And this is why the hospitality industry is organizing against them.
I love the AirBnB idea and the implementation. There is a dark side however. Hotel organizations have historically been unable to change quickly, and operate on pretty thin margins. So the existence of a significant quantity of AirBnB rentals in a market does the equivalent of the Federal Reserve 'stress test' on weak banks, except it isn't simulated.
I am really on the fence about what that means. On the one hand it means a number of hotel properties will come on the market at distressed properties, on the other it means there will be a huge gap between really cheap motels and really high end hotels.
One thought was to buy up a mid-range hotel property and convert it into "Tech Suites" where for each pair of rooms connected by a door, one side stayed a hotel room and the other side became a small office. My local Sunnyvale city supervisor isn't completely against the idea but they are dubious about a mixed living/commercial zone at the scale of a motel/small hotel.
We had a "weekend rental" in our neighborhood - it was not listed through AirBnB. What did it mean?
Well, the street became a hotel parking lot. The house became a place to throw a party for forty out-of-town guests, and the neighborhood residents...well at $500 a night why should a renter give a fuck about them?
The couple hooking up on the down-low, well they sent the brats outside during morning nookie time. The kids entertained themselves by throwing rocks at the neighbor's car in her driveway. The three families staying for a youth baseball tournament - their kids swung from Jimmy's backboard until the rim popped out. The six guys attending their reunion sat on the hoods of their cars till the wee hours drinking beer and tossing the empties.
The business model shifts the costs of hotel use unto surrounding properties. Next week, however, our absentee landlord gets their day in court to explain their violations of the zoning regulations. Hopefully the threat of jailtime will make an impression.
Strawman. Free parking is perfectly fine in low density non-commercial neighborhoods. The problem is how AirBnB enables commercial use of residential property.
Like most people in the US, I live in a neighborhood of detached single family dwellings on their own lot. Paid parking is even less viable than frequent efficient public transport. The actual development density is about 15 persons/acre or about 37 persons/hectare net for the neighborhood. Considering the surrounding development it's less than half that.
I would be interested to hear how that goes. Do you know if they listed on VRBO or some similar service? Is the service involved in the case yet?
These are the kinds of things the supervisors in Sunnyvale wonder about in terms of "What happens when ..." and it sounds like some case law might be available (ideally in California but you don't mention where this is)
The way things went down was that the owner bought the house at the low point in the housing market and had it as a traditional rental - as a college town we have a fairly stable rental market. Last summer, (according to the neighbors nearby), the stable renter was booted and the house started being rented for game days and other weekends. Around New Years, we had dinner with some of the people more impacted - I live diagonally across an intervening block.
My neighbors were bothered by it, but didn't know enough about zoning regulations to know that the use was flat out illegal. The closest neighbor felt constrained by norms of neighborliness despite the fact that the owner did not live there and was running a hotel. However, zoning regulations are something I have dealt with regularly for many years.
A couple of months ago, I had a bit of a close call while walking the dog as one of the transients returned from Taco-Bell in their Expedition. It was then that I realized that the renters were as complicit in the activity as the Owner...so I spoke to the renters as they parked and advised them that their activity was a violation of zoning and unwanted by the neighbors. Hmmm...that's probably better than trying to change the Owner's ethics, and I can be as much of an asshole as the next man when I wish.
The next Saturday morning I was walking my dog as that week's renters arrived. I spoke with them about the same subject. Turns out one of the renters was a swinging dick lawyer from upstate. He figured to run me down the road by threatening to call the police.
And that's when it hit me, what could be better evidence of the activity than a police report with the renter explaining their agreement with the Owner? I told him calling the police was a capitol idea, and advised him of the address when he could not tell the dispatcher where he was. Sure, it cost me forty-five minutes with our City's finest, but it didn't leave the City Manager any more excuses for ignoring the problem.
So Zoning eventually got around to sending the Owner a letter, despite which we continued to get transients - the economic considerations didn't change and Zoning enforcement trying to be nice was taken as a sign of weakness.
It took a bit more followup (complaints), and the genteel neighbor realizing that the Owner didn't intend to reciprocate the neighborly behavior.
So the hearing is in municipal court next week and several of we neighbors are available to testify about the activity.
You're a better man than me... I would have probably "arranged" for something to happen to the house when it was unoccupied. Or perhaps that's just wishful thinking ;)
Hell, three different neighbors considered addressing some of the situations with guns - it's Alabama. I always saw it as economics, and an insurance claim would probably have been a boon.
Mischief would only reinforce the property owner's conviction that it was ok to externalize the costs upon the neighborhood - though that doesn't mean I didn't think devious thoughts. It just turned out that once I stopped pretending that the renters were ignorant of the illegality, events began to resolve of their own accord.
Besides, I have no interest in spending time in jail. That is a world of suck.
>Hell, three different neighbors considered addressing some of the situations with guns - it's Alabama.
Is this a serious comment? I guess it's one of the reasons I'm grateful not to live in the United States. The fact people in your area might turn to using deadly force to address noise complaints and misbehaved kids completely blows my mind.
Twenty minutes from where I live in any direction, someone probably hunts the land. Guns are as common as hammers.
Was my comment serious? yes. Were people seriously considering shooting someone? Of course not - they were expressing their frustration with the overall situation. Had they been inclined to shoot someone when annoyed, they would have done it long before the now.
However, the truth of it is, there is no reason to believe that a transient lodger isn't going to roll into the neighborhood at 2am armed and drunk and starting trouble. That's the volatility in the mix, and why the AirBnB model poses problems in residential districts not structured to accommodate them. And that's the worry that my neighbors, and I, have.
I probably would have just jimmied a door open and introduced some feral cats or something. Maybe a family of racoons, that's all. Guns or violence is way over the top, though I guess I could understand how your neighbors would be pissed.
As a land use issue, the police don't get involved. By local ordinance police power resides in the zoning department not our police department. However, because zoning violations are punishable by jail time under our ordinance they are criminal offenses.
I think he was referring to the beer drinking/rock throwing/etc...
A few calls to the cops to report unruly behavior, and a letter or two to the homeowner may have been enough to get the homeowner to be more vigilant in controlling the tenants, or would encourage a return to longer term tenants.
The nearby neighbors made the mistake of thinking that the property owner was a fellow homeowner. The problem is that the property owner doesn't see things that way. In their eyes, its a business and the neighbors who tried to deal with the problems person to person was just showing their lack of sophistication - this was a "pay yourself first" endeavor.
Jimmy's father built the goal at the end of the driveway when Jimmy was about 8. It is a thing of beauty - Ryan was a craftsman. Three summers ago he drove Jimmy and his teammates to the AAU Nationals. The next Thanksgiving he was diagnosed with liver cancer. 15 months later he died. When, I heard how the damage had been done and that the property owner had promised to get it fixed, but hadn't, that's when it was clear the owner didn't give fuck about the neighborhood or the people affected by their business.
It's simple economics. Two weekends a month gets the owner past breakeven, and the third and fourth are mostly profit. The values systems between the property owner and the neighborhood residents are incommensurate.
In the end, all it took was for two assholes to collide and agree that calling the police was the best solution. Well that and hitting the city manager and elected officials over the head with email.
2 other common reasons to organize against airbnb are 1) neighborhoods don't like transient guests when their expectation was that the neighborhood were permanent residents and 2) airbnb is avoiding state taxes
I don't use or support services like AirBnB for this reason. If any of these "disruptive" services actually cared about their customers, they would gladly comply with government regulations that are meant to protect us.
AirBnB is great if you're white, able-bodied, and have no expectation of quality (or even an expectation of a safe, habitable environment), but just Google around for issues of racial discrimination with hosts and AirBnB's complete lack of support for disabled people.
These are all issues that have been through the legal system for close to 100 years, yet now we celebrate when we throw out our progressive ideals for something as petty as cash savings?
Hotel organizations that aren't able to adapt to changing market conditions should fail. So should banks. Hopefully, we learned our lesson from "too big to fail" - we shouldn't artificially indemnify organizations against the impact of change, or we'll wind up having to choose between living with a stagnant, immovable status quo, or dealing with a catastrophic collapse.
The "tech suites" idea is great. Maybe you could even turn some of them into something like a "startup dorm", which would fit nicely into an incubator/VC setting.
I'm afraid not really. With all the regulations being placed on banks, it's only inevitable that banks will get bigger and bigger since there's less money to be made so some will try to go for scale and volume.
on the other it means there will be a huge gap between really cheap motels and really high end hotels.
As a middle-market customer, I really hate it when this happens. Most notably, airlines. The air travel market for the flights I make is pretty strongly segregated between $400 fares and $4000 fares, and you get what you pay for.
This is not exactly an apples to apples comparison. They're comparing the median room rate of hotels to Airbnb.
However, your average Airbnb apartment and the average hotel room are nothing alike. Most of the Airbnb's I've used are far closer to what I'd expect in a suite at a moderately nice hotel. If you compare that, the price of two diverges immensely.
Just recently I spent three days on a 60 ft barge on the Seine in Paris opposite the Louvre. There is really no comparison to even a high-end hotel there (and I've stayed in several in Paris), but it was maybe 30% of the cost of a comparable experience I'd find for that location and living space size.
I could be an abnormality in my usage of Airbnb. I actually pay about what I'd expect to for a standard hotel room. I just expect what I'd get in a suite minus room service.
On the other side of the coin, your hotel is unlikely to cancel on you at the last minute (which happened to me recently with an Airbnb). So you are accepting a certain level of risk. It's also less convenient to book an Airbnb, especially if you are only staying one night because most hosts have a two night minimum. Mostly, I agree with you, though.
While I was attending a training course in 2001 - I arrived at the Doubletree in Richardson, Texas on a sunday night to discover that the room I had booked, and provided my credit card for - was not available to me. Even worse than a cancellation, as now we had to scramble to find another hotel at 11:00 PM on a sunday night (in richardson, texas)
A friend of mine recently had the Four Seasons in San Francisco cancel on him. He found out when he arrived. Of course, they had a car waiting to take him to the Hotel Intercontinental and comped him for his troubles, but it does happen.
I have had hotels cancel on me. Some hotels have a policy that if you don't check in by 2am they will give your room away, and no amount of calling ahead and negotiating will change that.
Most of the Airbnb's I've used are far closer to what I'd expect in a suite at a moderately nice hotel
I think that AirBnB operates very differently at different price points. Once you're paying more than $x, you're right- you basically get whole apartments. And below $x you're paying less than you could ever expect for a hotel room. But in the middle is this awkward area where you're paying a relatively decent amount to stay in someone's spare room, and have to deal with the extra complications that brings but without the larger benefits.
Would you be willing to send/provide the link to this barge you stayed on? I'm taking my wife to Europe (last major trip before children), and I would absolutely love for her to have this experience.
Send me an email. jordan at zenzen dt org. I've stayed in plenty of other Airbnb's in Paris too. So far, I haven't gone wrong.
This was a little more expensive than normal (but we had company staying in the other two small cabins so and really utilized the deck on top since Pont des Arts is one of the best views of the sunset in Paris and it is docked right there) and I happen to love boats. If you don't like a little gentle rocking, it may not be for you.
I'll chime in with my Airbnb experience. There's always one out there that's going to bite you, I'm travelling around Europe and using AirBnb mostly. I've had great experiences with using them in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France. Then there is the outlier which makes you question using it at all. There is one thing you pay for in hotels and that is service and it is a requirement. With a hotel you won't ever be stranded in a foreign country, but with Airbnb it's possible.
I recently booked a stay in Prague which seemed positive, with quite a large number of positive reviews. Normally with all my other airbnb stays, I contact the host many days before and organise a way to check in and a time. This has worked out well, we simply meet at a specified time, talk and get given the keys and shown around the place. Back to the story in Prague, I contact the host 4 days prior to check in and receive no reply for those 4 days. The listing on the website becomes 'disabled' and the last calendar activity of the host is 6 weeks ago. There are then reports saying that previous tenants where 'bumped' to a different apartment as there was a problem with the listed apartment. This raises alarm bells to me and the last thing I want to do is arrive in a foreign country and be left stranded. Which is exactly what happened. I contacted AirBNB a day prior to the event detailing the 'fishiness' via online medium and have only received automated replies.
Luckily our host in a previous city had a friend who could arrange us a stay at short notice. Don't get me wrong, people are people and there are fantastic people out there.
So really the price difference is a multitude of services, and how much you will risk being stranded or mislead.
Why would you be left stranded if this AirBnB booking fell through? Unless you had absolutely no money, what's to stop you booking a cheap hotel or hostel for the night?
I've never used AirBnB and have no real plans to. However, I have traveled around Europe extensively, and some of the best times were when I simply arrived somewhere and then attempted to find accommodation.
I rode my motorcycle from London to Spain, toured for two weeks and never booked a single hotel in advance (my GPS packed it in on the second day too, so I played with paper maps). Only once was the first hotel I entered unable to find me a room.
I traveled around Sicily on public transport, mostly buses, a few trains and ferries. Again, I never booked accommodation in advance, always found somewhere and was never stranded.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear, the booking didn't 'Fall through' as you phrased it. As per AirBnb's terms once you have booked the stay, on the day you have to 'assume' everything is ok regarding the check in and rock up to a random radius of where the apartment is. So even though I wasn't able to contact the host and organise a meet up time, Airbnb gives you a rough location of where the apartment is (host doesn't have to specify exact address) and you meet there at some time. Check the FAQ and the terms here (https://www.airbnb.com/help/question/88).
I was left stranded as the check in time was 'organise with host', no specified time and the apartment location was a broad area. I had neither a time nor a place to check into, that's how I was stranded.
I had organised a Plan 'B' knowing this may happen so I didn't spend the night on the street.
I contacted AirBnb via their website a day before this event and still am yet to receive a reply from their customer support.
I think you're arguing my point any way, it's harder to be stranded from a hotel, either they will find you a room or they will point you somewhere else who can.
Plan B is important with AirBnB. I'm staying in an apartment right now I found on there (Prague as well), and it worked out well. However, like you said renting an apartment from an individual could easily leave you stranded. I mean, you could show up to get the keys, and they're simply not there. Maybe they're late? Maybe they had an emergency? Maybe they forgot? You need that backup plan and a location of a nearby hotel, hostel, number for a taxi, etc, just in case. This doesn't happen with a hotel. Nonetheless, I'm going to stick with AirBnB. I enjoy renting apartments, they have a lot more character than hotel rooms, are cozy, and you feel like you're a part of the city, which is why I travel in the first place.
> what's to stop you booking a cheap hotel or hostel for the night?
Special needs, traveling with others, just plain tired after a long trip, middle of the night, better amenities, better accommodations, hotels are booked full, maybe some of those available hotels/hostels are super shady and I don't want to be among strangers there. As much as I love the idea of being able to travel freely, I also like the assurance that I know where I'm sleeping at the end of any given day.
In my experience (~ 6 AirBnB stays) if cost is your major motivator, you're more likely to have a lousy AirBnB experience.
I've stayed in NYC and in smaller markets in AirBnB places I selected for cost. Why pay $200+ when I can stay for $80 in someone's private room?
Well, you get what you pay for, and when you pay less then a local hotel the things you miss are the things that hotel charges you for: cleanliness, privacy, and respect for your time.
While reviews/recommendations are supposed to be a filter for quality, they're really something of an echo chamber on AirBnB. If you leave a host a negative review, they may do the same for you, and fear of being publicly labeled an undesirable guest is enough to keep most travelers mute.
That said, once you start paying something roughly comparable to a hotel rate in a given city, they likelihood of you having a better experience increases. These are hosts who are basically running a side business and treat you like a customer. For better or worse, they charge you more to treat you better. I think it's the higher end AirBnB market that hotels should fear.
I've been nailed with cleaning fees on Airbnb that make the cost higher than nearby hotels, which always include cleaning in the price. The cleaning fees are listed out separately so they're easy to miss, I wonder if this article took them into account.
> The cleaning fees on Airbnb are listed in the final price you pay before confirming the reservation,
True, but when you browse by price they are not. I think this is the point the OP is trying to make.
They are asking if the post got prices from a final confirmation, including cleaning fees, or if they got their prices form scraping the data on their website, which wouldn't include the cleaning fees.
if its the latter then I've seen cleaning fees of $50 per stay which can close the gap considerably if your only staying for 1 or 2 nights.
I take a weeklong trip to San Francisco every few months -- a city with loads of Airbnb uptake. I used Airbnb for the first few trips and was happy with the apartments I rented, but I've stopped even looking at Airbnb because the booking process is such a pain.
Every time I've used it there's been 24-72 hours of back and forth with a host before I even know whether I can reserve their place. Often I lose a day waiting to hear from a host only to find out their calendar wasn't up to date and it's not actually available.
Hotels are more expensive, but booking one is trivially easy. That convenience is worth a lot to me.
I was pro-airbnb-all-the-time till I booked a room that looked good in the photos but was in a shitty building in a shitty part of town ... (I was in a hurry and couldn't really do as much research as I normally would have). I was there for a nice relaxing vacation so it was quite a surprise and I wound up losing $500 because I immediately ended my reservation and used hotel tonight to get a better room for about the same price.
With hotels, at least you generally get what you pay for, and you can rely on branding (brand names and star ratings) to get you most of the way there as well. So while I hope to use airbnb again, I'm quite chastened by the experience and am definitely more aware of the things I used to take for granted with booking hotels.
I've been having the same problem with Honolulu. In the last 3 weeks I've had 3 or 4 booking attempts declined because the host's calendar was not accurate.
Airbnb folks: this drags your product down to the level of VRBO, Flipkey, etc., where spotty availability calendars creates a large disincentive to use the service.
AirBNB would never be able to survive in countries with a well-run "business hotel" culture. I frequently travel to Japan and usually stay at a business hotel chain like Dormy Inn or Richmond - the price is rarely above $80/night and the rooms are perfectly fine. No Sofitel, sure, but about Ibis level. And Dormy Inn has an onsen in every hotel!
If a decent hotel room is ~$80 then I wouldn't even think of using AirBNB and I doubt I'm alone. I have no idea why hotels in other countries are so damn expensive.
That's all well and good if you're a solo business traveler happy to sleep in a cubicle. But if you've got the wife and kids, one of whom's a toddler who needs some space to run around and the other a baby just starting his solids so you need to boil and mash veggies, I can tell you from personal experience it's damned hard to find a decent place to stay. Short-stay apartments haven't really caught on in Japan: your choice is basically either tiny business hotels, or renting an apartment ("weekly mansion") for a month-plus. Unfortunately Airbnb's still quite limited in Tokyo (very few Japanese people seem to know about it), but I'd go for one in a heartbeat if the location was decent.
Business hotels are not "cubicles" in most cases, they're perfectly adequate for 95% of travelers, and there's a wide range of size/quality/budget tradeoffs. Sure if you're a traveling circus and need room to set up your trapeze, then maybe you need more room—but so what? In that case, you pay a bit more and get a somewhat larger room. Options exist, even for odd cases like yours.
The cool thing in places like Japan is that you actually have a choice whereas in places like NYC, you have far less. For that reason I dread visiting the states anytime I don't have a friend I can stay with or something.
The U.S., especially, could really do with a big shakeup of its dysfunctional hotel culture. And its dysfunctional transportation culture. And ... well you get the idea...
My "odd case", also known as family travel (adults travelling with children), represents 30% of all travel worldwide. Did I mention I used to work for Lonely Planet?
Regarding my apparently plentiful options, can you point me to a business hotel near Tokyo Station which has rooms for four people at a price that's a "bit" more than the standard under-Y10k business hotel cubicle? Go ahead, I'm waiting.
And Airbnb seems to be doing a pretty good job of shaking up that dysfunctional hotel culture...
Lonely Planet or not, that is very hard to believe. I know anecdotes != data but this is so different from my normal experience that I just can't accept it. I do not think I have ever been on a plane where 30% of pax are vacationing families. Business travel outweighs vacations 10 to 1, or it feels like it.
Anyway, of course you're not going to get a family-sized suite for 1万円 at a proper hotel. You wouldn't get an apartment, either. I am not sure what you are expecting here. A four-person suite is going to cost way more no matter how you cut it. And if you claim four-person suites make up 30% of hotel bookings, then you are hallucinating.
I hadn't really perceived that AirBNB was evolving into a short-term apartment rental system, but if that works for you, great! My point was simply that, since I don't have all these dependents, I would never think of using it in a country with good business hotels.
I do not think I have ever been on a plane where 30% of pax are vacationing families
I don't think I have either, but I have been on flights where 95+% where vacationing families, so I wouldn't be surprised if it balances out. Most routes are either business focused or vacation focused, so depending on what routes you travel you probably won't be sharing your flight with many from the other group.
I rented a nice apartment for a week in Shibuya the last time I was there for 2/3rds the price of the hotels we’d been staying in. They do exist, even if the range of options is a little limited.
I just had a very bad experience with AirBnB. A host posted pictures of an entirely different apartment. In the real apartment the electrical outlets were falling out of the walls and the windows were so rusty that they wouldn't shut. (The place was also expensive.)
But there's always a gamble with "collaborative consumption," so it's not the end of the world. And I've been very satisfied with other AirBnB experiences.
I ended up confronting the owner face-to-face about all the issues with the apartment — basically telling her it wasn't ready for rent. I told her I probably wouldn't leave a negative review as long as she fixed the problems with the listing. (She was new to renting, so I wanted to give her some slack, even though she was kinda dishonest.)
For me, the only issue with AirBnB is that they want me to upload a picture of my passport. I don't care who's on the other end, you're not getting a picture of my passport.
Because of this requirement I had to cancel my nice apartment reservation in Boston only to stay in a far more expensive hotel. But at least they didn't keep a picture of my passport on file.
I'd rather stay in AirBnB than in a mediocre hotel in most markets, but a great hotel is still totally worth it to me.
My personal AirBnB stays have been pretty varied. When I stayed in SF in 2008 it was awesome, because I ended up staying with a friend of the founders and then in the actual AirBnB corporate apartment and meeting one of the AirBnB guys.
When I stayed in Japan, it was amazing -- the spare couch of a Thai expat living in Tokyo, who then introduced me to her friends, and we went out to do stuff a few times. An long-term expat from a culture I understood (Thailand) is an even better introduction to Japan than a Japanese national.
But then I stayed in a few other places in Asia where it was a "regular low-end hotel or apartment rental" who relisted on AirBnB. I generally don't stay in hotels like that otherwise, and in comparison to 5 star luxury hotels, it was pretty weak, and IMO for 50% of the price, not worth it.
I actually really like the "large high-end luxury hotel experience" -- being able to arrive at 3am to a fully staffed front desk, having 24h room service, knowing reliably exactly what the place will be like in advance, etc. And, if you have some third-party-paid stays and optimize for frequent stay points, the cost can be pretty reasonable (e.g. 10 x $60/night normal stays redeemed for 2 free $1000/night NYC NYE stays).
I tried to use AirBnB for Hawaii, but couldn't find enough listings at the time; ended up using another similar service (VRBO?) and discovered some terrifying people.
I'll try AirBnB more in markets where it's strong, and probably higher-end properties than I tried in the past, but I don't think it will destroy hotels.
In all honesty its hard to do a fair comparison as most people will find excellent deals on the many hotel deal sites (orbitz, priceline, etc). This can cut the cost of a hotel room's listed price to half in a lot of instances. I would think in a lot of cases a hotel room vs an airbnb room would almost be equal.
I stayed at my first AirBnB last week, in Cancun, MX. It was $29/night for an entire apartment. I spent the last day of the trip at a resort for $120 (equal to my entire stay at the ABnB) and found it lacking comparatively.
I'm sure the experiences can be hit or miss, but I'm definitely hooked.
We tried to keep the visualizations simple because this was our first post using d3.js. Will think about adding an option to show errorbars next time around though. Thanks for the feedback.
It occurs to me that for about the same price you could reserve a private room in a hostel in many of these areas. Sure it lacks the charm of someone's apartment, but it also has the legal and cultural support that Airbnb is missing.
Last time we were in Paris we stayed in a great hotel for five nights. This time we stayed in an apartment via AirBnB for a month for the same total amount of money.
We did our research - found hotels willing to give us a discount for a month's stay, looked at other apartment rental agencies etc. but AirBnB was far and away the cheapest option for what we were after.
The apartment was fantastic, exactly as described and in the condition shown in the photos. It was clean, the owner was extremely helpful during the planning and booking stages and met us at the apartment (at 11pm on Christmas night, no less) when we arrived in Paris. She provided cleaning at no extra charge - we arranged with the cleaner directly, who arrived half an hour before we left for the airport.
Frankly, I couldn't fault the service. AirBnB staff were great (we had a billing issue early on that they resolved in minutes), the host was great, the apartment was great and the whole process was easy.
Obviously there are trade-offs when staying in an apartment rather than a hotel, but from my experience they're more than worth it to save a significant amount of money.
I had to be 5 days (4 nights) in La-Defense[1] near Paris for an hacking marathon along with my co-founder who lives right there.
AirBNB was my default choice, and I manged to spot a nice (according to the pictures) small apartment in that area, with WiFi etc.
I booked, and thought all is well. Later on, say, 12 or 24 hours or so, I get a message that the owner has rejected me (no reason specified).
I switch to Hotels, and managed to find a much better suite, in a far nicer environment for a little cheaper than that apartment, I think it was via booking.com.
I don't think I will ever check this options again, as for me, the possibility of being rejected later on, with no reason, while flights and meetings are already booked, means a risk, I would not dare take.
of curse this is my own single experience, and there are thousands of travelers who gets there BnB solution every day and all are happy.
I complained to Airbnb once about a dirty and grimy bathtub. They said:
> As every property, guest and host is different and has different expectations and ideas of a level of acceptable cleanliness, it is very difficult to have a fully standardised workflow on cleanliness. What might be normal or acceptable to one person, may not be for another. Our hosting obligations specify these things, but obviously, what one person considers 'properly cleaned' is very different from another - you can read about the hosting obligations here - https://www.airbnb.com/policies#host_obligations
Airbnb is more work, more risk, more variability, and less certainty. If you’re staying at a hotel and something doesn’t work out, you can usually get another room or at least have it looked at. If the place you just booked on Airbnb does not work out, you’re out of luck.
Great customer support does not change the fact that it’s a necessity because incidents just happen. When you’re hit by a problem, you’re not a statistic.
I’ve got my fair shade of apparently unwashed linen, moldy-smelling crack shacks, pile of shoes randomly dumped in a coat closet, exposed wiring, blood stain in the bathtub, a random pot house hosting a skludgy Aussie drunkard, and a basement suite with a junked fridge outside of it. For the record, I’ve also got a fair amount of places with fabulous views, hosts who can’t be any nicer, and impeccably clean floors.
Booking with Airbnb is like gambling with your life quality in general. You have to be extremely cautious and meticulously expend a great amount of effort just to make sure you’re booking a place that’s actually good.
When it’s good it’s really good. When it’s bad it’s hellishly awful. Airbnb is sometimes much cheaper, but that’s possibly all it is to me.
The author forgot the single greatest cost savings I get out of traveling with AirBnB: having a kitchen. I usually learn a new local recipe or two while I'm on vacation in another city.
While I still visit a couple restaurants if they serve local specialties or are well-known, I really appreciate the freedom to cook, stay healthier, and save money on meals.
> At an Airbnb, you get access to a kitchen, you can stay in a neighborhood with character (hotels tend to congregate around touristy areas), and you can stay at some pretty unique places.
There are hotels in colorful neighborhoods with some pretty unique rooms. And how many people, when traveling, opt to use the kitchen even once rather than eat out?
Depends on whether I'm traveling or vacationing. For a brief vacation I'll probably eat out every meal. But if I'm traveling, I'll probably want to conserve money plus get tired of big meals. Even on a vacation that goes about a week long I'd probably eat in a kitchen a couple times if I could.
Having access to a kitchen may be the main reason that I much prefer AirBnB when traveling. I can't stand being forced to eat every single meal out of the house during an entire trip.
I'm not a big fan of AirBnB, but I also think hotels have room to offer better services and compete better with home-stay options. Somebody already suggested live-work suites, but it doesn't have to be every room. Depending on the location, the hotel could have a percentage of working suites, or even a drop-in office not full of back-packers chatting on facetime for a reasonable rate. Same for kitchens: provide a number of kitchenette rooms or a useful kitchen for guest use--not just a crappy breakfast.
Hotels could also offer a "home-stay" rate that does not include housekeeping on stays over 3 days--I'd go for that every time.
On the other hand, AirBnB should be more like a hotel: collect all hotel and local taxes on every stay.
It should also be a law for both hotels and home-stay websites to advertise only the full and final cost, including all taxes, cleaning fees, and so-called "resort fees."
How about measuring the ability to even book a place in a city like NYC? I recently tried to find an apt for a 4 day stay in manhattan with my wife. I contacted 15 places on airbnb. I've got all the reputation stuff filled out. I've used airbnb before. I tried only contacting places with a history of good response times. I even upped my max to higher than a hotel room. $300-350 a night.
Number of responses? Zero.
I love the concept, but the reality is much different than everyone makes it seem.
I can understand that price may be the most important factor but I feel that the article lacks a more exhaustive comparative analysis - namely considering other factors and risks that are important when a person looks for a room
The biggest thing this is missing is the taxes. Cities love to gouge travelers on taxes. A $250 hotel room has as much as a 10-15% tax on it typically.
I love the AirBnB idea and the implementation. There is a dark side however. Hotel organizations have historically been unable to change quickly, and operate on pretty thin margins. So the existence of a significant quantity of AirBnB rentals in a market does the equivalent of the Federal Reserve 'stress test' on weak banks, except it isn't simulated.
I am really on the fence about what that means. On the one hand it means a number of hotel properties will come on the market at distressed properties, on the other it means there will be a huge gap between really cheap motels and really high end hotels.
One thought was to buy up a mid-range hotel property and convert it into "Tech Suites" where for each pair of rooms connected by a door, one side stayed a hotel room and the other side became a small office. My local Sunnyvale city supervisor isn't completely against the idea but they are dubious about a mixed living/commercial zone at the scale of a motel/small hotel.