what they promise in this regard, the nordics have enough societal responsibility and shame involved that you can reasonably expect people to do what is asked of them. A system like this in America would probably fall over from abuse by people who would not pay for the cleaning and then not do it
My father runs a few guest suites out his house and the cleaning cost, wear and tear of washing linen makes single night stays really impact his bottom line, hence him having a cleaning fee which is per stay rather than per night.
Prospective guests can then choose for themselves if they feel the overhead of the cleaning fee for such a single night is worth it for them and my father doesn't land up with uneconomical stays.
I know hosts that do this.
The guide for guest behavior is pretty much good guest guidelines like ensuring no trash is left out.
Its past time airbnb standardize the experience here more.
18 days later I’ve get notice from Airbnb that I’ll be charged $50 (45 EUR) for damages. The host decided that this required deep cleaning. What’s more important for $50 you can find a cleaning company for 2-3 hours in Warsaw.
Granted, Airbnb has taken on the hotel industry, and so I'm not surprised that their rules have evolved.
It’s not just Airbnb the company that moved away from it, it’s the Airbnb hosts that moved away from it as soon as opportunists started becoming mega landlords renting out ikea-furnished party houses. It hasn’t been the original “person with a spare room for a weekend” Airbnb in a long, long time.
The other part of the theory is since it is owned by a former NFL player (and a Seahawk, at that), that local police were reluctant to rock the boat too much. Neighbors got frustrated, and well, maybe?
They could take user feedback seriously, but chose not to. Case in point: we booked a place in Hawaii. We (2 people) arrived the day of, tired as heck from the beach activities. Place looked fine, except for the crumbs of food in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. No big deal. We crashed almost right away, too tired to do anything else. An hour later, my wife jumped up, claiming some insect was walking on her legs. I turned on the lights sleepily, and lo and behold, there were cockroaches on the ceiling, scurrying about (and one had fallen and landed on my wife's legs). In the middle of the night, I contacted AirBnB help. They wanted proof. So I took a video and sent it, along with photos. Finally around 2AM they agreed that we should get out of there. We packed up and left for the beach, to wait things out.
My first reaction was: I should leave a review telling people about the roaches. But guess what? AirBnB cancelled our reservation, so there was no way to rate the place or leave a review! They did refund me, but we wasted a day trying to catch up on the lost sleep.
After that experience, I stopped booking AirBnBs if I could help it. They (and VRBO) are a last resort for me (no pun intended).
It happens to host with hundreds of spectacular reviews.
That's why Airbnb likes to get proofs.
Toward the tail end of the pandemic, well after vaccines and the average person even remotely cared about it, I stayed in a small studio apartment.
The cleaning fee was $200.
The host gave me a list of at least 30 things I needed to do, including vacuum the floors & washing all the dishes and returning them to their exact initial positions - along with photos of where everything should go, exactly, along with a list of fines as high as $100 PER ITEM for each infraction the cleaning crew could find.
I have never stayed in an AirBNB since outside of hosting a large group, and I never will again.
They've banned this now.
What about all the hosts using AI to pretend guests trashed their place?
No thanks.
Hotels are just fine. I hope all these get-rich-quick scumbag AirBNB speculators get wiped out by high interest rates and lose every penny they have so that people who actually need housing can afford it, and people who actually know how to run a hospitality business can keep doing that correctly.
Why did you even try the place in the first place ?
It has long been obvious that many scammy hosts exist on the platform, and it ought to be easy to detect such hosts if they bother to try. Yet, that never happened until now.
So what changed? I would bet that until now they have always worried about having enough inventory to sell, and that now they are noticing they have too much inventory. That changes the dynamics from "be extra nice to those who bring the inventory, and even tolerate a little fraud from them" to "be extra nice to those bringing the dollars".
I do wonder if this is an early sign of a coming recession.
On leaving, the host offered us a discount on future bookings if we left a 5-star review. This 'beg for a 5-star' practice is common in every Asian business. We got it from a Hilton in Vietnam. (It's probably global. Our recent experience happens to be in Asia.)
In fairness, hotel ratings are the same. My SOP now is to ignore all 5-star ratings. Simply don't read them. Instead, sort by lowest and that gives you the true measure of a place.
Ratings are totally broken.
Which, of course it is. There's a reason we're going back there, again, next week.
Tourists think that this stuff is still higher quality than what is found outside of Japan (which it usually is), but things have definitely begun to degrade with the tourist boom.
I forgot about my other Airbnb experience. The place was mediocre, I rated it so. The guy called me and offered me money, just cold hard cash, to change my review. I refused.
IMO this is basically the only category of AirBnb that's worth considering and it doesn't seem like a big growth area.
This is most peoples experience.
I was a big fan of AirBnB. Why spend money on big hotel chains, people should make money, they have large houses with empty bedrooms anymore.
Staying at any AirBnB is the worst. All the pictures are heavily photoshopped, making crappy places look decent. AirBnB not only encourages hosts to do this, but also makes money off of it: Airbnb hosts in the US can book the official Airbnb Pro Photography Program.
Initially, it was just homeowners renting out bedrooms. Then the investors came. Passive investing. Real estate. Leverage. Accelerated enshittificiation. All the ratings are fake. It is impossible to tell from the photos and ratings if the places matches any minimal expectations.
And there is another consideration. AirBnB investors consume the scarce supply of housing. This is a big problem in US and in many countries. The supply of decent housing in decent places is limited. Its a combination of zoning + nimby. Removing that supply has done to housing what Sam Altman did to RAM prices. Cities everywhere should ban AirBnB and think about the people living there.
If it was just the filth, it could be like any other terrible experience, but this mid-rise was standing next to the rubble of a razed building beside it and there was literally an open gas pipe hanging upright two floors down with people smoking above. The doorman who showed us the unit seemed unconcerned and it was nearly impossible to get our money back until we literally threatened to sue Agoda. We had sent them all our evidence (we took pictures) and even had the doorman talk to them on the phone and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to refund us.
To add insult to injury the place was more expensive than nearby hotels and I just checked and the place is still listed (we went a year ago)!
There’s a reason municipalities have landlord/tenant laws, and Airbnb’s whole thing was offering hotel-like services at sub-hotel pricing, without hitting landlord/tenant.
They’ve arbitraged themselves out of existence (but not before making a nice profit for Airbnb shareholders).
Any service with terms basically that say "we have the right to charge your card whatever we like for whatever reason " will eventually abuse it
See also: car rental
I'm a host, I've had hundreds of stays over several years, and I have stellar reviews. It's a large house so there's a $250 cleaning fee. I ask guests to start the dishwasher and take their trash to the dumpster at the end of the street.
I'd say I have two types of guests. The first type is the 99% - they are friendly, grateful, and make the whole thing worthwhile. People who ask for recommendations on the area, leave a nice note in our guest book, and are grateful and respectful of our home. They never complain about taking care of a few things before they leave, and often ask what else they can do. It's honestly a source of positivity for everyone involved to have them stay in our home.
I can count on a single hand the number of times I've had the second type of guest. Exploitative people who have it out for us the second they check in and won't be satisfied until they've extracted money and apologies. As a host, I have literally zero recourse against these people. The system is set up to let them behave this way, and they make me more cautious and my home more expensive for everyone else.
Getting to my point - everyone comes to conversations about Airbnb with an enraged, polarized point of view. It's still a thriving platform with absolutely everything in a single place. The homes range from bare bones crash pads and neglected side projects to true luxury experiences. The guests range from people you are happy to have met to true predators.
Unfortunately, Airbnb and Vrbo have created an absolute race to the bottom. As a host I have next to zero ability to screen who stays with us, and I'm basically at the mercy of bad actors. They extract huge fees and are unhelpful to me and barely helpful to my guests. They introduce ham-fisted rules like this every few months and are revenue optimizing themselves off a cliff.
This is a market that could benefit from more choice.
And no, I don't have the ability to see a guests' reviews before they book. To have any hope of visibility on the platform I need to have instant book turned on, and they've removed the ability to require any sort of floor in terms of a guests' rating.
The platforms have intentionally engineered both hosts and guests into all sorts of prisoner's dilemma situations to drive booking volume at any cost.
Again these are clear expectations set up front before someone books, and I've never had a guest complain about them. If you are really that averse to taking out the trash and sticking your dishes in the dishwasher, my property probably isn't for you and you probably aren't the guest for me.
If I don't have the ability to make simple and reasonable requests like this, I'm going to have to work around it. In this case that means telling my cleaners I need them there immediately after someone checks out, which almost certainly means my cleaning fee is going up to $350.
There's an inherent tension between the person providing the service and the person consuming it that has to do with fairness and leverage; each person always feels they are on the wrong side of the deal. In reality, it is the aribtrator, who sets the rules, who gets the upside of both deals, so they're right, ish, but they blame each othner.
It’s ultimately an issue of consistency. If I book with a name brand hotel I have some comfort knowing they have corporate standards that tend to be enforced consistently across properties. If a Hilton, Marriott etc hotel has issues it tends to get dealt with quickly because those brands know consistency is their brand. In extreme cases they will kick hotels out of their brand. That randomly named hotel that used to be a brand name was likely kicked out of the portfolio for compliance issues.
With an AirBnb it’s a total crapshoot. Sometimes it’s totally fine, other times you’d end up in the dirty lair of a psychopath.
The problem is a lot of AirBnB hosts want to offer the hostel experience for hotel prices.
Several years ago, I had to take a very early flight so wanted to stay near the airport. I rented an Airbnb VERY cheaply. This was a room within an apartment of an old lady who was renting his son's (gone to university) bedroom.
It was a great experience, very kind, comfy and she even made me breakfast.
But nowadays, prices are crazy. A hotel room is usually only 10% higher (if higher). And I have also been victim of last minute cancelations.
If the room is unavailable, the hotel makes it its problem. But in the case of AirBnB, they make it YOUR problem. So that's worth 10% or more for me now. After they ruined a new year's eve vacation.
I no longer rent Airbnb. I might try if they hardened host's rules and gave me a cancelation guarantee of 'we will put you in the closest hotel if necessary ' . Kind of like car rentals: if the car is unavailable, we give you a better one.
There's also quite a big perception bias towards guests when it comes to discourse about Airbnbs. As a host I have to deal with so many unbelievably disgusting and disrespectful people renting my places on a regular basis, but nobody is ever talking about that. Social media would have you believe all guests are victimized angels and hosts are greedy and evil. I would love to see some of these people host and find out what it's really like. If you've worked in retail or hospitality you know.
Airbnb has actually gotten extremely sensitive about this perception the last couple years. They've changed a lot of policies to bend over backwards for guests to avoid the PR. Anyone guest you see complaining online about a recent experience should be taken with a _large_ grain of salt because Airbnb very rarely sides with hosts anymore and it likely means the guest did something very egregious to get penalized.
Nothing about this is ragebait. Clean after yourself was the norm, cleaning fees often a full days cost or more, and I had bookings that I never checked into make claims about stains or damage!
Most hosts were bad by hotel standards. I will never use one on my own volition.
For me personally I only ever use Airbnb's now for big trips with at least 3-4 bedrooms needed. These types of Airbnbs usually have more professional management in any case. But otherwise I think Airbnb just offers a poor value:
1. For a long time Airbnbs skirted hotel taxes and other fees. Those days are long gone, so I often find Airbnbs to be just as expensive or more than hotels when you factor in cleaning and other fees.
2. Like this article points out, quality control and rules can be all over the map, and people are sick of it. With a hotel you usually know what you're getting, with an Airbnb it's always a crapshoot.
3. A huge benefit with a hotel is that if something goes wrong you can almost always be moved to another room, sometimes a different hotel. With Airbnb, while they may help you rebook it's much more fraught and you don't know what the next place will be.
So for me I use hotels for most stays now, though I am curious about house swapping for longer overseas trips. I have friends that have raved about it so it just seems like a better option.
Turn it off and come back to a sauna that will take 3 hours to cool down. I'm not doing that.
I understand that there can be exceptional circumstances. However, I've stayed in more hotels by a factor of at least 25, and this has never happened once. In fact, any minor inconvenience at a hotel is usually remedied promptly, and user reviews generally feel accurate.
Airbnb wouldn't share any information about why the host was allowed to cancel (I understand there may be privacy concerns, but I'm left wondering if they simply found a better paying private offer, given it was for the holiday season and booked well in advance). In one case I found an alternative in the same building, so there was no widespread issue.
Those two are enough to put me off Airbnb forever. I just don't want the additional stress of wondering whether I'll receive a last minute cancellation, even if they're exceedingly rare.
In both cases, Airbnb would only offer us a refund plus maybe like 10%. They would not make any effort to rebook us at an equivalent property.
My theory is that because Airbnb does not sufficiently penalize hosts for these sort of late cancellations, hosts are incentivized to cancel cheap bookings to get a more expensive booking on another platform if prices meaningfully increase.
I've had several AirBnb hosts cancel. Airbnb provided an alternative option the first time but the second time did not. Luckily my credit card's travel insurance treated it like a hotel booking and was able to secure a reservation at a nearby hotel. And that was the last time I used AirBnB.
This happened to me on booking.com, twice. The host didn't allow prepayment, and when the payment time arrived, they cancelled saying there is a problem with the credit card. I tried to contact them but they didn't respond. Booking.com didn't care. From that time on I generally prefer hotels than private apartments.
I don't think it ever makes sense for an AirBnB host to honor early reservation for holidays. The price they lock you in advance is just their stoploss, while the actual market closer to the date provides an almost guaranteed upside. Bonus points if they collect your payment in advance: free credit!
Airbnb hosts are not expected to have professionalism.
Never opened AirBNB site again after that. Zero customer protection plus shitty fees and hidden traps (no linen/towels rental was a nasty surprise one time).
That would, in turn, incentivize them to minimize this behavior. And it would alleviate my concerns. Yes, they'll eat the cost occasionally, but they'd arguably still have my business - so they can weigh the benefits of that
The vacation rental companies offer very consistent cleaning services and local contacts for any issues with the house, and were relatively cheap because they were typically able to fill these houses with weeklong rentals all summer.
With Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes they are just a marketplace for the exact same rental companies that already existed, under the same terms and conditions, but a higher nightly price, and sometimes they are far less professional operations, and it's not easy to tell which is which when you are initially paying.
Last summer we rented a house directly through a vacation rental company that was also listed on VRBO for a third of the nightly price it was listed on VRBO for. We're dreading the day when the only option left is VRBO.
Would be so much better if every region just started their own again and you just looked up property managers in the yellow pages haha
I've used them a lot and have found them very responsive with none of the Airbnb type horror stories. For vacations where you want a house instead of a hotel room, companies like this are a VAST improvement over Airbnb because they offer the type of local service that Airbnb will never be able to do at scale.
We got a much steeper discount, I'm assuming because we were solidly in shoulder season (a couple weeks after kids return to school in North Carolina, and during hurricane season), which the vacation rental company accounts for in their seasonal pricing, but VRBO didn't seem to. At this beach in particular, it is a summer vacation for families and you get a steep drop in prices if you don't have to schedule around school holidays, but VRBO didn't price that in in the same way that the local companies do.
What do you think would have been my experience at Airbnb?
Sorry you seem to have had so many problems with your rooms though, usually mine are a lot better than unclean sheets or worse.
Host isn't available. There might or might not be extras. Wash the dirty sheet yourself. Wait until cleaning can come by next day.
Hotels win every time.
As for short term rentals: the first time the housing market was financialized the economy crashed. People with money bought up all the pieces and are ransoming back what used to be the American dream. You pay money for a quasi-luxury experience and in reality you fund airbnbs profits and become an employee in someones REIT and are fined for the pleasure.
Not totally serious, but not totally unserious about it either.