For reference I have great reviews both staying and hosting in the US.
This was after an my first international booking when they ask for passport pic.
They let me know after I was in my room and told me I had to GTFO and where absolutely no help at all.
Been using booking.com, locations can be hit more miss still. The nice apartment I’m at now in Mexico City shower hardly works for instance.
Also it’s pretty much a meme now that hotels are about the same cost after fees and usually much better service.
If you aren't willing to accept some kind of reduction from hotel accommodations, you aren't willing to save money.
Same goes for booking.com these days- no support response until after the problem.
This question is not specifically about the OP but in general about people that pay so much money for an Airbnb when they can have a room in a nice hotel for the same (or even less) money. I'm not talking about special occations (i.e people that want to organize party and stuff), I'm talking about traditional tourists. Why would anybody choose an AirBnb vs a hotel?
Maybe I'm not in the right mindset (or age?) but I've never even considered an Airbnb when going on vacation anywhere.
I prefer to have my own kitchen if I'm staying for more than a few days as I don't like eating out all of the time.
I have booked many dozens of apartments on AirBnB and my approach these days is:
1: Never book an apartment with less than 50 ratings
2: Never book an apartment with an average rating of less than 4.8 stars
The problem is that AirBnB has set up their system so that even complete garbage apartments have average ratings of over 4.5 stars.
Because of that, people still book those for normal prices.
If AirBnB would normalize the ratings (median rating = 2.5 stars), there would be an upward pressure on the hosts to improve the quality of their services.
But the way it is, there are only few good apartments on AirBnB.
Over the last years, I have only been to two apartments via AirBnB which I would consider "good". And both had over 50 ratings and the average rating was 5 stars.
Based on my experience, either I'm staying in very different locations (typically not big cities, Florence being the exception) or shopping at very different price-points than many of the horror stories.
The only good experience I've had was with a place that had zero reviews. I got to the point where i figured the review system was so unreliable and unfit for purpose that I would just take a chance and it worked.
I found a lot of those place with multiple good reviews were mainly from people who had stayed two nights and as part of a group where a cheap place to sleep was their number one criteria.
Mostly everyone else is just doing the ebay thing where I give you a good review and you give me one back since there is zero incentive to give an honest assessment that your next host will read and consider you a trouble maker.
Having 0 support like Google would be much better than being promised help will come, then having various customer agents taking over your case from scratch and then after exhaustion, being told you won't be refunded or no action will be taken
I rarely write bad reviews but this place deserves one. Here's a list of things that didn't go well for us. 1. Unit is advertised as having a pool but there's a disclaimer hidden somewhere that amenities are not accessible to guests. Had multiple emails back and forth to understand that it's closed only after labor day weekend. 2. Unit has a kitchen but we were told that it doesn't have pots and pans. Again, a lot of back and forth. We packed a lot of utensils since we have some food allergies and can't eat restaurant food. In the end it turned out to have all the essential kitchen utensils. Wasted a lot of our time and caused unnecessary stress. 3. Unit does not have an air conditioner and it clearly states that there's no air conditioner. What was not mentioned is that the unit traps a lot of heat and is essentially unlivable at night. Our first night there, we couldn't sleep till 4am due to the heat. The fans were useless. 4. That night we discovered that the upstairs toilet was broken. We had to go downstairs every time we needed to use the bathroom that night. I tried to fix it in the morning but it was futile. 5. In the morning, I went to use the gas stove and saw a note that a lighter was needed to use the stove. Sadly, there was no lighter to be found in the unit. When I called the host, they said they'd reimburse the lighter which wasn't very helpful. I had to make a 30+ minute trip back to town to get a lighter. I missed my meal schedule which wasn't great. Someone had left a lighter outside the door when I was gone but forgot to tell us or knock the door. 6. Someone came to take a look at the toilet and said it was broken and that they needed a maintenance person to fix it. No maintenance person came that day. They reached out to me once to ask about a good time to fix the toilet but I wasn't at the unit and the place does not have cellphone signal. Out of the blue, the maintenance person sends me a text "+1 ( (Phone number hidden by Airbnb) : Go ahead give me more tickets I’m on a roll fixing everything lol Sorry wrong person Me: No problem. Looks like the toilet isn't still fixed" 7. The place continued to be unlivable at night. We did not get any sleep on all 3 nights. Woke up sleepy and dehydrated all 3 mornings. 8. For all this inconvenience caused, the response from the host was pathetic.
I'm back to hotels again, with airbnb as a very last resort
The flip side is I had also some amazing AirBnb stays (thank you to my wonderful hosts in Port Angeles, WA and Galveston, TX), and that does give me some hope for the platform.
Looking the other way while their hosts break the law is what made Airbnb what it is today.
The only practical tip I can offer regards airbnb is to rent places that are also featured on other well known sites, since this does reduce the risk a little.
From this and the many other stories about AirBnB and its "support", best advice seems to be to immediately close your account, request your data to be deleted and never use any of its "services" again.
Take Asheville, NC for example... they banned short-term rentals (for good reason). So, if somebody wants a 1-2 month rental, you would use Craigslist/Facebook, both of which are full of scammers. Friends got taken by a scam in 2020. Found a listing on Craigslist, had some email with "landlord", signed a 1-month lease, etc. When they arrived, the house was occupied (by its real owner, maybe). The neighbor came out and laughed, said they were the 3rd or 4th couple to be scammed at that address.
This bait and switch scam seems somewhat common-ish on Airbnb
https://www.vice.com/en/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-...
I think house-swapping gets around this by doing away with any possible financial gain, but this precludes you have a house of your own you're willing to have people live in while you're in their home.
I've booked about 10 AirBnBs over the past month, while travelling through Europe. I basically had to as my mental and physical health had deteriorated due to staying in hostels, with the never ending cycle of snorers, lights on, late night returns, etc. And hotels were absurdly expensive.
Each AirBnB that I booked, in
* Barcelona, Spain
* Amsterdam, NL
* middle-Germany
* Denmark
* Norway
were all someone's extra space in their house they had; or a side unit to their main house; or their entire place and they were on travel or business outside the country.
Additionally, ALL of them I booked were far, far cheaper than hotels by many margins, and I could cook to my diet in many of the spaces I stayed. That really helped cost wise too.
None of them had ridiculous cleaning requirements OR cleaning fees (and I clean the dishes and pots and pans I use by hand simply because I need them again or otherwise, and I'm not an animal). None of them had ridiculous AirBnB fees, although most were pretty much a good deal, and then AirBnB fees made it a bit less of a good deal.
Sorry for this sounding a bit preachy, I'm well aware of the damage AirBnB does to communities, cities, countries even but I'm baffled how many shitty experiences it sounds like people are having recently.
(there's a BIG anti-tourism/anti-AirBnB mentality and movement in Barcelona, which I experienced first hand not getting any change back for a 10 euro bill on a 2 euro purchase; minor but still, sheesh)
On the other side of that, I'm also fully on board with properties that were bought explicitly to use as AirBnBs or rental homes for tourists, to return to market, and I really hope that does happen. I say that because as evidenced by my experiences, there are still places that sort of follow the original ethos of AirBnBs: rent your extra personal space out.
I typed all this from a small basement area in Norway, that I booked on AirBnB, which is very comfortable, and relaxing. I made some great pasta too, which honestly I can't say I've ever been able to do in hotels. Also, I have far greater concerns with hotels and *bugs than with AirBnBs and similar stuff, but that's just me
Honestly though, I will probably avoid using AirBnB in the future as best I can, especially as it seems unnecessary through Japan.
I've got a friend who has used AirBnB and has been burned by this every single time. She comes with her daughters and wants to do a bit of cooking buts not a single pot or pan to be found? Once she came and borrowed my pans which wasn't convenient and not really why she was paying AirBnB fees.
After being burned multiple times, she just stays with me. It isn't as convenient as i live further away from where she wants to be, but at least i have a working kitchen.
I don't get why people advertise they have a kitchen, yet remove all the tools needed to use it? Just seems like a real dick move.
I guess I'll probably keep using it for times when it if it fails it doesn't ruin my life (not a month overseas).
Too many of the hosts are weird, with odd rules and renting out weird spots.
I may be lucky, but all my AirBnb stays were pretty good to excellent. I book for convenience, not trying to beat the hotel on price and prioritize listings with long, consistent history.
In general, having several rooms where a jetlagged family member can turn on the light and read without waking everyone else is a huge feature. So is having a full kitchen, so for me the AirBnb has been a clear net positive option. My 2c, others may have a different experience.
That said, you also seem to have had bad luck with hotels. I've stayed in many hundreds and the percentage of memorably bad experiences I've had is tiny. I'm not sure if I have had the kind of record you have had even if I go back decades. I can't remember the last time a hotel gave away my room.
That was not the message I tried to convey, sorry. I did a lot of business travel at one time, stayed in a lot of hotels and have no aversion to them at all. If I am traveling alone, I almost always stay in hotels. Family travel is usually with AirBnB.
I was simply saying that AirBnb should not be seen as universally evil based on a few stories, however horrible, as there are still use cases where it seems to work well. My 2c.
As usual, the companies make money and the product is the economically strained consumer. We see this kind of grift everywhere from car sales to real estate interest rates where poor people and people of colour are targeted because they want something more than they can afford.
Everyone is always looking for a deal or something cheaper even when they don’t have to..and there are others who have been conned into parting with the few dollars they have because they have been convinced that they deserve a certain experience even if it’s sub par.
The only way to deal with this societal malnutrition is to find joy in everything. Example: The notion that one has to go on a family vacation annually like it’s a sacred vow pilgrimage is a uniquely western phenomenon. and a seemingly recent one.
Something strange has been happening recently. The attachment to material things has somehow made people blind to reality. Their own reality. The reality of their wallets.
Consumers in the west are not the true poor, but due to social media and some perverted sense of entitlement, they want the experiences of gazillionaires. Which makes them artificially poor. Quantity over quality is the first indication that one is living with a sense of lack or scarcity.
But I don’t understand the new found middle class obsession with luxury at cheap deals. Never has anyone in the world lived in such abundance. No one has childhood memories of overseas travels or annual cruises or vacations. So this must be a planted desire. It’s not real. The Airbnb customer is the product. Consumers minds are just fertile grounds where unreasonable expectations are seeded. Hence the wild chase for something cheaper.
The first priority for any vacation stay should be safety and then cleanliness and then comfort. The reviewing system and site should be independent.
But that’s a long game. Companies that want to stay forever put in such controls. Short grifts don’t have to worry because in a Ponzi scheme, the people at the top would have made the money early on well before the decay and rot sets in the balance sheet.
I am always surprised that people are surprised by this. This is what those companies do. AirBnB, Uber, deliveroo, twitter, whatever.
It's what they mean when they talk about "disrupt the market". Offer a service with the bare minimum of humans (underpaid as much as possible). No concern for communities they "disrupt", or their customers, or taxes.
They are the company equivalent of vermin infesting society.
In general, people assume good faith and law-abiding behavior, partly because when regular people don't abide by the law (even inadvertently), it catches up with them fairly quickly.
The surprising bit is that when companies break the law, there are no consequences. What Airbnb is doing here is effectively fraud, they've misled the customer into thinking they were covered by an insurance policy or some sort of money-back guarantee, but are not honoring their part of the bargain.
Avoid in places you haven't been to before or when you'd be really screwed if it ended up being unsuitable.
What you need to understand is that for me I am not just “someone who went somewhere”. This was something that really happened to me personally and it was extremely uncomfortable and I’d rather not delve on the details. That is why a statistic-based argument makes no sense to me. I will never use Airbnb, ever again, because it left me both physically and mentally scarred. It’s not an abstract ethereous thing for me.
Seeing prices around 3K depending on a city, so yea.
I've used AirBNB for long and short term stays, in Europe and in the US. Each time I stayed in a delightful places that was a genuine passion project for the hosts. Those places would not exist without AirBNB and similar services.
If you're on a tight budget and just need a place to stay at for a bit, it's obviously easier to go with a Marriott. But if you're willing to spend some time on searching the best place to complement your trip, AirBNB can get you the best experience.
If hotel chain electricuted people in shower, it would get fined and closed pronto.
Just press the flush a few times or whack the water tank. Common problem with tanks in european households. If there is no water to flush, just fill a bucket, washbowl or pot with water and flush that way. Honestly, I stopped reading after this, seems like whining from someone without skills to deal with adulthood. Hey, maybe a lightbulb also burned out.
In the case where the terms of the living arrangement are “you can stay here 30 days for free, but you’ll need to take care of any issues you come upon yourself.”, this would be an appropriate response.
In this case, as mentioned in the article, they are “you can stay here for 30 days for $3,000”. Totally different story.
Does it make her opinion less important?
Things don't work as expected, and you simply pay up?
Not sure about you, but if I was staying at a place for a length of time i would expect things like the toilet work properly. As someone paying for a place to stay, "filing a bucket with water" to flush the toilet isn't something i should be doing. Toilets are not expensive and easy to replace, it sounds like this one should have been replaced some time ago.
Thanks for explaining!
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
Ah yes, and then you read in the notes that you also have to do the laundry and wash the dishes.
They can slap vacation ads on it and now they have a stable source of income!
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Well, clearly it doesn't.
They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
Really? I don't know that this was ever guaranteed, and post-COVID it's definitely not. The ones I've seen are paltry compared to 10 years ago.
You got to be kidding?
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
> and you get breakfast!
Ok, now I see that you’ve got me.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
1. The incentives of the platform
2. The incentives of the individual
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
- Large friends and family network, rotate through other peoples homes
- Own a series of apartment buildings, rotate through addresses
- Unoccupied buildings with accessible mail drops (pick up mail from outside)
Similar tricks exist for non-residential address requirements.
Never underestimate the creativity of scammers.
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
See "We become what we behold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 and https://ncase.me/trust/ from the first comment. A high trust society, or marketplace, is an opportunity for the defectors to extract value. Unless they can be punished somehow ...
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
There was a recent fire in a summer vacation town popular with NYers. The town requires summer short term rental landlords to get a permit & inspection. The landlord did not get one. The landlord also had sketchy kitchen wiring that was probably some sort of DIY and not up to code. The landlord had removed batteries and hardwiring from 3 smoke detectors. These are the kind of things the inspector would have found immediately.
A family visiting from out of state lost 2 of their 3 children in this fire.
Apps like AirBnB create the facade of officialness on what are instead very sketchy markets. Family probably thought they were doing the right thing going through an app and the landlord must be verified and more "legit". Being from out of state they wouldn't know the intricacies of local town permit&inspection requirements and how to check if the landlord has one, etc.
Likewise in my condo in NYC, we had one particular owner who was trying to use their unit as an Airbnb. Regardless of the local laws which were tightening up at the time, our condo expressly forbid short term rentals, and had language around minimum length of stay and lease approval requirements. It only stopped when we started fining them $1000 per incident.
Stuff like this matters because you buy a condo to live in it and don't expect the unit on the other side of your bedroom wall to essentially be a hotel room with new neighbors every 3 days, staying up all hours (vacation, yay), dragging suitcases in&out at odd hours multiple times per week.. forever.
The building itself takes on a lot more wear & tear, and they put a burden on staff as they think the building porter&doorman are there for them like a hotel concierge and front desk.
This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb.
Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable.
It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
Some places have been dirtier than I expected (nothing horrible though), some were much smaller than the pictures suggested, but the for the vast majority of cases it has been a good experience. When the experience wasn't good, I rated and commented accordingly, so the host got their rating lowered and maybe did something about it. I also met some of the owners, which was a nice experience.
For work I had to travel for 1, 2, 3 weeks at a time and it wouldn't have made sense in economic terms to get a hotel, so I'm glad airbnb existed.
New hosts might be an issue, but hosts with good reputation are, in my experience, not a problem.
I can see the problem where whole neighborhoods get used for airbnb, driving costs up for residents. I imagine that's a tiny minority of cities...where jt makes sense to enforce laws to avoid this. For the rest of the cities? In my opinion airbnb is a net benefit: if creates a product that didn't exist before and allows buyers and sellers to benefit from this transaction. For me at least (and the people I know which is, admittedly, a non random sample) it has been a good experience. I'm sure in most places it's riskier than hotels. Yes, there's a trade-off.
We arrived, looked clean and decorated well enough, but had 4 glade plugins for a 500sqft place… seemed excessive like their might be a bad smell hidden.
Sat down on a chaise which collapsed because of a leg attached by gum. Found a cockroach under said chaise. Reported it and the owner said it was treated the other day, so it should be fine.
Sat down on the couch, which also collapsed, one leg was missing and was held up by a coffee mug. The bed frame had cinder blocks and children’s notebooks supporting it, (stubbed my toe on the cinder block). Bathroom fixtures were loose, sink basins were not properly seated to their countertops, inviting mold.
In the morning I found 3 more cockroaches roaming around the otherwise clean looking kitchen.
I named one of them Gregor. Airbnb gave us a refund for the nights unspent and we’ve spent the rest of the time at a brand name hotel. More expensive, but more options for recourse if things go south.
If not for the cockroaches it would have been bearable, but the combination of issues left too many doubts as to the safety of the place. My wife and I could not find rest there.
Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place, but the quality control truly is a gamble. These days, I increasingly prefer the consistency of a hotel bed.
I will say this, the thermostat was better at the Airbnb than the hotel. No auto feature in the hotel.
AirBNB is not safe.
https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexua...
https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sex...
I was shocked how bad their support was.
Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.
But regarding fake hosts: I think this is standard practice on BnB. Nobody wants to expose their real names on Bnb and be subject to abuse by unhappy guests... unfortunately that's the reality of it. From the host's point of view, I can understand that... the host shouldn't matter anyway in most cases, right? Most people who own these places don't look cool and young as in the fake pics you'll see in most listings! But guess what: those cool pics do seem to make the place a bit more attractive to guests, so the incentive to use fake pics is strong (not sure if that's illegal though).
I stayed in a few wonderful places in California through BnB, but clearly, the listings were all under fake people (I think some even go to the effort to pay a real person to pretend they are the owner, as I googled one of them and she seemed like a real person... though I 100% doubt a young artist lady own a 3-storey townhouse in a good, quite central area of San Francisco).
My sister is about to list her apartment on Bnb and she's going to pay a company specialising in this to do all the cleaning, customer support etc... They take a 20% cut I believe... but it's probably worth it. Not sure she'll allow her real profile to be used for the listing, but I suspect that as long as it's not illegal, she should use some kind of AI-created profile or something.
And the web site is useless. There is no option to sort by price, the filters for maximum price don't work.
It's going to have to be cheaper than a hotel or B&B to make it worth taking the risk and I'll have to be able to find it without scrolling all the way through the site.
So far I haven't found a compelling reason to try it regardless of the horror stories.
Unless something has changed in the last months I always found a direct hotel order cheaper and easier than booking/hotels dot com, not to mention fake rates, irrelevant reviews or non existing rooms.
Whereever people sense they can make a buck or save a buck, laws amd regulations be damned.
I have never swayed an inch off my view.
I knew first hand how this affects housing prices and wear, I live in a severly affected area and pay the price for it, literally.
Same for uber. Neither is cheaper than the previous thing, hotel offers better bang fpr the buck, uber has surges and exploits the drivers and isnt even cheaper. Nope, I dont qanna hear about these drivers wouldnt have a job at all without uber. Lol.
Just because some tech bros with sexist issues can make an app and a service without customer service does not mean jack shit.
Airheadbnb is being declared cosa non grata in more and more places, uber is literally outlawed in half of europe.
Theres your business, kalashnick and the other pajasos.
If I had my own country or my way, I would send these clowns to prison no questions asked, to, you know, disrupt them a bit.
Do not come have a shit in my place.
I am all for the strictest and heavy handed regulation on these matters.
Hotels expensive? Well, then stay at home or go to a motel or some cheaper destination. If its too expensive, your kin has no business being there, mate.
Taxi too expensive? Get a car, use public transport. Walk. Screw uber and the consumers of it.
I have sympathy for the drivers waiting in the dark on italian airports, but not uber, its a zero sum game to increase prices later on or to have a self driving fleet which then somehow makes this non viable business model good? Hell no, this is a deliberate scheme to burn through investor money.
Airbnb and Uber are the scum of the earth, its a shame the population let them get away with this stuff for a while. People are inherently and helplessly stupid on some things. In hindsight, its always easy to play the innocent one with a halo hovering over the head.
I wonder where the fierce hn defenders of these models are today.
I've stayed in many absolutely wonderful homes on airbnb and as a travelling family it's vastly superior to staying in a hotel. We're staying in one in Utrecht for New Years'; I can't wait.
The author's points are valid (if you have little kids, there's a great Shaun The Sheep episode about a converted sheep barn that comes to mind reading this article) but I can't think of anything remotely as good as airbnb for travelling families, except for airbnb clones like vrbo.
_mostly_ miserable. There are some exceptions. They're usually very expensive.
I will never ever use it again. Apart from being a terrible company that doesn't give a shit for the cities and communities they're destroying there's just a host of practical reasons to never ever use them.
It starts with the key exchange. In a hotel you just get the key(card) handed, go to your room and be done. You'll never have to go through shenanigans like those described in the article.
Much worse is tip toeing around neighbors who, rightfully, hate your guts. Or even worse, tip toeing around other guests, which were not part of the description.
Don't get me started on hidden cameras, which may or may not be advertised. If I pay big bucks for a room I will absolutely not run a "The Conversation" type sweep of my private quarters.
There's huge scam and safety issue with all things AirBnb. No thanks!
If anything goes wrong in a hotel there's somebody who can deal with it. I had some bozos having a party in the room above me in a hotel in Prague. A call to the reception resolved the issue in 5 minutes.
It's not the quaint experience of a host providing personal guidance to a city. Often you wind up in a bland, badly designed cookie cutter apartment managed by a faceless company.
Hotels set minimum standards. Essentially I get what I pay for. I can splurge and stay at the Hyatt or a LeMeridien, or I can travel more on the cheap and get a good bed and a reasonable bathroom at an Ibis.
Think you got a bargain with AirBnb? That may have been the case 8 years ago. Nowadays I can only suggest: Best of luck with that one.
Support if something fucks up? Well, you just read the article I suppose.
AirBnb wound up on my eternal shit list. I wouldn't touch them or any of their properties with a haz mat suit.
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out long term and if these companies can control quality at scale or if this whole mode of trying to play middle-person just fizzles out over time and we return to more traditional approaches that weren’t necessarily terribly broken in the first place.
AirBnb started out as a company that basically fostered and encouraged illegal, unregulated short term rentals. Many of the hosts were breaking various ordnances and bylaws to rent you their home.
There is also a huge societal cost in terms of increases rents and reduced permanent housing supply because of AirBnb.
So if those type of people at that company screw you over, don’t be surprised.
Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive, but I wonder that in front of the increasing fees for a decreasing added value, the pendulum will swing back and customers will revert back to direct contact with the service providers instead of using middlemen apps. The old way.
They're running out of magic investor money and the reality is starting to hit them
> Back when these apps were released they were disruptive and competitive,
Of course, they were totally unregulated, regulation caught up in most countries (airbnb taxes/time limits, better status for uber drivers, &c.). They were only profitable because they were abusing the people working for them
I dont mind paying for a real service, but these apps have also encouraged tipping culture, which was already going crazy. Now everyone wants a tip.
Just charge me the real cost, pay them a real wage, and if no wants to pay for it, then society doesn't want it.
Airbnb is clearly in the money-extraction phase of the VC-funded b2c cycle, it's not like we haven't seen this before. This turd is usually served with a side of "acquiring every potential competitor", so that the con can go on for as long as possible.
I've been decreasingly satisfied with airbnb (no horror stories). I think I've done roughly a 50-50 split between them and hotels, depending on the area. It's not exactly hard to switch back to hotels either, airbnb which now has premium prices really only makes sense if the service is premium too. Peace of mind is a huge factor for vacations.
We booked our first AirBnB and stayed for three weeks. While it was everything the host promised, we weren’t misled at all and it was nice enough. We realized we would like hotels better…
- consistency: we could just go on the Hilton or Hyatt app and we wouldn’t have to worry about what we were going to get. We knew what to expect from a Homewood Suites, Embassy Suites, Home2Suites or Hyatt Place. Even if the hotel ended up having issues, we knew there were easy remedies - everything from getting another room or changing hotels easier.
Besides, we are changing cities on Sundays and I need to be set up to work by Monday morning and don’t need any complications.
And no secret codes. We get to the hotel. We do a digital check in from the app and our phones open the door. We check out digitally and just leave.
- gym access: we have two rooms in our house dedicated to exercise. We have a studio for floor exercises and another room with cardio equipment. We wanted to be able to go downstairs to a gym.
- no hidden fees: we know exactly what we are going to be paying up front.
- no expectation to have the place spotless when we leave. Staying in a hotel is purely transactional. No reviewing the host. No worrying about reputation.
- loyalty points: between the loyalty points that come from the hotel and the cobranded credit cards, you can easily get 15%-25% back in points you can redeem for future stays.
- housekeeping - enough said.
I stopped using Amazon and went back to shopping at my grocery store, Costco, IKEA, etc. You get to actually see what you’ll be getting, bring it back the same day, and know it’s not some fake that you need to ship back the next day. Hell, even the dollar store sells me better junk than Amazon does, and cheaper too.
I stopped using Uber and went back to taxis. Three times now I’ve arrived at my home airport to Uber surging their prices to $100+ for a simple airport pickup. The last Uber I took in Vegas decided it was ok to run red lights and Uber wouldn’t do a thing about it. No thanks, I’ll take the fixed-rate taxi service, or even just rent a car.
I stopped using AirBnB and now book hotels. Prices are comparable, and the quality is far more predictable. It’s getting harder and harder to find good listings, and when my family shows up and the place “isn’t as described” it’s a real downer.
A recession of sorts might be the perfect thing to force these companies to start focusing on their product again, instead of this growth-at-all-costs mentality.
I've never used Uber. But the various local taxi companies seem to have recently formed a cartel; they won't take bookings before 9AM, muttering about "the school run". This is new, I booked a taxi at 7:30AM two months ago, to go to the hospital, and that worked fine. Last week I was forced to either book before 7 (and spend an hour in a waiting room), or cough-up £18 for a ten-minute trip.
For clarity concerning this school-run nonsense, school starts at 9AM here, and few kids go to breakfast clubs.
I always click into the host details, check for additional listings, check their history, and usually try to street-view the property as well (harder to do for apartments, but usually possible for full homes).
It's annoying that I have to do it. No question Airbnb should do a better job ensuring their listings are legitimate. But, when I travel, I almost always need a kitchen and someplace that's dog-friendly, which rules out most hotels.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but across most of the eastern US, Scotland, Italy, and Iceland, I've had good experiences. I generally pick a mid-priced listing, not the cheapest, and definitely not the most expensive.
There’s a pretty simple correlation most of the time: the cheaper the accommodation compared to the local market, the higher the chance of disappointment.
On the other hand, when I take Airbnbs that are only a small discount compared to a reasonable but completely average hotel room from a reputable chain, they are often fantastic.
Bad and scammy holiday and short term accommodation is surely a problem, but Airbnb and their rating system doesn’t look any worse than many other alternatives from my experience.
Many of the comments here show more about the author’s attitude toward a once popular start-up than much else.
If you haven't had the pleasure, having an AirBNB next door is like having your house moved to a cheap hotel parking lot. Random yelling and screaming at odd hours, parties every holiday (even the minor ones), lots of middle of the night loud drunken discussions. Random people all the time, is that guy trying to break into my house or is he trying to get into the AirBNB back yard. Questions, where's a good place to eat, where is the water hose, how do you like living here, do you know of a late night pharmacy nearby?
The interesting part is how much of a hellish experience AirBnB support was. If you're staying in an AirBnB, you likely do not have the time to spend waiting for support to get back to you. Their customer service should help the customer immediately, and sort out the details later.
In this case I also wonder why the author didn’t take faster action themselves. Immediately move out into a new hotel or rental and sort out a refund later.
Probably the root cause to both inaction is money.
Airbnb doesn’t want to pay for a prompt help desk and for a customer friendly refund Policy.
The customer doesn’t want to or can’t pay for a market rate hotel.
This makes me far less likely to trust airbnb for long term rentals myself, knowing you can’t trust that listings are authentic and that you can’t count on airbnb to help if you get duped.
Edit: If you weren't on that trip then please accept my apologies.
Couldn't you just throw some security cams up at the entrances and just track coming and going and total stay time? You'd only have to review footage after a reasonable suspicion.
At least this part sounds like the system working correctly?
The platforms act like its not their responsibility to verify compliance and hide behind terms of use & arbitration. Consumers assume that everything is on the up&up because they are going through big public company intermediary.
For example, as sketchy as real estate brokers are (very) .. they generally aren't going to put you into a literally illegal apartment. There is personable responsibility and concern about liability.
Why is it that all these SV firms can use amazing AI/ML to target ads, and sell us stuff but its impossible to use similar for following laws. Look at Ubers efforts to circumvent local regulators, its the same flavor.
The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get.
Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant.
AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly.
False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP).
More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook.
Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
There's nothing wrong with AirBnb in principle, but I strongly suspect if they were properly regulated and actually carried out the necessary checks, provided an adequate level of guarantees and service, suddenly their business model would be much less viable.
In effect, AirBnb externalizes the cost of their business to local residents and authorities, but they harvest the profits. They are not the only industry operating under such framework of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33286238
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
With many hotels the money is actually flowing out of the local community as the business is owned by a big multi-national. It's not really so cut and dried in favour of hotels.
It cast a pall over the whole stay. It was hard for me to be comfortable, I could not imagine a long-term stay. The kids didn't mind though, and luckily we weren't worse off for it.
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel.
Of course this does not apply to exotic Airbnbs.
The promise of AirBnB used to be you could get a spare room / apartment in a place where the locals actually lived, rather than the hotel & convention center district that's 2 blocks from the airport
Some other residents will have broken plumbing, bad smells and cockroaches. You are living as they are?
Not everyday you come across random Kafka references!
Airbnb hides the review score, only giving an average.
So I don't have statistics behind this next sentence, but my anecdotal data has shown that most Airbnb rentals are not where people live. They are specific spaces purchased and maintained for renting out short term via services like Airbnb. These are renters. They are renting the space. Language is important.
We often find that all in all the prices are not so different from airbnbs but with a lot more risk; so when you think about it, a E1200 airbnb for a month (which is hard to find in lisbon, by the way) vs a E1500 hotel, I would always pick the hotel; daily cleaning, breakfast included (usually so much I don't need anything further) and easy to cancel, extend or completely just get my money back or get relocated (especially when using the same chain like Accor).
I had awful experiences with booking.com and very good experiences with hotels.com. More than once, they rebooked us in far nicer and more expensive hotels after complaining. I found our favourite hotel that way; our booked hotel was overbooked and pretty crappy; the staff was nasty about it; one call and we got put up in a hotel 5x the price for the same number of days (2 weeks) instead swiftly and at their cost. More or less in the middle of a paradise.
A lot of us would like lower prices as long as nobody is negatively affected. Laws and regulations aren't automatically just by design because they're laws, sometimes they're outdated or the result of lobbying/regulatory capture. There's a lot wrong with Uber such as how they treat their drivers/customers, etc, but I doubt many of us would shed any tears to the taxi medallion cartel they disrupted.
However, in this case, it's clear that laws have been broken, but not even the typical laws you'd associated with Airbnb (those around short-term rentals), the law that has been broken is the one that outlaws fraud or misrepresentation of goods/services. The problem isn't even that Airbnb has "disrupted" the market by breaking the law around short-term rentals, it's just that Airbnb is now using its size to break basic laws around online commerce with total impunity by charging for goods/services that aren't rendered and fraudulently pitching an insurance policy/guarantee that doesn't actually exist.
However, here nothing has been disrupted, rhe meddalions are stronger than ever in Europe. So all the little savings here by using uber will cost more in the long term now that the taxi cartell has been reinforced. Same for hotels.
At least taxi drivers know safety protocols, same for hotels.
So the fallout goes beyond of what people think.
If this stuff comes at the cost of pretend customer service or exploitation of work forces or customers, the regulatory hammer should be, swift and heavy hitting.
We are far from this as a society, the exploiters can use their ill gotten funds to pay for legal defense. The bit of damage done to society and people finds no representation. Try ripping of a bank or take from the rich and your life will be disrupted before you can do a ten count.
this is an ad hominem attack and not helpful -- Kalanick's personal problems are separate from Uber's product and services
Top management of banks and such at least have the courtesy to simply pay for an escort not associated in any way with the business. Most of them even simply live a solid family life. You will be hard pressed to find such misconduct in the classic instututions.
Price is king is a relative palavra, if it were unconditionally true, then squatting and car theft would be the ultimate solutions.
I know, these are not very legal, but the same can be said for uber and airbnb, they carefully select to be just as illegal as they can before having to deal with some serious consequences.
They are not pure anarchist disruptors, they are calculating cowards and they calculated to waste investors money from the get go.
If history shows anything, the first and dominating self driving taxi fleet will not be teslas or ubers.
They have announced their visions harder than they are working on a solution, esp ueber.
Either way, outside of madrid, you will have a hard time to find an uber in Spain, which is a complicated country.
Let us do the math. EU has 450 million people, Europe has 740, give or take.
Deduct the Russian market from that, they are out over there.
It was banned then unbanned in places, fe Turkey.
In switzerland, the owe 150million in taxes, not clean solution, is it. In other words, it is worth it to them to operate there having to pay that restrospectivelly, I dare you, try to steal 150m from the Swiss and see how that goes.
Your list leaves plenty to be desired, it does not contain Greece and the Netherlands and Finland, and Belgium.
So 740 m minus
RU has 140m population, of which 100 to 110 m live in the european part.
660m left
Minus Germany and Uk, this leaves us with
510 million, by now, we have excluded almost the entire us population and the countries with most purchasing power for sure.
France, italy and lets say half spain is Nother 130m, leaving us with 380m.
This is half of whole Europe and half of the european union and we are not through yet.
Next most populated country would be ukraine, I would say legal or not, their serives are currently disrupted there by ongoing events.
In other words, europes best economies do not wanna hear about uber and there was no popular uprising about it.
They should take the hint and stay away.
Theybare venditor non grata, that is a horrible business result after a decade of operations.
As far as I understand, in the US Uber is a dude with a car and a drivers license, who installs an app on their phone and starts driving people around. In European countries I know Uber is just another way to call a taxi.
Big difference. I'd say it's not too wrong to say that the "dude with a car who installed an app" model is mostly outlawed.
When has this not been the case at any point in human history under any government? There is nothing new here. Greed is a component of human nature, and capitalism (and other systems) can certainly bring it out.
I fully agree with your historical point, I read about thensoutj sea company in the uk and the stake holders, i was shocked, but nor surprised. The wikipedia page actually makes for good reading if you have time.
Interestingly their dispute process is very buyer-friendly, though. When a seller demands money in compensation for damage they often lose. I believe this is because Airbnb is on the hook if they can't collect from the buyer.
The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.
To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.
And these types of scammers are and know the "right" people.
There is a reason why stolen passports are so valuable.
Or for any getaway kind of situation where the point is mainly to be at the place that you are staying, not necessarily to get out a ton. Hotels are terrible for that, aside, perhaps, from ultra-expensive huge suites (I wouldn't know, I've never tried one, too pricey and I have a suspicion it'd still feel like being in a hotel room).
They're also great in rural areas. Often you can get an AirBnB much closer to some 2nd- or 3rd-rate way-off-the-interstate attraction you're interested in, than a hotel. Otherwise your only options would be camping or an RV.
That said, we've used about two dozen Airbnbs over the years, all in the U.S., and have never stayed in a place that was not exactly what we expected based on the listing.
I just find a good 4 person room and we make do - or I Airbnb/VRBO.
Until I gave up on rideshare apps, I was carrying around a pile of cash and pre-tipping drivers 20% in cash up front in order to get decent service.
Fortunately I discovered a decent local airport ride business that offers car seats and no attitude. It's barely more expensive than Lyft and works really well.
Sometimes, Americans and american businesses do not understand the social leaning eu countries, the people have worked hard for generations to keep people like uber(yes , people, we know behind companies are people) at bay and they know why. People want to be able to live off of one full time jons salary, no matter the sacrifice. They also want to their neigbors to have the same privilege, they dont want their neighbors to rob them. And if it does not work, then the social system shall serve as a fallback.
Nothing to do with lack of work morals, it is a different mind set.
Could Airbnb challenge it legally though?
There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.
The cleaning and service fees are being universally complained about. It definitely reduced some demand, especially since some of it seemed to have started recently - last year ?
For long weekends, it becomes a very bad deal: the overhead of big service fees that are usually more than 1 day's rental, then you tack on the cleaning which can be 125-225 typically. You put those numbers together and sure, while there's demand, the demand is mitigated by the high cost. There's a demand for all sorts of consumer items in the world but people hit their limits.
And fundamentally, Airbnb competes with hotels. Their niche is to provide a better hotel experience: a bigger space, maybe a backyard, and definitely a kitchen. But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
Which it is, which is why on my trip to London in a month I rented over booking and not AirBnB.
Why would I choose a more expensive service with zero additional benefits? Because their app is more cool?
Absolutely. That's where bitcoin could help a new platform, as a decentralized trust protocol. The bisq.network protocol requires people to put up significant bonds to perform roles that are trusted, and then if they fail to perform well, they can loose some or all of their bond. The bisq token holders (bisq tokens are simply colored satoshis, i.e. they've built functional governance directly on bitcoin) vote monthly on various governance proposals, and can thus hold people doing bonded roles accountable.
The tough question is whether such a system could make to individual apartment rentals in the real world. Its an oracle question: how to you establish the truth of competing claimed about the state if an apartment? Not an easy problem to solve, but if its solveable it could provide an amazing new marketplace.
There is always a healthy layer of NIMBY, I want to be a tourist but I don't want tourists to come where I live.
Sure, they should be regulated, and in many places in Europe they are regulated.
Any business/housing has the potential to be bad for neighbours, which is why we have zoning and planning laws. Bars and nightclubs, industrial businesses, apartment buildings. Short term rentals are no different, rules and taxes should apply. Fines should be imposed for rowdy party behaviour (which is one of the more negative aspects of short-term rentals).
Sold!
(That said, fining somebody hundreds of dollars for not doing that is unreasonable for the same reason that the request is reasonable; because it's an easy thing to do.)
Like at a cafe, it's socially accepted that you put away (bus) your finished utensils.
Famously, Chewy. Amazon (used to?) have a reputation for being very pro consumer. Zappos.
Obviously, those are all companies that grew because if I knew of fast growing businesses that were sustainable and likely to succeed I would be investing other people's money fulltime.
Which is not to take anything away from them but customer service is pretty much baked into their model.
I've been staying at the same a hotel every few months for the last four years, even during 2020. The last time I checked in instead of saying "let us know when you want housekeeping" like they have for the last 3 years; they started saying "what's your preferred housekeeping interval?" I think that's a better system to ask than question.
The only slight downside for me is that if I'm in a room for a while the toilet paper can start to run low, but that's fixed with a text to the front desk.
Interestingly when I was looking up the info on the Doubletree, they mentioned something about housekeeping every X days (not every day), but when I arrived, it was daily. I didn't make any request for it, it could be that the website is just out of date, as I suspect this is more about staffing than anything else.
i.e. price their beds the same as hotels, or higher?
Anyone who charges lower then the minimum viable will simply never break even, given that the money spent to accumulate trust has an opportunity cost.
The cheapest hotels will be priced about the same.
Low or zero trust hosts can't compete against high trust folks without a huge discount as already discussed.
I knew someone whose family ran a small bed-and-breakfast (pre-web).
I don’t think they cooked all 3 meals but they did at least provide breakfast and brownbag lunch.
I hate staying in hotels, but one benefit is getting a nice hot breakfast served to you.
Lately it's sucked just like every other hotel, since they don't clean the rooms and the employees are all overworked and stressed out. Still better than having to deal with all the huge fees and shenanigans from AirBNB IMO
Inn!
Express!
Holiday Inn Express might have beds fit for a Baggins, but everything down to the fold of the sheets and the pen/notepad is the same every time, and I cansure appreciate that.
Last AirBNB I was at told me to just not smoke all the 'courtesy items' on the shelf left by previous tenants.
Breakfast!
Clean!
Rooms!
Did you even read the article? The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
I do not know how you’ve managed to extract that insight from my post. The experience I’ve described with AirBnb is not possible with any hotel, Hyatt included.
> The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.
Take a look at Hyatt San Francisco, for example. See that the ground floor is occupied by some public areas exclusively? So I should either leave my bike in the place where it can be stolen, or to put it into my room via an elevator. Now it’s starting from $285, and $295 give you are a cottage in San Francisco on AirBnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6523507?check_in=2022-11-29&che...
So to be more precise:
- hotels, I can survive then, no prob. I can even survive Hyatt SF with my bicycle.
- AirBnbs give me pleasure. Get up, open the door to the garden, birds chirping, the creek floating, my favorite turnovers in the stove ready in 20 minutes, my laptop connected to Ethernet, my bicycle ready nearby - I can just jump on it and ride… Which of you “nicely regulated” hotels can give me all that?
To be fair, I’ve managed to get some pleasure from a hotel too. Now and then. A different pleasures though. And all of these hotels were in Japan.
But generally speaking midrange business hotels are utterly unexciting--which is to say they're predictable which is what I'm looking for from my hotel in general when I travel. I'm probably not there for the hotel experience.
That's different from jacking up the price "to compensate" for the losses at the start. They just have to eat the initial costs, and it will take a while for normal market profits to put them in the black.
I am a landlord: I let a single house, to a family. New regulations came in on 1st September, requiring the property to be registered. I already had a valid gas safety certificate, expiring in 2 months, and an electrical safety certificate good for two more years. Registration also required an energy performance certificate, which I had.
But collecting all these documents, along with the precise dimensions of each room in the house, including the kitchen and bathroom, has been a terrible hassle.
I'm a good landlord; I don't mess with the rent mid-term, I fix things quickly, aand I don't bother my tenants. They are good tenants; they are German, and Germans know how rental is supposed to work.
I live in a flat, and my neighbour is an AirBnB, whose owner lives in Bavaria, and whose "host" lives in another town. It seems to be a nice clean apartment; but it's illegal, because local regs ban holiday lets in homes that are suitable for residential use. AirBnB don't give a shit. I notified the local authority, and they're trying to close it down. The "hosts" have appealed, so this saga has been going on for a year.
The problems, for me, are that I share the front-door of the block with complete strangers (where my post is delivered); the guests don't understand UK recycling rules, and dump mixed waste in my recycling bin (resulting in non-collection); and sometimes they have noisy parties. More generally, most of my neighbours seem to be investment properties; there are no kids around here, and I only know a handful of neighbours. AirBnB has sucked the life out of this neighbourhood.
But it's also unreasonable to expect AirBNB to keep up with the uncountable legal jurisdictions of the world. Every locality - down to the city block - could have different rules.
If your neighbor is violating the law, that's your neighbor's fault. If you want to do something about it, you have the power.
Is that the same as banning holiday lets in homes entirely? What does a house or proper apartment that's not suitable for residential use look like?
Requiring a letter explicitly allowing a listing from the managing agent on record prior to publishing the listing wouldn't be particularly onerous. Of course their listings would drop dramatically since most aren't by the book, but feature not a bug?
These tech platform marketplaces are willing to do lots of AI/ML hocus-pocus & throw bodies at things like targeted ads, onboarding new suppliers (drivers/landlords), whatever helps their KPIs, etc.. but not on following the law/rules. That is because it would reduce sales, knowing that they are implicitly allowing illegalities on their market places.
Why does a technology platform get to automate & scale in a less compliant manner?
Yeah, I'm sure the code is kind of hard to write, that doesn't mean you can violate laws & contracts, because the code is challenging.
We have so many examples of these platforms disrupting locals & human jobs to automate & scale globally, while ignoring laws, regulations, etc. Just because its easier to make money assisting illegality doesn't mean it should be legal to do so.
Look at all the work Banks have to do on AML/KYC/etc to make sure organized crime, narcotics, terrorism and sanctioned nationals money does not get to use the USD financial system. It's not perfect of course. And it's hard for sure, theres entire organizations at every banks with 100s or 1000s of employees responsible. Why does Silicon Valley always get a free pass?
Damage is obviously a problem and not the issue at hand.
So I got a huge TV, a kitchenette, a double bedroom with another huge TV, a bathroom with his-and-hers basins, and a single bedroom. The next morning I discovered a second bathroom, like the first; and a utility room with a washer and a dryer.
The problem was they didn't have a bar, so I couldn't get a bottle of wine. But not a big problem; the suite hotel shared a lift with the regular hotel next door. So I would ring the barman at the regular hotel, and he'd meet me on the second floor with my wine.
Her last one was incredible. A lovely little 3 bed home with a hot tub in the garden room.
I haven’t encountered this before.
It really isn't that hard, and they don't even try because it would reduce their revenue. We can argue if they need to enforce block by block HOA & condos/coops rules.. but they aren't even trying at more macro levels like state/town laws.
I live part of the year in a large summer town with ~100k residents. It has clear, well known rental laws that have been on the books longer than AirBnB existed. For example the minimum lease term is 2 weeks. Yet, of course, if I go to AirBnB and search in town, there are 100 homes being offered by the day. Meanwhile if I go to any of the brokerages to be shown rentals, they only offer month/summer/year length rentals.. because its the law.
"New York City: Rentals under 30 days are prohibited unless the host is present on the property."
OK, great, well why are there daily/weekly AirBnB rentals of "entire apartments" all around NYC with host descriptions like:
During your stay William is available via text or phone if you have any questions about the space. I will try my best to preempt any questions by leaving detailed instructions about the operation of the space.
During your stay I’m available everyday from 9 am until 12am to answer questions and help with anything you might need if I don’t reply fast, feel free to call me
During your stay Will have an open line of communication and on-site support Response rate: 100% Response time: within a few hours
Yes, I think it's roughly like what you said: the Council doesn't want holiday homes in this town. Housing is expensive here, because in addition to two universites, it has a cluster of big hospitals. But we still need inexpensive housing for the multitude of low-paid wokers those institutions require.
Tourists are a boon for some places, but this town would work better with less tourists (few of the tourists buy anything, and most of them don't stay overnight anyway - they just want a selfie in front of an old building).
[Edit] Not exactly; an old-fashioned couch-surfing isn't ruled out. Nor is am apartment let for less than 90 days a year. But anything that could be an attempt to get around student-housing regulations is probably banned, because that's heavily regulated.
Nice people, but just not what everyone might have in mind as far as accommodations go. Or maybe it is, who knows.
The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels. There's a huge demand for what AirBnB provides (Serviced and short term accommodation). Hotels are inadequate for longer stays or where you just want the comforts of home, a good middle ground is the "serviced apartment" concept found in some places (entire apartment blocks reserved for short term rentals) however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
You mean a hotel? Hotels are not inadequate for longer stays. If someone desires the comforts of a home, they can move there and actually rent/buy a home.
> The reason AirBnB exists is that tourists are not properly accounted for in city planning and not properly serviced by hotels.
This is a werid entitlement. Tourists aren't entitled to overrun and impose a serious negative impact upon a town/city's housing supply because they feel like they 'deserve' to vacation there.
What about a middle ground. If I go somewhere for 2-4 weeks? For that length of time I kind of want a proper kitchen, which I won't get in a hotel, but obviously it is not long enough to actually rent/buy a home.
Alternatively, tourists are unhappy that people in some areas don't want unlimited numbers of them and account for them properly with zoning restrictions.
> however there are times when you want an entire house, not an apartment.
It's not your home, why should you deserve a house over someone who lives there?
That's the thing with a lot of VC-subsidized services. There are a lot of services that consumers would be happy to, well, consume if they were cheap enough. Drivers, personal chefs, weekly housekeepers, lawn services, laundry pickup, etc. Even people with an upper middle class income are pretty selective about that sort of thing.
>But many would rather go back to the tiny fridges filled with pricey junk food they never touch, if it means saving hundreds of dollars a weekend and flexible cancellation policies.
Kitchens are not a big deal for me when I travel. A fridge is nice but you get a small one you can use a lot of the time in hotels these days and minibars seem to have mostly gone out of fashion.
For me this is true if I'm traveling for < 1 week If I'm gone for more than that i don't want to eat every meal out and want to have some food + drink stored in my accommodation.
I agree with your point. Cleaning fees tend to make it hard to consider AirBnB for a weekend. That said, assuming the host doesn't just do it themselves, they're going to get a housekeeper in, rates are up for that sort of service, and that's about what it costs.
It's a bait and switch by selecting which UI components are displayed in that search screen, and hiding the added costs ("service fee" and "cleaning fee").
Also, unlike a hotel an Airbnb host will give you a list of items to do upon leaving. And often passive-aggressively, "And it would be appreciated if you could put the towels and sheets in the washing machine for one wash as you leave so it's less work for the cleaning person" type commentary.
Noise, smells, sanitation, etc
Same for whether it's sanitary enough to not be causing any damage.
And realistically I'm picturing roughly one cow would fit.
It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like destroy the world if it became a paper clip maximizer?
It all went horribly wrong.
If you are wildly successful (oh, to be so lucky), what will your company be forced to optimize?
Mid-years Amazon's radically generous customer service refunds and Etsy's seller revolt yanked their courses away from volume optimization for a few years... but it's their inevitable end state for boosting revenue. No public company can resist maximizing revenue by any means available, and especially when no other plausible alternatives are available.
So think really hard on how to set up a marketplace / platform with a business model that mixes in more user-aligned and sustainable goals? Looking at you, Apple...
As a consumer of B2B services, I’m always amazed by the awful deals companies make to show revenue growth. One in particular a few years ago was particularly amazing. The sales dude was getting paid on revenue, and pushed through a deal that cost the company fortune. The entire sales chain of command retired and bought boats.
And of course, while the grift is going, the execs and shareholders get rich. But everyone knows when the gig is up. Evidence: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/uber-doordash-plunge-as-labo...
btw. I'm all for interruption but please... it shouldn't be through these means (at least not on this scale).
No, they hire the authorities, and the shit-show goes on forever. The gig is only up when they've passed their overvalued business on to late investors, who demand to be paid through strategic neglect of core functions, price rises to rational market values (or higher), and moonshot PR.
I imagine that it could have pivoted in many directions. That’s really the tragedy of AirBnb. It seems like a platform that could have been more.
Never forget "skirting consumer product safety regulations and trademark protections". Their entire retail business at this point is no more subject to regulation than buying "designer" handbags off some dude's street stand.
Now, should there maybe be an area of the city explicitly for short-term rentals, included in city planning? That's a different question; but it shouldn't be mixed in normal residential area, as all it does is make life worse for the actual residents.
I lived in a Homewood Suites for three months. It was fine.
Not everywhere but at least in the US suite hotels with small kitchens are pretty common. Most of the big chains have one or more suite hotel brands. (Though honestly I not infrequently travel for 2-3 weeks and, while I definitely appreciate a refrigerator I pretty much never find I need a full kitchen. And being able to stretch out on a sofa is nice.)
I'm guessing you're a high income individual with no kids then?
Sheesh, jamie. I typically eschew using this term, but someone taking a 2-4 week vacation is already highly privileged to be able to do so. Tourism is a privilege. Not a right.
Following your logic, going to the bakery to buy bread instead of making it myself is "entitled" and disregards the baker's quality of life since he'd be much more comfortable sleeping than waking up at 5am to start preparing the bread.
Many markets have demand, but society prevents their legal existence. For example, organ trades. I'm sure a lot of alcoholics would love just being able to go get a new liver whenever they want or when theirs fails. However, the... issues that creates have been deemed unacceptable and therefore, it's not allowed (obviously, it still happens illegally).
Some people want AirBnBs so they can have all the accoutrements of a home wherever they travel. Other people do not want such a market to exist, for a variety of reasons. I don't think that simply because an economic opportunity exists, it should be serviced or be allowed to be serviced. Obviously, advertisers want to increased the amount and effectiveness of their ads. FaceBook and Google would block out the sky and plaster it with ads if they could. Should they be allowed to?
1. I am not saying the market/residents have to accommodate anything, I am simply stating my preference that if I have to travel for 5+ days I would rather have a full kitchen. If the residents don’t want to provide it, fine. If many other people feel as I do, then that’s kind of what markets are for.
2. I don’t typically take 2-4 week vacations, but I sometimes do travel for work for extended periods.
I recognise being able to travel at all is a privilege but having a personal preference for a full kitchen I don’t really think warrants such a judgemental response.
$300 or more a day is beyond the pale IMO.