Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras(theverge.com) |
Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras(theverge.com) |
These are supposed to be vacations, not a walking-on-eggshells experience because the host is constantly spying on you. If there's damage, submit a claim against the person.
A lot of people are getting very tired of being subjected to weekend after weekend of stags and hen parties because the neighboring apartment was turned into a hotel room.
Not to mention the extra pressure it's put on property and rents.
In the first part of that sentence you characterize the transaction as akin to renting out a spare room, but in the second part you characterize the guests as "customers." Historically, if you rented a room from someone, you were subject to all sorts of rules, invasions of privacy, etc. In many circumstances, that's still the case (e.g. with live-in nannies).
What's actually happening is that guests treat AirBnBs like hotel rooms, and hosts are doing the same thing. It's just a commercial, arm's-length transaction.
Society forgot why hotels were created, so now we're re-learning it via AirBnB.
I have never had an Airbnb that was not clearly an illegal hotel.
I've had plenty of complaints in the past about terrible airbnb hosts, but this seems to me to be clearly motivated to bring more money into AirBNB at the expense of the hosts and neighbors. Just like Paypal made conscious decisions to ignore customer fraud and hold sellers liable for everything, now AirBNB is trying to squeeze more out of the hosts by supporting and enabling bad behavior by guests, removing options for hosts to control or respond to terrible customers. I stopped using AirBNB several years ago, but then I noticed that hotels have copied AirBNB's shitty policies, like the price doubling on the last page due to unexpected fees. They're enshitifying the whole hospitality industry.
Disallowing potential spying on guests and requiring disclosure just sounds sane. Nobody should be monitored without their knowledge.
(AirBnB has lots of other problems, but "hotels" alone are not a complete replacement for what it provides.)
My point is, commercial rentals exist because of the problems AirBnB are having. They're trying to "disrupt" the industry by not providing the protections and safeguards to save money, and basically running into all of the problems that led to the commercial rental industry in the first place.
Their innovation is collecting a fee while pushing the dirty work off to unsophisticated 3rd party property owners.
Then the rich get richer and consolidate more properties under their companies, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Think of people who had been making sacrifices so they could save up to purchase something, just to be outbid by collective groups of people just purchasing property to rent them out. There's no competing.
this happened very, very quickly in some markets.. +10 years ago
I wonder if nuisance laws can be used against the host if repeated violations are coming from the same property, even if the renter is different.
Back to the topic - removing listings isn’t a sufficient enough punishment imho. And how would you even prove it from the guests side? Take a picture I suppose? But how do you stop bad actors?
Not sure what the correct solution is. Someone who wants to spy can purchase a spy camera which is very abundant these days.
Now it's commoditized and a business, and the quirky and cheap options are few and far between.
Part of the degradation is both the company, the sellers, and the buyers - back in the very beginning it wasn't well known and most of the customers were well behaved - I'm not sure that's entirely the case now, as the customer base has grown.
One luggage, no permanent home, been fifteen years.
I used to use AirBnB all the time.
They gradually become more and more, well, "large company".
Governments gradually made AirBnB illegal or effectively illegal, largely or wholly killing off AirBnB in given cities, or countries.
For example, it used to be about impossible to get into Amsterdam, because of rent control and renting regulations; no supply of places to let. Then AirBnB came along, and everyone and their dog let places on AirBnB. You could get in, and at a good price. Then AirBnB was essentially banned, and now you can't get into Amsterdam.
It was always that there were a lot of people offering places who didn't know how to price what they had; so you'd see a lot of properties, but a lot were crazy money. Still, if there were enough, there would be enough places at sane prices you'd get somewhere.
These days, I still look at AirBnB, but I see that their fees have continually risen over time, and are now like 10% or 15%, and there's just no content. I was in Paris last couple of months. There was nothing viable on AirBnB, unless you wanted to pay several thousand a month. There was one what I concluded was a scam, a very dodgy letting agency, who had lots of apartments, all with no ratings, but very bad reviews on-line. I think they were continually deleting and remaking their lets on AirBnB, to get rid of negative reviews.
Finally, AirBnB itself, regarding "large company", became unreliable as a service, in that I never knew, when I came to us it, if log-in would still work.
I recall the first time log-in failed for no obvious reason, and the and the only option was "email support and we'll contact you in a few days" - and I was looking to move in about two weeks time.
After that, I put up my own HTTPS proxy, which I now use whenever I use AirBnB, to avoid AirBnB suspending my account for a few days, until support get back to me.
I also recall one episode about ten years ago where I had to phone support. It was a three hour long screaming nightmare of hell and madness.
So - fees are now rather high, support don't bother - anything but support - I had to backdoor my own net traffic to use the service, no viable apartments in most locations.
It was great, but now it's really not.
The one and critical thing AirBnB got right was building into their platform the expectation owners would offer discounts for stays over a week, or over a month.
I don't see this on other platforms, and it makes pricing on other platforms crazy. If I come and stay for three months, I expect a discount for giving full occupancy over that time. If you don't offer that, you're off the menu.
...because back then they were dealing with a single homeowner, where there was a certain level of mutual respect.
Once "Airbnb host" became synonymous with party houses, cleaning fees and multi-unit short term rental empires, that changed.
I think it depends. For relatively short stays of one or two people, a hotel is nearly always a better deal in my opinion (for short stays the cleaning fee alone can be a big percentage of the total price).
But for week or longer stays with a family or larger, they usually come out ahead given multiple bedrooms and the fact that the cleaning fee is amortized over more nights (not to mention access to a kitchen can save a ton of money). In this segment, though, they're really no different from VRBO or a host of other vacation rental providers that have been around for a long time.
But for most singles or couples traveling, predictability and lack of issues is pretty much the priority. That's not to say I only stay in chain hotels--I've stayed in plenty of B&Bs and small inns--but I don't like rolling the dice on that aspect of my travel more than I need to.
For me it has absolutely nothing to do with being cheaper, but simply hotels generally don't cater for families. I have an under 10, and either I go to bed by 9 because that's when they want to go to bed, or I make the stay up and we all have a really shitty time as they are too exhausted to enjoy it.
Two rooms with an adjoining door would work, but most hotels don't have this. AirBNB is simply the only option.
Also, at the Tokyo AirBnB, once I got there I found a sign in the bathroom that essentially told me AirBnB wasn’t allowed in the building, so if anyone asked who I was, I had to lie and give the prepared backstory. I’ve never had to lie to skirt the law/rules when staying at a hotel.
My next trip I’m staying in a hotel, and it has a kitchen as well (with a sink and range), so I can go to the store and prepare food if I want. It’s not 1,000sqft, but how much space do I really need for a couple weeks? My goal is to get out and do things, not stay inside the whole time. I’ve also had many hotels with a fridge and a microwave. The fridge might not be full size, but again, for a week or two, how much space does a person really need?
Most Hyatt Places didn’t have washer and dryers onsite. We had to either Uber to take our clothes or use a wash and fold delivery service.
The rest of the places did.
The rooms are usually around 400 square feet.
Homewood Suites and Home2Suites have dishwashers and full refrigerators. Home2Suites you have to ask for a “burner”
I still, can not wrap my head around this. The idea behind airbnb was to rent out unused parts of your house. You STILL can not do this. Motel 6 is cheaper all day everyday. I will keep giving my $80 to Motel 6, but, I KNOW there is someone out there that has a room and needs $80. The original problem still exists. I can't pay $120 + $30 in cleaning fees, plus do your house chores Sarah.
One bad guest who upsets the other residents and leaves the property in bad condition will sap your earnings and throw off your life. Airbnb might eventually reimburse you for damage, but there’s still your time and aggravation.
Also any household maintenance issue, like an internet outage or finicky toilet or a microwave on the fritz becomes an emergency if it’s an amenity you promised to a guest. Even realizing the guest towels are getting a little worn might be a cause for panic. Motel 6 has a handyman on call, maybe the owner or a relative, and can take a room out of rotation if they’re not booked solid, but Joe Airbnb is stuck begging a plumber to come out on short notice or rushing to Target before check in time.
Airbnb raised rents to to point where either people have no space or those spare rooms are filled with longish-term tenants, at lower void rates. Or their children had to move back in because all the inner city housing is now AirBnbs.
Chances of finding a camera in a hotel room are near zero while at Airbnb you have no idea what kind of pervert the renter is. At this point prices for Airbnb have rissen so high why not get a hotel?
It's like we don't learn at all from history or just like to forget so we can make an extra buck.
It's becoming common now to upload guests' personal info into cloud property management systems, and set up things like wifi with services that offer a discount if you provide guest info. It's gross and when I complain about it to AirBnB they do nothing.
And it wasn't a mistake as the host asked you to sign the ledger when you arrived.
The GDPR makes this illegal.
In fact, unnecessary personal information is now a liability, not an asset. Thankfully.
I’ve never used the service, because I prefer real beds cleaned as required by the local health department.
Anyway, what Airbnb should really ban is hosts charging a mandatory cleaning fee when also requiring their guests to do the cleaning.
We just stayed at one this weekend, and like almost all our previous bookings, the host asked us to:
- Take off all bedding and towels and start a load of laundry
- Do all the dishes and start the dishwasher (but required to hand-wash some items)
- Collect and take out all the trash to the curb
- Clean the grill/stove/oven
And we still had to pay a $200 cleaning fee when booking the place. A hotel would never require this of us or charge us extra.
That might be easy to game either way. Hosts can claim they didn’t keep tabs, just had a hunch to come over and check; and guests can claim the camera in the yard could see some part of the interior through a window and ask for a refund.
One interesting effect is that now hosts with hidden cameras can't offer the footage as proof during disputes.
Use case of hotels might be bigger, but it is a highly contended market. Airbnb has a huge chunk of a smaller market.
Also, the margins are much better on hosting a website than building hotels and paying thousands of service employees.
This is how you do it. Come in as a "disruptor," ignore all the rules the establishment has already learned the hard way, and make shitloads of money for as long as you can without pesky old oversight or constraints.
Eventually, you wind up with the same rules the establishment had, if not more. Your catalog gets clogged with cottage enterprises that game your algorithms to steal your customer equity. While you're neck-deep in customer complaints and bad press, you're reduced to a clearinghouse for someone else's business -- little more than a classified ad service. You lose, your customers lose, and -- unless, god forbid, they get organized -- your original suppliers lose. Everyone loses except the scalpers and the scammers. Except now you've run out the competition, and consumers have little other choice.
In this example, why use AirBnB when all you get is either a Sonder that is more hassle and no better than a hotel, one of a dozen apartments leased by the same weirdo, a retirement-home-in-waiting in a bland suburb, or a sketchy individual's greasy rathole?
In the end, welcome to niche status. You do actually have a unique product (in this case, places for big groups to stay for several days), but the market for that isn't big enough for perpetual "growth," so you're on track to be acquired by a hedge fund, rolled together with your former competitors, soaked with debt, and then put out to pasture. But your founders are long gone, booking corporate speaking engagements between yacht voyages. Some "vice president" decides your labor pool stays cheapest if you disincentivize things like career development. Eventually everything is parceled out altogether. What's left of the value of your brand gets smeared over commodities. "Welcome to AirBnB, powered by Motel 6 (an SV Capital Partners, LLC experience)."
Checking for cameras seems like a smart move no matter what their policy is. You just never know.
I'm struggling to find it, but I read an article a few months ago where a team placed about 30 cameras hidden in a home and tried to find them all. Most methods found low single digits. Even the best ("an advanced lens detector" for $400) brought the total up to fewer than 20.
Really wish I could find that because now all I'm finding is dogshit articles claiming it's easy.
edit: found, it was from CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/22/how-to-find-a-hidden-camera-...
You can also check what devices are connected to the wifi but there's no guarantee they don't have a second network just for the cameras which you can't access.
I'm astounded you found it understandable.
If I'm renting rooms, I certainly don't expect the landlord to be in the business of filming myself or family, especially as we may well be walking around sans clothing. Not only is this rather illegal, I suggest plenty of people would find themselves responding to the landlord rather violently in such a situation. And I would not blame them.
Nothing an ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel on top of said thermostat couldn’t resolve.
I will gladly take a smaller property in exchange for dealing with people that have actual hospitality training, daily room cleaning, room service, etc. Hotels are just a nicer experience. I don't want to spend my vacation cleaning the room or worrying about a "host."
>> Hosts can’t use outdoor cams to keep tabs on indoor spaces, either, nor can they use them in “certain outdoor areas where there’s a great expectation of privacy,” such as an outdoor shower or sauna.
There are certainly hosts who would instantly put a camera in the tree looking in the windows.
They'll still do it, but they can't use the pictures without incriminating themselves.
The arms race continues, but slightly better for guests.
So I did it now!
Will this improve guest privacy? No, hidden cameras are too difficult to detect and too easy to install.
Will this prevent AirBNBs becoming party houses/apartments in residential areas? No, obviously not, since that's apparently already banned.
Will this collect commercial taxes from investment property owners illegally renting out AirBNBs in residential zones? Of course not.
Et cetera.
Also, I am not sure why you are conflating AirBnB’s authority with a local government - or course AirBnB won’t address the issues you cite in your last paragraphs as that is not their job and to think it should be is totally ridiculous. We have local and state governance to pass laws regulating behavior that is not good for society at large. AirBnB’s job is to generate value for shareholders all while operating within those bounds.
1. Not allow Airbnbs in residential areas
2. Force each Airbnb host to list the address
You know, like hotels
The dice roll is way better. Even the bad ones once in a while are at least different and fun to mock.
It's funny how almost the whole families have the same gut response to stuff like that. Look at something and what is the most immediate natural reaction to an idea or the look of a thing. And some other family might all have the same some other natural reaction.
Like one person finds gold attractive and another finds it gawdy, and so do their whole family & friends groups.
For me, hotels are only good for work. That's the only time the predictability matters. I avoid scheduling as much as possible on vacation. There are events of course but I don't try to tetris pack the days.
But for a few days or a week at a customer, then a hotel just something I need like a highway rest stop bathroom.
Same happened with crypto, I feel, vs banks and stocks. The latter is regulated and saturated, and crypto is a wild west. So every scam is new again.
Houses and apartments come with kitchens and back yards and balconies. Even in 2024, hotel rooms are miniscule and that stupid fridge is, at worst filled with 20 dollar boxes of cookies and liquor samples, and at best too small to fit a large bottle of water in.
I've grown to dislike Airbnb as a customer, but what you said is one-sided, and dismisses the disruption of the hotel model in a digital nomad age.
I've actually be thinking about Airbnb for a fairly extended stay at one point. On the one hand, it seems like the right solution. On the other hand, it's a big commitment for essentially an unknown quantity.
Of course I’d had plenty of experience of self catered accommodation on holiday - sometimes purpose built but mostly normal cottages that were simply rented out.
Airbnb and similar systems just reduced the friction of finding and transacting self catered accommodation, and the increasing trend for city breaks delivered a growing market.
Also I only took a airbnb once in my life.
Anybody who takes airbnbs regularly has for sure slept on somebody else's dried body fluids.
Source: worked at a hotel.
And. I guess I'm not alone in preferring apartments. (And nowadays with lockboxes and WhatsApp-savvy rentors/lessors the lack of a reception desk is not a problem.)
People should still be able to rent out their homes if they want.
People did the same thing on eBay by making the items almost free but the shipping expensive, until they fixed the eBay interface, e.g. by letting you sort by price + shipping and showing shipping fees before you click.
There’s a longer story to this: eBay used to exempt shipping fees from its commissions.
So sellers would be screwing eBay and, being an efficient market, as it often is on eBay, the savings would be passed onto the buyer.
I’d sell games for 1 cent with $10 shipping (cost to me: ~$2) and put the shipping cost in the title for clarity. If you didn’t like it, fine, pay more to buy from someone else.
Now they charge it on the whole purchase, which sucks when they take a ~15% commission on sales taxes and shipping and sellers can’t easily tack on a premium to these. So they get lower net proceeds when selling to someone that has high sales taxes or shipping fees.
This really discourages sellers from shipping internationally where those costs are higher.
Now that eBay charges percentage fees for “promoting” your item and getting visibility, bulk sellers will often post the exact same item, unpromoted, for less if you can be bothered to go through their “other items for sale”.
Have seen some wild examples where a seller sold one item at very different prices. They must have had items with 50% promotion fees, 25%, 5% and 0% (evidently passed onto the customer through different pricing) to capture the whole market.
The most consumer friendly thing would be for AirBnB to just explicitly have a fixed "stay" fee and a per-day fee.
That said, AirBnB's site shows the total cost for a stay when browsing, so I don't really see this as particularly deceptive. I don't care how the host itemizes the bill as long as I know what I'm paying when selecting a place.
Airbnb's UI needs to guide prospective guests toward specifying what they are looking for so that prices (and price sorting) actually meets their expectations. If you search for a specific date range with # of guests, pets, etc., the sort order needs to be on all-in costs, not daily cost. Maybe they could offer pre-baked "personas" - e.g., I am looking for a hotel alternative vs I am looking for a unique experience.
There are no good guys here.
Idk in the US but I know nobody who still use eBay for anything, I don’t know how they are still alive.
But, as another commenter said, they can be used as a way to encourage longer stays, as with most places you only pay a single cleaning fee regardless of the length of your stay. But, again, it's just a fact that these rentals are usually just cleaned between guests (as opposed to a hotel when cleaning is done daily so it can be rolled into the nightly rate).
I’ve found high cleaning fees to sometimes be an intentional discouragement to shorter bookings, but sometimes I’ve paid it because it was still the best option and I like that they maintained the option.
Sucks that the only way to push on fixed costs (it’s not just cleaning) is via the cleaning fee.
For example, I found one that wanted almost $1000 as a deposit, and had a whole bunch of rules by which they would charge you extra. Not cleaning dishes, or not well enough would ding you $12 per item! Not putting the keys back in the lockbox on time would be $28/h. There was even a db meter that supposedly didn't record audio. The issue is where is the line? What do they consider clean a dish "well enough"? What is the db limit? Can I see the meter?
I just avoided it as it sounded too irritating to deal with and with the deposit outside of airbnb there is no room for argument.
Just checked my account, we stayed at 167 places in the last 5 years.
I remember having a request to run a washing machine once - and sure thing I did. It's just a push of a button, not like I'm doing laundry by hand, and if a couple minutes of my time (that otherwise would be spent circling around the place and quadruple-checking if I packed everything I've brought with me) saves someone half an hour then I'm happy for a quick and meaningful distraction. As for the dishes and kitchen utensils - some hosts ask, some don't, but I wouldn't leave them dirty either way, that's just common sense and basic respect to the property.
Don't remember seeing any outrageous cleaning fees - although I haven't really bothered to check the fee structure, all I care about is the grand total and whenever it fits my budget - the rest is simply irrelevant to me. Airbnb used to suck about not showing the total amount right away (which led to this cleaning fee fiasco), but I believe it's long fixed.
Then, I typically spend about a week's worth of evenings carefully going over the listings, multiple times. Airbnb's search is mostly a joke, one can only find a decent place by setting only the most basic filters then methodically going through the listings checking if they're accurate, have a decent number of photos (listing descriptions are useless, have to actually see the kitchen, shower and "dedicated workspace"), favorable reviews, no obvious red flags, checking surroundings on the maps and so on.
Either way, for the long-term stays a good Airbnb house or apartment beats a hotel (YMMV). And ever for the shorter-term (1-2 week) stays I always checked the hotels and always ended up picking an Airbnb because it was a more attractive option.
It's a terrible experience. last 2 trips I've gone on I've ended up in hotels because all of the airbnb's had cleaning fees close to the nightly rate and an actual chore list for check out.
no thanks.
I ask guests to:
* Strip the beds (otherwise, I find that people re-make beds and it's hard to tell if they have been slept in), * Load and start the dishwasher (the dishwasher takes 4 hrs, and the cleaners travel to my remote house, and I want to make sure they can finish in about that time) * Take the trash down to the garage (to avoid ants)
I pay a neighborhood kid to take the trash bins from the garage to the street on trash day.
I successfully manage my place remotely (3hrs away) via a good cleaner and home automation (detailed here: https://www.linquist.com/airbnb/automation). 4.99 stars, superhost.
It’s really simple to manage - price it in.
Our nightly rate is our nightly rate is our nightly rate. We have a two night minimum on our city property, so it doesn’t end up astronomical - and when we have single nights spare we open them up at a higher price point. On the other property, we have a one week minimum, as it’s in the countryside, larger, and cleaning costs more.
We also price in stuff like welcome champagne, tea, coffee, cooking supplies, firewood, you name it - we give our guests everything they would have at home, and enough to throw together a meal on their first evening if they get in late.
Our margin is >50% on both.
Price it in.
That is why any half decent hotel has protocol to always change all the linens anytime someone rents a room.
“ But an unreasonable task is like strip the bed…”
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-ceo-guests-shouldnt-ha...
But everything else seems reasonable. If a host left a note explaining the reasoning behind the dishwasher and the trash, I would understand completely.
What YOU pay for your cleaners is up to you.
Stop nickel and dimming your customers - if you charge a cleaning fee then there's zero moral rights in my mind that you have to ask customers to also clean.
Just up the nightly rates and build it in.
When's the last time you stayed at a Hotel and found you got hit with a 'Room Cleaning" fee?
What's next - a fee for allowing Heating to be used? A fee to allow water? Heavens above.
EMF meters(like in the airplane to spot mobiles) are quite cheap and if you find an active one, you can probably sue the host, but at least reporting should have some effect, even though no instaban.
"If a guest reports the presence of an indoor camera after that, Airbnb says it will investigate and that it could remove the host’s listing or account as a result."
I do think that many hosts are scared of loosing the income, so they will comply.
In a house with a bunch of smart meters/appliances, bluetooth devices, a router, indoor electrical wiring, nearby power lines, cell signals, AM/FM radio, etc wouldn't the house be constantly flooded with EMF radiation pretty much everywhere?
What are you referring to here?
Might pay $75/night for it but to need to do any cleaning
If I were renting a holiday cottage in the UK (airbnb or otherwise), I'd expect to do the washing up and take our rubbish, and possibly strip the beds. I wouldn't expect to clean ovens or put laundry on.
Staying in Finland recently we had to make our beds at the start - no idea if that is normal there but wouldn't expect that in the UK unless you were at a youth hostel.
I assuming the cleaning feel covers mopping, hoovering, cleaning bathrooms, making up beds with fresh laundry. Some places do feel like they overcharge nonetheless for the number of hours required and I presume that it is more an overhead person stay charged to discourage short stays.
You might as well say that “laws only apply to law-abiding people.” That’s not a reason to not have laws.
The only way things will change is if all of use refuse to keep giving them our money.
I agree that doing laundry is a bit onerous in clearly dedicated rentals, but in my experience those tend to have fewer requirements and tend to not care if you miss a couple steps unless you trash the place.
There is a rating system for guests, and losing "social credit" will make using the platform harder.
This implied threat makes people "behave", with both benefits (the worst actors will be filtered out and can't repeatedly impose the cost of their actions on society) and drawbacks (feeling pressured to always give 120%, fear of bad ratings, getting excluded through no fault of your own if you just get unlucky).
The cleaning fee is for deeper stuff like vacuuming, scrubbing the sink, toilets, etc... And yeah I think it also captures the one-time effort of the "turnover", where the host has to do the laundry, remake the beds, and a bunch of small things you might not notice.
I also hated it when the cleaning fee wasn't added until the end, which was very bait-and-switch-y. But as long as it's upfront it's ok.
It would be nice if more hosts just offered rooms though. If you don't think of it as a hotel, then it doesn't need that deep clean and doesn't need the cleaning fee. I just want a quick place to crash for a night sometimes...
And it varies from market to market what's the norm. For instance for cabins in Norway, the norm for a long time was that the renter brought their own bedding and cleaned everything, mopped the floor etc before leaving. Long before airbnb was a thing.
Should an American company decide that this Norwegian way of doing it is no longer ok..?
It still probably helps reduce surveillance a fair bit:
- honest host who currently disclosed cameras will stop
- dishonest hosts who are worried about getting caught will stop (most aren’t tech savvy enough to hide cameras, catching them isn’t hard, and they don’t want to risk getting kicked off platform)
- really dishonest hosts who hide cameras will get kicked off platform if caught (and potential civil/criminal cases)
Not perfect but a good move and should help.
cctv cameras in non public places and with no oversight (including video doorbells etc) are a cancer on society
I've seen this lots but I've never actually done any of the things they ask me to. Bringing out the garbage? Sure, but only if it's overflowing while I'm there. I will start the dishwasher. We've also never received a bad review so I think at least where we stayed, while those things are explained in their handbook or wherever there's no downside to just not doing them.
You know about the cleaning fees at booking, but not necessarily the "rules" about cleaning.
Yet you benefited from coming into a home that, presumably, had all of its floors vaccuumed, its kitchen and bathroom surfaces sanititized, its linens folded and/or readied, etc. Whether it was the host or a service, somebody followed up behind you and likely spent at least several hours preparing the place for the next guest. And instead of it being bundled into your daily room rate like in a hotel, since it's only being done once per stay, it was applied as a per-stay cleaning fee. That's eminently fair.
There are about a thousand of things to complain loundly about with AirBnB and countless things in life more broadly -- being asked to tidy up a little bit or to pay a per-stay fee to cover cleaning? Not really a compelling one.
But if a guest is tidy, then the cleaning fee should be nothing.
The hard part is that you need to reserve and pay for a cleaning crew as if it was always a disaster.
Yet hotels manage this fine - it's just baked into the price.
I don't have a problem paying a cleaning fee. I just don't want to pay the fee AND be required to do 90% of the cleaning myself.
I'm happy to put the dishes in and then start the dishwasher. I'm not going to wait around for it to finish and then put them away. I'm happy to pile the used towels and bedding in a single spot, but I'm not going to do the laundry. I'll pick up any trash and wipe down the kitchen, but I'm not going to take out the trash or do a deep clean of the kitchen. Etc.
I regularly see $300 cleaning fees.
And when I've had limited options and paid those cleaning fees, I think "I'd have fired my housecleaners if this was what I was getting for my money, every week, sometimes twice a week".
Let's be brutally honest - the hosts using professional cleaners are only paying for an hour or two. And oftentimes, I expect that their "cleaners" are the host's kids being handed a tub of sanitizing wipes.
If it is $200 then that should cover 10 man hours of cleaning in a developed country.
I had similar issues as a guest on Airbnb, paid a cleaning fee $100+ and then had complaints that I left food in the fridge (like normal a pack of milk or something not growing new lifeforms) and couch pillow on the floor. They sent photos to shove my nose into it. And it was a tiny studio not a big mansion with much area to cover
I quit Airbnb 2-3 years ago and am happy without
- Group get-aways where the point is being together at the place, not seeing the sights of whatever area you’re in.
- Families traveling, especially when not staying in a city core
- Trial runs at living in a place
- Areas poorly served by decent hotels
They’re bad for lots of other scenarios.
[edit] oh and the less time you’re staying the worse they tend to be—stuff like cleaning fees and having to tidy up before leaving really suck if you only stayed for a night or two, but aren’t a big deal if you’re there for a week.
The cleaners used this as an excuse to scam the owner who lived 8hs away and saw the property every 6 months to tell them we had trashed the place and that they had to work 6hs. They took up close pictures of trash… (that was outside in the trash can btw) and claimed we just left it everywhere. Took an up close picture of a crumb on the floor. Am I supposed to vacuum the whole place?
If you’re a couple it’s easy to track everything and have a strong case. With friends you have to start questioning your friends to see if any of these claims are true. I don’t go in their rooms to check, so I have to take their word for it.
Very much not worth it. Not to mention the quasi legal battle with Airbnb that is a pandora box and for 6 weeks or more you are unsure of what’s going on, the host trashes yours and all your friends profiles, and they expect you to “pay for damages”.
All this because they estimate the minimum possible time for their cleaners and if they go over the 15min they booked (at a rate that is only matched by HP ink) they pass the charges to you.
Screw that. Never again. We’ve been staying at hotels with much better amenities for the money and actually REST. Checkout is at 10? I just leave. I don’t have to wake up at 7 to do dishes and bed sheets and trash and sweep and look for crumbs and take pictures to cover my ass later.
By biggest complaint though is that the cleaning fee is priced for groups and families. I'm paying $60 for someone to come and arrange the pillows at worst.
And how are the neighbours going to feel about your house party in their residential area? You can't call this model "amazing" for all concerned. Don't say that this doesn't happen, it really does. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39669347
I'd guess that post-pandemic they just don't have enough staff to get all the rooms done so they prioritize rooms where there will be a new guest checking in.
Honestly, it's fine. It's not like I wash my towels or my sheets daily at home. To the degree the pandemic was a forcing function to think about what labor people actually cared about, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
I'm fine with it; I don't want someone remaking the bed so I have to loosen all the tight sheets before I use it.
It would also be very unusual for me to have enough trash that it needs emptying, or use enough toilet paper that it runs out, but I guess others might eat particular take-away food which could account for both...
Nowadays, it really only makes sense if you're renting as a group. Small, affordable Airbnbs just don't exist anymore. Airbnb knows this - just look at their new ad campaign. Not sure if that was inevitable as the company scaled, or if they've just found that they can milk more money out of larger rentals.
All of this being said, Airbnb-esque services exist that offer small apartments at competitive rates. I stayed in one in Detroit for a few days, and it was pretty nice. I think it was called Mint Something. No cameras, either.
/s
But I don't read that as what the above commenter was complaining about.
Extended Stay America is an exception to this, they own all of their real estate.
Also, unrealized gains in real estate would be priced similarly by investors for both Hyatt and Airbnb, so that would not make a difference to P/E.
I was having a discussion not that long ago about how a house that's paid off actually costs a lot of money.
They stay too long, and now they're a tenant rather than a guest - and you can't evict them.
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/airbnb-tenant-squatter...
It is also trivial to look at a bed and see if the sheets have been cleaned even if the bed was made -- hair shows up easily if not other stains.
If you have a business that makes $1/year after costs and taxes and are selling it for $20, your P/E is 20.
The only method I can think of that might work is one of those media sniffing dogs the cops have, which is super impractical obviously.
I have not found this to be the case at all. Getting a suite with a kitchen usually involves paying a large premium to a regular hotel room.
The biggest chains have these sub-brands in the space, based off three minutes of googling/wikiing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residence_Inn_by_Marriott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staybridge_Suites
https://www.hyatt.com/development/ourbrands/hyatthouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homewood_Suites_by_Hilton
I never stayed at one, so can't comment how accurate the OP was re/price.
And if there's not (as often), I at least gather all the trash together and make that task as easy as possible for whoever's stuck with the thankless job of cleaning up after me.
It's wild and disheartening that people here feel justified in not doing basic tidying of whatever mess they made when traveling or that it's some big demand of a host to ask them to.
There's a Hyatt House I pass by sometimes right next to the Shibuya crossing; though I'm guessing that one definitely does not have the price advantage.
Refund would always be minus postage costs, so you'd get 1 cent back for your $10.01 purchase when returning (i.e. no point)
Been a while since it came up for me (always sold stuff as “final sale” and if I avoid buying fragile stuff). Once had a hard time repaying a buyer that returned an item where I didn’t describe it correctly (screw you apple for having nearly identical LCDs but with slightly different camera cable lengths)
There was a lot of that too. I’m sure it’s sometimes emotional: sellers wouldn’t want to “subsidize” shipping, so they’d fix the shipping fee to what the max could be for anywhere in the country.
What grinds me as an international buyer is when sellers offer “free” shipping domestically, but don’t subsidize int’l shipping by the same dollar amount. Though there can be other time costs for int’l shipping. It depends.
I've stayed with a couple small competitors to Airbnb, though. Mint House was a good one, with solid rates and a nice living space.
I'll be trying Vrbo for my bachelor party next month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-tel
> K-tel was founded by Philip Kives,[4] a demonstration salesman from Oungre, Saskatchewan.[5][6] Kives had worked at a number of jobs as a young man, including selling cookware door-to-door and in a department store, and as a pitch-man on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Agree that it sucks in denser housing outside tourist areas. I’m sympathetic when local governments outlaw short term rentals.
Unfortunately the latter is becoming increasingly popular and harder and harder to avoid. I usually try to book places where it's a large house and they rent out the top floor or something.
That way if there are any problems, the owner is right there to help and it's easier to negotiate the cash deals.
It's generally written somewhere, but on aggregation sites like hotels.com and booking.com it seems the hotel can't alter the advertised price directly.
Example: https://www.hotels.com/ho119759/maritim-hotel-koln-cologne-g...
> A city tax is imposed by the city of Cologne. Business travellers with proof of business-related travel are exempt from this tax. For more details, please contact the property using the information on the reservation confirmation received after booking.
> An effective city/local tax rate of 5.00 per cent will be charged
This is the key. You're valuing your time at nothing. Which is fine, if it works for you.
It doesn't work for me. I want to do a quick search, using the basic parameters, and to be able to trust my search without going full CSI.
Increasingly, with Airbnb (also booking.com, also eBay, and now even Amazon), the results of a quick search cannot be trusted. In the case of Airbnb, hotels offer a "more reliable" alternative for the busy person.
It’s not good at all, but I’m not aware about any alternatives that can provide equally good results.
Having a good stay that I will enjoy is what I value of my time against. If I’m going to spend 2 months somewhere, I think spending a week isn’t worse than hating something every day for those two months.
eBay is an undertold story in failure (to innovate).
For sure, still a going concern, but odd of such a large company taking the Craigslist approach of “let’s stay small and just do enough to keep it working comfortably for all of us”
eBay practically invented online shopping at scale and had a huge head start but failed to maintain marketshare.
It’s still the catch-all for products that don’t fit in other marketplaces. For me, it’s a place to buy a lot of Amazon items but at a lower price (at some convenience cost). Or niche/used items. Amazon has overly regionalized (sometimes I can get items in Canada from Amazon.com cheaper than amazon.ca for example), while eBay is still a generally global interface.
Hotels have cleaning "scale" on their side. I'm also operating a large home with a full kitchen, balcony, garage, etc. 8 people can comfortably stay. It ends up being a LOT cheaper AND more comfortable than a hotel for 6-8 people.
Depends how much you want to risk a guest sleeping in dirty linens. Maybe you have very trustworthy people you can rely on to accurately gauge if a bed has been used or not, maybe your guests do not mind the risk either in exchange for cost/environmental savings.
I prefer the most foolproof option when it comes to sleeping in between linens or using towels on my body.
"parking space included" - show up, no parking
"wifi included" - show up, wifi is sitting next to window and stealing from neighbor
listed on quiet road - after booking address is changed to unit on busy road
heater is so loud it sounds like a vacuum cleaner making getting any sleep hard
I no longer use AirBnB period. Hotels have extra rooms, reception, cleaning, etc. I'm not saying hotels are perfect but at least for me, the positive experience rate is 90% vs AirBnB which is 50%
AirBnb also lost the price wars, at least as the places I've looked.
For normal people, they are not aware of this different form of rented lodging and if you’re hosting a big family vacation or a retreat, Airbnb is not a bad option.
It’s the bottom of the Airbnb market that is completely screwed up.
Hotels have a star rating so that I never go to a two-star hotel expecting a four-star experience. These star ratings are done independently, and I don't trust Airbnb to provide objectivity when the owners are going to strongly push back against an "unfair" rating, and Airbnb will capitulate especially for superhosts and others who have influence.
Sometimes I’ve just bought individual items from several sellers as a workaround.
I wish users could order stuff by sea for a discount. Sometimes I’m buying camping or sports stuff for another season and don’t need it coming airmail. Arriving months later can actually be beneficial. But I understand, too many people will lose their minds.
I'm more annoyed by 90% of the search results disappearing when I sort by anything other than "best match".
Dunno what kind of rules exist on the host side to block bookings under a certain rating. I know eBay’s are garbage because they’re not in the business of blocking sales.
As long as these expectations are spelled out before booking, it's not a scam and completely fine. If a renter doesn't like it, just don't book.
I'd not be surprised to read that Air BnB are going to curtail this behavior next.
The only reason you're doing this is to game the system. Be honest and charge more.
I had a co-worker who really hated people coming into her room. I think we were in Japan and she had a Do Not Disturb sign up and she got really pissed when a maid came in and made up her room anyway.
So in other words, even 10 years ago she was charging roughly $75/hr, which is much more than the $20/hr that grandparent was citing.
The entitlement is through the roof, when people pretend to run a business refusing to do any work themselves and refusing to hire people. As long as there are clients willing to use AirBnB and pay cleaning fees, sure. But it is a scam and not much more, as another poster pointed out.
Two people spent roughly 2 hrs cleaning, so 4 hours of labor total + supplies. I think that's reasonable, but I wouldn't hire them for after every single short stay if I ran an Airbnb.
$165.
When they deep clean? $250.
Obviously, if no sheets are removed, they would all be cleaned.
I think Airbnb has become worse as these types of properties have become common on the platform. The best experiences on Airbnb are, and have always been, people's personally owned homes.
Where would that be?
Earlier, you might have to write letters. I remember my mum describing doing this when she travelled to the Eastern Bloc — she had to write letters to the tourist office, then follow up by letter to make the booking. It might have been necessary to write in German or Russian.
Popular tourist destinations? Travel agents or some snooping around could find them. Ranch rentals? Ski resorts would know where they were, or others.
But nothing for something similar in Bakersfield (where nobody goes willingly).
Also the cleaning crew is already on site. People are always checking out and checking in. The crew just pushes their cart to the next room instead of driving across town, packing and unpacking all of their stuff, and making sure to hit a precise time window between checkout and checkin.
I used to dream about owning a vacation home, but my parents bought a beach house about 15 years ago. They'd rent it peak season, but keep it for family use on the shoulders through winter. It was fun for a few years, but eventually the constant upkeep and expense wore them down and they sold it. Renters can be real animals - constant stream of broken furniture, stolen kitchenware and decorations, and just plain weird stuff like broken bathroom mirrors. Really opened my eyes, at least to a money-making rental property.
Put dishes in the dishwasher and start. Strip the beds. Pick up trash, quick counter wipe down.
Only difference is the trash which could just be an issue if the host isn't coming for a little while.
These should all be common sense. I don't think I've ever been asked for much more than that. Cleaning fee is for deep clean and general turnover. Maybe it should just be called the "flat-fee" though.
Hotels are literally factories for this. The fixed effort per stay is much different in a home.
My checkout list is clearly defined in my listing, which is doing great based on my ratings and bookings. The cleaning fee is not hidden.
I would re-evaluate if I were not successful.
And sure, your listing may be doing “great” now, but what if Airbnb change the rules as they may start looking at doing?
Sounds to me that your model may not be sustainable in the medium to long term. Life’s full of “we did like gangbusters last year until…”
But they might have gotten less paranoid about it(since nothing ever happened?). Chances of bad interference are probably very low.
Enough flying phones would cause a significant performance degradation. The issue of handling fast switching was solved, but any "because security" or "because safety" laws tend to stay for a long time.
> There is another reason sometimes cited too for the early introduction of mobile phone restrictions, and it is related to the potential impact on cellular ground equipment.
> A mobile device operating at an altitude, and moving at speed, can see multiple cell towers at the same time. This will block frequencies used by these towers, with much more activity than they were designed to handle from ground-based devices. In the US, the ban on electronic devices in flight was initially put in place by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), not the FAA, for this reason.
https://www.faa.gov/travelers/fly_safe/information
> The FCC and FAA ban cell phones for airborne use because its signals could interfere with critical aircraft instruments. Devices must be used in airplane mode or with the cellular connection disabled. You may use the WiFi connection on your device if the plane has an installed WiFi system and the airline allows its use.
You'll note the FCC in there. While the aircraft instrumentation is the most immediate "reason for people to do this" that people can identify, disrupting ground communications is also there. Unfortunately, people are not that likely to do it based on "you'll inconvenience people using the cell phone towers that you fly over."
This change, affecting international bookers, will make it more expensive to rent, thus potentially affecting a hosts bottom line.
This may not affect you, but it will affect others.
And remember, as a host, you’re not the customer.
The person booking is the customer.
You? You’re just a supplier.
And do.
As evidenced by the recent changes.
The point is, you should either charge cleaning costs and not require the customer to do anything other than leave it in a “used” state - or - not charge cleaning costs but require the customer at least does some basic cleaning.
Charging and also requiring customers to clean is unethical in my book.
Why do you not do that?
What is your rationale for charging it separately?
But to answer your question - because it is a fixed cost per stay.
If you stay two nights @ $250/night, you'll pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so that would be $350 night if I were to "build cleaning in") If you stay 6 nights @ $250/night, you'll still only pay an additional $200 cleaning fee (so it would be $283/night if were to "build cleaning in").
Airbnb doesn't allow me to charge a different $ based on the number of nights stayed. But they are showing an all-inclusive cost to the user when the user is browsing with their # of days, so there is nothing hidden...
and to your "give it time" statement, it's been over 5 years...
And secondly if you reread my post you’ll see that I think it’s morally wrong to charge a cleaning fee AND expect guests to clean as well.
That’s double dipping.
Ah, but companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be as shitty to their customers as they can get away with.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
This depends on which site you’re browsing on. I don’t think US does this, but you can browse the AU or Canada version and set your price in $USD because those geographic “editions” have to post the all-in cost up-front.
While not a scam, it definitely feels like a dark pattern.
Stuff that you explained can happen because initially IP-to-Country isn't 100% precise (later in booking/checkout stage you provide country and then it knows for sure).
Other case I've seen is that meta (comparison) website you came from showed you prices without including everything even though they should've.
And then booking platform tries to transition you into correct pricing in between their pages.
But to many other comments, there's probably at least some element of advertising a relatively low nightly price and tacking on a stay fee that may not be as immediately obvious.
Edit: At most latter is possible with complex rule sets. But I'm really not sure: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2061
What I do see is some booking automation that will dynamically set minimum stay lengths to avoid filling, say, a 3 day gap with a 1 or 2 day booking if it’s far enough out and set minimum stays to the duration of the gap.
I rent out our cabin. If you stay 1 day or 7 days, it's the same amount of work for me and same costs in cleaning. That's impossible to price fairly without having a flat fee.
In my market the customer sees the total price up front. I think this is the best solution for all parties.
Without them that could make some properties more expensive to maintain and repair.
When you know truly how to price (and cost!) something, you know when and where you can offer discounts. If cost to acquire a tenant is $2k, then the discount to preserve a good tenant should be about $2k per tenant turnover time.
Turning Airbnb into a full-blown rental market with people and LLCs buying houses just for AirBnB was the downfall. At least, that's my interpretation.
The “offer a spare room” and “pick up someone going the same way as you” narratives were about skirting regulations.
I'm on one collector group on Facebook and people come and list their items for thousands of dollars even though the average price on eBay is about $1. You'll point them to the sold items and they will say "OK, I see that, but I really think you are wrong and mine is worth $6500 + shipping, and also you are very rude telling me my price is wrong."
Could you be more specific?
And "helping" them is a lawsuit magnet: Big landlords are colluding to raise rents, D.C. lawsuit alleges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38155840
Indeed, constraining demand acts to constrain a factor which acts to encourage supply.
I don’t know anyone who would want a bunch of Airbnbs intermixed with their residential areas
Tourist can go to these things called “hotels”
Slightly off topic, and not aimed at you in particular but at tourists in general: For the love of god visit other cities than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is expensive and overcrowded. There's a whole country worth of interesting places to visit instead.
The point I'm trying to make with Amsterdam is that it's really nothing special when compared to a bunch of other nearby cities. Sure if you want to visit the Anne Frank house you need to go to Amsterdam and stand in a long line. If, however, you are more interested in the culture of the country you can find that nearly anywhere. Pretty much any city of reasonable size will have a FEBO and a pancake restaurant and a couple of neat museums. No need to queue for those, and yet people DO queue for those in Amsterdam for some reason.
Yes
I'm also a digital nomad. new country every 1-3 months and I completely agree. I'd love to find an alternative but the one month discount is critical for keeping my costs fairly low. booking doesn't even allow you to book over 30 days.
Perhaps accommodations in your destinations that are on Booking don't have availability for the whole duration you're searching for?
On the plus side, locals can still find somewhere to rent, and Amsterdam hasn't turned into a theme park.
Are you happy now?
I do not think of airbnbs as identical to hotels in every way possible, and I don't want them to be. I am ok with doing some basic cleaning tasks despite being charged a cleaning fee. I naively still consider airbnbs to be a little bit like sharing a space, with an implied social contract. I expect to do a little stuff that is low cost to me, high value to the host. I also know they're still going to have to pay a cleaner. And I really would prefer them to not unconditionally wash and dry the bedding for every single unused bed in the place. That's how our planet got into this mess.
I tend to be way more distrustful of previous guests than I am of the host. There are a lot of nasty and entitled people out there.
You have your perspective. Others of us share mine.
As I’ve stated before these are my personal beliefs - and they may have been influenced by my age. I come from a time long before Airbnb was even the merest glimmer of a thought in anyone’s mind, and base my expectations and experiences on that.
Whilst Airbnb started off as folks sharing their properties. It’s now a fully fledged business for many where “hosts” are now corporations who buy properties to let out (in 2021 the figure stood at 28%).
So that also makes me very jaded.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/biggest-airbnb-hosts-canada...
None of which I expect guests to do. So it's not double dipping.
You've been explained why you're wrong ten times now, and still drone on about it. Maybe airbnb just isn't for you? Book a more expensive hotel instead, and then those thinking my cabin is a good deal can do so and be happy.
If I have a strong feeling on something, why do you feel I should not talk about it?
It is your opinion that I am wrong. It is not a fact that I am wrong.
You say you have a cabin - I’ve booked Cabins in the Hocking Hills area of Ohio (not via Airbnb). They’ve never had cleaning fees.
If they can handle this, why can’t you?
Ohh my god, come on, you've been explained this a hundred times by now. It's not that I can't handle it. It's that it's fairer for everyone if the price is set based on the actual cost.
My cabin costs $200 a night to rent, and $100 to clean. If you stay 2 nights that's $500 total, or $250 a night. Do you suggest I just should set the price to $250?
But what then for those renting for 7 nights? Normally they pay $1500. But with your scheme it will be $1750. Or I would have to eat the cleaning cost for those staying 2 days, making no money and instead just pulling it from the market and everyone loses.
The customer doesn't even see the cleaning fee. They see a total price. Then it's up to them to decide if they think it's worth booking or not.
Perhaps this is because I live in Europe, where all costs must be up front. Hence there is no scamming going on here. And I don't care what a cabin on the other side of the world does. I do what makes sense in my local market (people here even bring their own bedding!!). Get it into your head that people want freedom to choose a stay that fits them. If you don't want to care about this, then just don't book.
BTW, I live in (and own) a vacation home almost permanently - a condotel - that meets all of the above requirements.
In fact we can’t live here more than 179 consecutively without leaving for some time and renting it out to follow the law.
I knew what I signed up for and we made that choice. It would be completely different when we bought our house in the burbs that was zoned “residential”
And there’s the rub. You’re getting very emotive about the subject whereas I am approaching it simply as a customer experience issue.
When I book the cabins I get a cheaper price the longer I stay.
The issue would therefore seem to be that the Airbnb doesn’t provide you the flexibility you desire. The cabin’s I’ve stayed at are owned by different people but rented out by a company that handles such properties in a reasonable manner.
And besides, you continue to ignore my initial first statement: That I feel it’s immoral to charge a cleaning fee AND expect customers to do cleaning.
The original post I replied to stated that they expect the customers to strip the bed plus more cleaning tasks, AND they charge a $200 Cleaning fee.
Even the Airbnb CEO stated he felt that it was wrong to expect customers to strip the bed.
The Cabins I stay are request that when you leave the property you have gathered plateware etc. into the kitchen, and towels etc are left in the shower, and all furniture is left in the basic state you found it.
That takes all of about 10 minutes - which is fine by me. All costs in cleaning and maintenance is taken out of the rental fees.
So no, in my “scheme” costs are not higher because the company I rent through handles rates accordingly.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in particular. They're extremely tedious and definitely not what HN threads are for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I ask because corporates usually figure out how to use the rules to their advantage and I am now trying to sniff through how they would play this.
This seems both obvious and difficult to prevent.
I'm curious if you have a source for this? Intuitively, it makes sense, but I haven't actually seen any figures that support this. Although my guess is that data would be hard to come by.
My theory is that single family homes get rented below what it costs to rent them and the landlords make it up via appreciation.
It's pretty obvious that there are places like this, where the rental prices are substantially below 1% of the purchase price (one of the "rule of thumbs").
In college three friends and I rented a 1000sqft 2 bed 2 bath apartment with one parking spot for $X, then the next year a 2000sqft 4 bed 4 bath 2 car garage for $1.15X. Per zillow, the owner was renting it to us for 0.3% of the purchase price. The only way for them not to be losing their shirt is crazy appreciation.
Such an approach can give you a long-term unsustainable clientele.
Such an approach can lose you the marketing cachet of being sold out for months.
etc.
How much should the price increase per night to cover the cost of cleaning?
So either too low for people staying one night or too high for people staying multiple nights. Why is it better?
Averaging
No it can't because the hosts are trying to charge a fixed fee per reservation.
AirBnb hosts have had their hands on the scale for too long now because the company is terrified of a mass exodus of hosts (many of whom act just as entitled as your average landlord, who will beat every penny out of you). It used to be a much better service for the users.
At least last time I booked on AirBnB it was clearly displayed as part of the total reservation price if you entered dates.
Oh right, averaging.
And a less charitable interpretation is that it's a scam because it's deceptive advertising to show a lower nightly rate.
I'm willing to pay a cleaning fee (though really it should be rolled into the cost of the stay) but not also be required to do the cleaning myself.
If you can't efficiently get cleaning services for your rented out room, maybe you should get out of the hotel business!
This was supposed to be the intent of Airbnb and is still a valuable resource if available.
And it's not like you can't still rent out to friends or the like. Just totally financializing and anonymizing that interaction turns it into a different sort of interaction. Social trust is a thing, and avoiding having _every single human interaction_ pass through some broker and be financialized is not the worst.
But really... a touch of social proof never hurts.
There are zoning laws for a reasons.
Do you own “your” apartment?
I’m asking because some places consider it an “apartment” if it’s a rental and a “condo” if they are individual buyers and other countries call it an apartment regardless
Why shouldn't our neighbors use their powers as voters to keep their peaceful suburban street from being used as housing for migrants, minorities and other undesirables? I'd bet that'll affect housing desirability far more than short term rentals.
Why shouldn't they use their power as voters to ban the construction of affordable homes in their vicinity?
Why shouldn't we use our power as voters to proscribe alcohol in their town? What could go wrong?
Your power as a voter isn't supposed to be the power to arbitrary meddle in other people's business.
As a consumer, it has to be good enough if there are only some areas where it's allowed, and some where it's not. Or maybe allowed but only up to a certain density or percentage.
Anywhere it would be allowed without limit I would probably not want anyway, just like a hotel. Most airbnbs are run like little hotels now anyway and I hate most of those, but at least there is variety and plenty are good still.
When tourists come home drunk at four in the morning they wake up families who have to get up at 7 to go to work and school. There is a reason why we seperate tourists in hotels.
AIRBNB stopped catering to digital nomads and went straight into the hotel business.
I'm a university student, and I enjoy traveling by myself, as long as I can do it on a reasonable budget. In North American cities (and in plenty of other countries), I pretty much blend in with the crowd, am not loud, annoying or obtrusive. What exact quality is imbued into someone who's willing to throw away EUR100/day that everyone else doesn't have? Doing this in large, world-class cities would turn any major destination into VIP hangout clubs for rich people. Not to mention that it's probably flawed financially - even if tiny towns that are over-capacity with tourists might be able to justify it, enormous cities will be forcing their businesses to lose money. Fewer people would travel to the city on account on it being too expensive, and the people who do travel would spend less money since they're paying the tax.
I'm very glad I don't live in Amsterdam, commuting there is bad enough. I'm actually trying to convince people to visit, among other places, the city I live in. Spreading the tourists around more will make everyone happier. Including the tourists.
> commuting there is bad enough
AirBnBs have definitely normalized a significant per-stay charge that isn't the norm in the hotel/inn business.
If you don't like it, fine, just don't use it. But pricing it to what people actually use, is fairest for everyone.
So yeah, the law and custom both cover this angle.
I think scam implies that something is deceptive, but not everything that annoys me is a scam. If users are completely aware of something and expect it, it is hard to claim they are being duped, in my opinion.
But those paying cash, no taxes, low salary abusing people, should remain in business?
What an insane take.
Are you okay with a meat packing plant in your neighborhood?
However, in my market customers only see the total, calculated to an avg nightly price. So it all works out and is fair for everyone.
FWIW I think pretty much every vacation rental I booked pre-AirBnB (or, for that matter, pre-Internet) charged a cleaning fee in a similar manner.
I think getting shocked by cleaning fees is like getting shocked that there is a sales tax.. Every time you go to the store.
Showing the total with cleaning fees at the end is inconvenient and user hostile, but in no way a "scam".
As someone else in the thread pointed out, some locales do require that AirBNB and similar list prices with the fees included, and they comply in those regions. And not including tax is kind of a con when the rate can vary between states, cities and even parts of cities. Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.
>Nobody can be expected to know the particulars everywhere they go, while businesses are legally required to know in order to collect.
Which is why they tell customers exactly what the total is and fee/tax breakdown before purchase.