The article touches up on it, but the "Additional fees and upfront pricing" is my biggest frustration with Airbnb that they refuse to fix (it's an easy solution, in my opinion).
Hosts want to show lower prices, so in search you don't see all the fees, but then when you get all the way down the funnel you finally see these completely ridiculous fees (usually around cleaning) of what you'll actual pay. I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. They need to change the UX, and it would expose so much of the BS hosts try to pull around rates. This would quickly kill the need for hosts to try to game the system like they do now.
Also in general, I refuse to use Airbnb these days when it's not only more than a hotel, but the audacity of some hosts have for checking out is hilariously dumb (cleaning, vacuuming, laundry, etc.). The reliability of hosts is all over the place, I see so many horror stories of last minute cancellations, hosts trying to pull one over on guests, and other sketchy practices they continue to allow.
Note: I could be wrong now though (maybe they do show up front pricing now/), but they already burned the bridge where I stopped even looking at them as an option.
Note (again): I just checked, and it does show a "total cost" in search, but it's still pretty deceptive. It should just be baked into the single nightly cost, and not a separate cost where you have to do the math to figure it all out. They should kill fees all together. Have it so it's just left at the hands of the host to make into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it.
This is completely solved on AirBnB's German website (and I think many others too). If you search for a place on airbnb.de the results page shows "€xx per night, €xxx total", where the total price includes all fees (cleaning fees, service fees, taxes), and the nightly price is just total price divided by the number of nights. When you click through to the listing it shows you a table how this breaks down.
Which just shows that using the misleading numbers on the US website is a business decision.
Same happened to me with a rental cars. When I travelled to Scotland I reserved one from the US. When I picked up the car they added a ton of mandatory fees that almost tripled the price. The person working there told me that they do this only to people from the US. People from Europe get shown the correct price.
Same happens with cell phones here. You sign up for a price and the first bill has several fees added making it quite a bit more expensive.
I wish there was a law in the US that mandated that the paid price is the advertised price.
> Same happened to me with a rental cars. When I travelled to Scotland I reserved one from the US. When I picked up the car they added a ton of mandatory fees that almost tripled the price. The person working there told me that they do this only to people from the US. People from Europe get shown the correct price.
Wow. Somehow, that seems shadier than just showing a misleading price then piling on fees for everyone.
It's a bit similar to restaurant prices in the US. Between tax and tips, you end up paying a lot more than displayed. This isn't the case in most of Europe.
1) They artificially lower the listed price per night, causing the home to show up in more searches. This could easily be fixed by Airbnb.
2) It's used as a way to incentivize longer stays. This motivation probably won't go away. Many Airbnbs are empty during the weekdays.
3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.
Many municipalities in the U.S. tax Airbnbs as a percentage of their nightly rate, and cleaning fees aren't included in that calculation. If those savings are passed onto the guest, they would theoretically lower the effective cost per night.
> 3) It's a way for hosts (and Airbnb) to skirt taxes. This is the real reason Airbnb doesn't want to punish the practice.
Why would shifting payment from nightly cost to cleaning fee have an effect on the hosts' tax liability? If they actually pay someone that much to clean the place, they get to deduct it from their business income either way. What you call it doesn't matter.
I would be curious if Airbnb takes a cut of the cleaning fees, or only the nightly rate. I could see how that might differ, and if so that it would incentivize hosts to shift toward the cleaning fees.
I have used both VRBO amd AirBnB for many years now.
When COVID-19 travel bans proliferated in early 2020, AirBnB proactively refunded my money for a reservation that was nominally no longer cancellable.
VRBO told me to reach out to the host, which turned out to be this apartment rental agency that would ghost my emails for a few days, then offer future credit, then told me to get in line as they have many customers, and eventually processed the refund 3 months or so down the road.
Have you left the business altogether or do you acquire customers a different way/via gmaps and the likes and a website?
Asking because we managed to get most of the people to book directly via our homepage, using booking.com and similar only if we have to
It's the same in the UK, but that still doesn't do what I want: you can only filter by base price, so you'll get some hilariously overpriced apartments even if you search at a low price.
The German website filters based on total_price/number_of_nights.
It will include listings that are up to about €3/night more expensive than your filter setting, but listings that would qualify just on base price but not on total price are filtered out as you would expect.
In recent years, I don't even bother using an app or going to the front desk. Assuming I've stayed for my entire reservation, I just leave. Never had a problem so far!
I frequently (multiple times per year) rent AirBnBs for the full kitchen and many bedrooms for group meetings where we live, work, and cook meals together.
I've never seen an 8 bedroom 6+ bathroom suite with a full kitchen in a hotel. I've only looked in a half-dozen cities or so where I've wanted to hold these team events, but I've never seen one.
Often in AirBnB you can find a stand alone house. In a hotel generally you have a hallway with rooms, one of those rooms is yours, and all the other rooms belong to other people.
The stand alone house can have a yard or a distance to the next house.
Sometimes you can find AirBnb right near a place you need to be in the next morning whereas a hotel might need to be a long ways away and travel between the locations can be problematic.
airbnbs are cheaper if you don't mind sharing the bathroom with other guests/host and cook all your meals in host's kitchen. This has saved me a ton of money traveling over the years.
FWIW, before Amazon started collecting taxes on 3rd party seller sales you could sort by total including tax when listing all seller options of a product.
The reason it makes more sense to do it for hotels is that many cities have 15+% or $$/night taxes. The highest rate is 20%.
My favorite AirBnB trick, which I've encountered in both Germany and Spain, is the "extra fee due in cash on arrival."
You only hear about this after your booking has been accepted -- in the case of instant booking, you have already been charged. And it's usually not too much -- maybe 20-40 EUR. Often it's explained as a mandatory city tax or something like that, and you don't know the city so....
So at this point you can choose: report the host to AirBnB, lose the booking you wanted after already going through all the stress of finding it, and wait probably a long time before you get your money back.
Or, just grumble and pay it. Because of the way reviews are incentivized, it would be a Bad Idea to complain about it in the review, which is why you didn't see anyone complain about it so far.
I'm not proud of this, but the four or five times it happened I just paid it, because in the big picture it wasn't that much. I think the highest was 100 but it was for a long stay costing over 1000.
But unlike the "cleaning fee" where you can, with a lot of imagination, picture some definition of "cleaning" that might, on average, cost that much -- maybe every third guest soils the bed? -- the cash-on-arrival thing is transparently cheating.
Follow the incentives -- five star reviews only, please!
If you're letting yourself get used like that not once but multiple times I don't know what to tell you lol. Do you also give money freely to scammers on the street?
Why would you not report that? Airbnb would bring the hammer down on that host so quickly it wouldn't be funny. I'm serious, they would not tolerate that whatsoever and would get you compensated and moved to another property.
Personal anecdotal data, but to be fair to Airbnb, they have repeatedly looked out for me..
Just recently I had someone cancelling on me whilst I was in the car driving to the place. Airbnb were straight on it, instant refund, extra credit towards another place and someone rang me to try and help me book an alternative for that night (I was quicker than them and had thankfully booked the next door unit before they even rang).
I've had a few bad stays over the years (getting woken early doors by bailiffs was fun), but they've generally been sorted out really quickly.
The times I've tried the alternatives in the last few years I've come up short and regretted the lack of support.
I've used airbnb for many years (since the glory days!), but have to agree the fees are killing me now.. just give me the full price up front..
Because of this. I spend a lot of time picking the property and often, where I go, there aren’t that many good ones, nor much time left before I arrive. “Another property” might not be in the same town.
Between tolerating the BS, or losing my preferred apartment… or, I guess, antagonizing the host who already doesn’t follow the AirBnB rules… I have so far chosen to tolerate the BS.
If you make another choice, that’s fine. If you find it so outrageous lol then we just have different priorities.
Could you elaborate on "the way reviews are incentivized". As I understand it, guests review of the host is only visible to the host after the host has also reviewed the guest or a deadline has passed.
Do hosts look at the reviews the guests have left to previous hosts and that incentivizes the guests not to give bad reviews? Or am I missing something?
Yes, if you give sub-five-star reviews it seriously messes with the hosts’ bookings, from what I’ve heard. And it’s pretty common for one person to manage a bunch of properties for the owners, so a bad review is messing directly with that person’s livelihood. The profit from your booking is not worth the risk of a negative review.
Additionally, I’ve heard stories of negative reviews getting “disappeared” but I’m not sure how that works.
Tangentially: this is why I read lots of reviews before booking, because you can sometimes spot rotten host behavior hiding in the five-star reviews.
this is precisely why a bad review should be left for hosts doing this sort of practice. They are likely running this across large operations, extorting “hidden fees” from each stay at each property.
Their profits should be systematically targeted if the fees are undisclosed upfront and they’re abusing it.
I have also encountered this in Spain, and my counter was to refuse the cash extortion after I had arrived and had the keys in hand. They will grumble or threaten you, but they know they can't force you to pay since it violates Airbnb policies. Even local occupancy taxes must be collected via the platform.
If they're extremely sneaky, their next trick is to fake property damage or extra cleaning fees collected post stay, but that's not a highly repeatable trick without them getting banned, so less likely to happen and you can dispute it with Airbnb, though ymmv.
Airbnb is what you get after 10+ years of low interest rates. You also get a template of behaviors seen amongst SF rental landlords: the professional landlords run a tightship and are reasonable to deal with, the landlords that inherited a singlefamily home or want to rent out their own place tend to be a neurotic bunch, just like airbnb hosts vs hotel managers.
You have clearly never lived in a corporate owned apartment. Hidden fees, odd lease lengths that are optimized for occupancy, huge rent hikes every year and most annoying is that it's impossible to get them to do maintenance. Weeks wait for critical issues, half assed repairs or even "technician could not locate issue/access apartment."
It's anecdotal, but my experience with corporate owned apartments over past 6 years in Bay Area, when it comes to maintenance/rent hike has been positive. I think increment has been around 2% usually. Lease length are 11-15 month usually. And deposit is usually lower than most independent listings I see on craigslist.
They can however at times be slow, and frustrating, for some random things you'd need. But I can deal with it.
In contrast, my girlfriend who lived in a shared apartment with independent landlord, wouldn't fix heat, and then did a cheap replacement, which broke in few months, and refused again. And now she's out of the apartment, not giving back the amount he owes to her. I'm not sure if there any data to backup, but at-least in city, it seems like independent landlords are possibly worse.
Fortunately I have not, it sounds like a bad experience. Unfortunately in SF post 1981 (??) apartments are not covered by rent control. I think the optimum landlord is one who owns 2-4 unit buildings that were built before 1980. My new landlord is currently trying to raise our rent by 66%. People can be greedy *&nts sometimes.
Low interest rates combined with strict regulatory regimes that prevent capitalists from building more housing in response to price signals while also making it unappealing to rent to permanent tenants?
I almost wonder if a "proper" capitalism should never see ultra low interest rates for greater than 1-2 years. It destroys consumer saving and savings habits, it encourages rapacious leverage acquisition behavior (which we're seeing in the fucking consumer housing market how nuts is that).
The fed should have some wheel that could introduce random 4% swings every six months that would hopefully disrupt the private equity leveraged buyout schemes, but who am I kidding, it would just lead to some ridiculous speculation/betting on what the next random modifier to the base interest rate is.
Perhaps, rather than offering good interest rates to large companies and hedge funds / private equity, there should be special low interest rates for single house owners, but businesses actually have to pay higher interest rates for commercial ventures.
Of course someone would figure out a scheme to get individuals to overprovision their mortgages and then back-assemble the excess debt with kickbacks to route it to other uses.
There has to be some way to have low interest rates to help out the "little guys" but make big biz and stock market leverage/margin buying pay a higher interest rate. If you have a high interest rate, it just benefits banks and the rich, who are the only people that have "real money", in case anyone actually does have "real money".
> Of course someone would figure out a scheme to get individuals to overprovision their mortgages and then back-assemble the excess debt with kickbacks to route it to other uses.
Legally mandated LtV < 1 based on `min(sale, appraisal)` would pretty much hinder such schemes. You can always sell your house to your child/parent and get equity back into the family anyway, but in general this would mean mortgage (real estate leveraged financing) could only be used to finance the sale.
Exactly. There was a time I preferred Airbnb but now I choose hotels unless I am looking for some kind of experience
Besides price, service is also worse during stay. At a hotel I can get towels, soap, whenever I want. Airbnb it’s maybe once a day the host can bring things to you.
I don't know what these cleaning fees are for if I'm doing all the cleaning! The last place I stayed had a "please, do everything" checkout policy. Take the trash to the dumpster, clean the towels, and run the dishwasher.
The disgusting thing is that they seem to take it on faith that these chores get done. Increasingly, AirBnBs are disgusting. Dirty dishes. Dirty counters. Bedding that I can't prove, but... I'm pretty sure hasn't been washed in a loooong time.
It's still something I put up with if staying for an extended period of time. Mostly for the (dirty) kitchens more than anything else. However, for short stays? Hotels all the way.
I have a ski cabin (not on AirBnB) and I don't think most people realize how difficult it is to get these places cleaned reliably. You can hire a very expensive cleaning service that brings in their own sheets and towels, but it's entirely impractical to have a regular cleaning service wait around while the dishwasher and 4 loads of laundry run. In terms of taking garbage to the dumpster, it's difficult to have someone take the garbage cans to the street and bring them back on garbage day. It's basically impossible if there are bears around. If the guests help out the cleaning fees can in principle be much lower. If you want to leave the place trashed like you would leave a hotel, don't complain about $400+ cleaning fees as that service is extremely expensive in resort areas.
When we leave in the spring, we pay a $110 cleaning fee and the property management company takes care of everything - cleaning, finding guests, cleaning, replenishment, maintenance, and they have a warehouse full of furniture when they need to replace everything.
True they take 48% of the proceeds + 4% escrow to handle major repairs. But I don’t have to deal with anything.
It’s in Florida so of course it’s cyclical. But since we stay there during low season, it covers its own expenses the other half.
This is investment advice. This is not an investment idea. This was a lifestyle choice to give us a place to stay during the winter.
But I would rather get two anal probes than be a traditional landlord again.
Edit: I just noticed you said it was difficult in a resort area.
Our Condotel is very much in a resort area. Three pools onsite, three restaurants, a lake for fishing, a water park, arcade, etc.
Not bragging, we downsized from our the house in the burbs in GA we had built in 2016 (3200 square feet) to a condo 2000 square feet smaller, paid the same price and we saved over $12000 a year in income taxes.
I wonder if you've got that info in the listing for your place? "Listen, cleaning would cost me money, and that's impractical (and difficult!), so, y'know, might want to bring your own towels and check the bedding."
>If the guests help out the cleaning fees can in principle be much lower.
is it ever, though?
This cavalier attitude to, like, the basic overhead of running a hospitality business, is why I'm back on team hotel for most stays.
To be clear, my place is not on any listing service. Purely family and friends, I never rent it. I tell everyone "the cleaners are supposed to come but leave it so that if they don't the next person is not grossed out."
It's entirely reasonable to expect family and friends to properly clean up a place that you have kindly allowed them to use. But that is an entirely different domain (i.e. non-commercial).
I could be wrong, but it also feels like hotels have stepped their game up a bit with the rise of Airbnb. Prices are good, and even cheap rooms often have microwaves, fridges, and beds that aren’t absolute torture.
Hotels feel exactly the same to me as before. May be the fact that you tried out a hotel recently after staying in a few Airbnbs and were surprised by how well they stack up compared to the Airbnb experience.
Mattresses, fridges, and microwaves have gotten cheaper. Space hasn't. Even 2 star hotels these days often provide similar amenities to 4 star hotels, just in a slightly less nice wrapping.
In some ways. Hotels can't get labor so they investing in things that don't require it.
I stay in alot of hotels for 2-3 day stretches. The lack of daily housekeeping really bugs me. But they seem to be building better midrange properties.
Hotels have gotten very haphazard about servicing rooms without, in many cases, being explicit about their policies. That said, I don't really care and, when they do come by to service, I'm often in the room trying to work on something.
If at all. Never had a host bring anything to us whenever we stayed in Airbnbs. Often, never saw the host at all (they'd just text a code to get in and out of the places I've stayed)
Mostly in Europe and Africa. When we stayed in AirBnBs in Europe we've met the host almost every time. One helped me park my oversized rental van and then paid for the parking since it didn't fit in the spot that came with the house. Another was there to show us all the amenities. Another was there to tell us to pretend we were his friend because rentals weren't allowed. And the one in Africa did a whole grocery shopping for us because she knew we were arriving late with kids and wouldn't have any food to feed them in the morning.
But yeah I've only ever met one host in the USA, and that was because they lived next door.
I met one once. Because he was renting out the bottom floor of his townhouse in DC, so he was on site anyway. Nice place, mostly, with rave reviews. Complimentary candy, soda, and even beer when we arrived (late at night after a long flight, so the snacks were very welcome. But holy crap the bed was awful. Hard as a rock, firmest mattress I've ever tried to sleep on. Ended up sleeping on the couch. And the power kept failing each day we were there, though that seemed to be a neighborhood thing, not specific to his apartment. Just bad luck.
I'm back to hotels because that was the closest I came to having the quintessential perfect AirBnB experience. Any halfway decent hotel has better service, better beds, better climate control, better everything pretty much.
right. I was talking about the 'quintessential' part. Entire apartments isn't quintessential airbnb, atleast for me, I've been using regularly for over a decade. Op was also talking about airbnbing someones floor in a condo not 'entire apartment'. Not sure if you read the post properly.
I have had amazing airbnb hosts in South America, but usually these hosts are essentially running hotels. Hosts in the US were the worst. One host in NYC, whose slum apartment I stayed in for a few weeks, checked up on the apartment several times while I was at work to turn off the air conditioning (that I left on to avoid coming home to 85 degree heat). Another charged a $300 cleaning fee for a week-long stay, and then complained to me that I left dirty dishes in the sink - apparently they didn't come clean the place for several weeks after I left.
Even if it was a tiny window unit left at a high thermostat temperature? The thing could not cool the place down in a reasonable time if it wasn't running 24/7.
The cheap fuck of a slumlord wanted to avoid paying $5/day in electric bills for the thing. This wasn't central air.
Once, when I stayed in Petaluma many years ago (I think 2014 or 2015?) but it was maybe 5 minutes?
They gave us a small tour, showed us how to use some appliances (like the heater) and showed us how to use the door code, and walked through the expectations (at that time, they were simple, was happy to accomodate).
maybe you only book 'whole house/apartment' ? . I usually book a room in hosts house as a single traveller. I always see the host, i even went skiing with one last week.
I prefer AirBnb for medium term (> 1 week < 1 month) stays where you often get some sort of discount and the cleaning fees aren't so outlandish on a per-day basis. It's been great and definitely advantageous compared to similar hotel options for the past 2.5 months I've been in Mexico City.
I'm fine replenishing basic sundries myself in exchange for something that is at least a studio apartment with full kitchen so I can save a bit on eating out costs, do grocery runs every 4-5 days.
Every time I've stayed in a hotel these last few years, it's been awful. Dusty rooms, skeleton crew, cleaning once per week "for the environment", prices just awful
AirBNB has even worse prices, but I check them both every time
Unfortunately the hospitality industry has had a harder time recovering from COVID -- most of the managers are fresh out of college and have little to no underlying experience in managing properties, and it's so bad that Hilton and Marriott aren't doing "brand assurance" audits (ensuring that the properties are up-to brand standards) until the end of 2024/early 2025 because hotel owners have pushed back so hard.
My SO and I stayed at a Waldorf Astoria a few weeks ago and they managed to screw up the stay so badly that we'll probably never go back to that specific location ever again -- the response that we received from the staff was so bad I was looking on LinkedIn to see if I had any friends who were still at Hilton Corporate to help me get the local property to fix their screw up (charging my credit card $10k for a $2800 stay because someone fat-fingered a $100 nightly charge into a $1000 nightly charge) because the local management just couldn't do anything.
Had awful experiences in: Washington State (all over), Silicon Valley, Tampa Bay, Dallas, and Salt Lake City. Mostly Marriott-owned places FWIW, but I checked and all the surrounding hotels had the same issues. The staff at the hotels were nice and they were doing their best, but they were hilariously understaffed.
I stayed in a few non-Marriott hotels in northern Japan and didn't have any trouble there beyond the normal Japanese hotel badness (they're clean, but insanely cramped, expensive, and uncomfortable)
This isn't much of a consolation, but you've always been able to see the true "all in" total price in search and on the map by browsing https://airbnb.com.au as this is legally required in Australia. It's been that way since at least 2015. More notes on using this technique here: https://jake.tl/notes/2022-05-how-to-airbnb
> Hosts want to show lower prices, so in search you don't see all the fees, but then when you get all the way down the funnel you finally see these completely ridiculous fees (usually around cleaning) of what you'll actual pay.
This is 100% true. Hosts figured this out pretty fast and leaned into it. The biggest reason is that showing a cheap price on the initial search result page was very effective at getting bookings. I suspect this is even more effective in this case vs some others because rentals are not easily comparable. ie, travelers invest non-trivial time into researching a place (looking at pictures, location, description, etc) to decide that it works for them before they notice the higher price - and then don't want to throw away that "sunk cost" of their time.
>I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this.
Everything I said up there also works at the level of Google search results. If just one vendor (ABnB, Vrbo, etc) switches to up-front pricing, then all their competitors look _much_ cheaper at first glance. And once the traveler is on their site, it's unlikely that they'll back out and go to a different one. The whole industry is basically in a "Mexican standoff" situation. Or maybe Prisoner's Dilemma if you prefer.
Also, the platforms are perfectly capable of doing all-in-one pricing, because they legally have to everywhere other than the US. There's loooots of extra logic to handle doing it two different ways. At some level they'd love to get rid of that complexity, but just can't for reasons mentioned.
source: worked on pricing at Vrbo for eight years.
Even if the Google Hotel Search feature fixed it, it doesn't help for other search results, or if people just run a quick search on each site and notice the prices are much higher on one than on the other.
At one point we were sending prices to GHS, which I think were all-in. But it was a fraught relationship, which I think ended. Google was trying to take a huge cut of the fees, while offloading the hard work of managing travelers, owners, payments, complaints, etc to us. It didn't make sense to help them eat our lunch.
EBay went through a similar problem where people would list an item very cheap and then charge a fortune for shipping. Now eBay shows you the price and the shipping charges from the search result list and even lets you sort by “lowest price + shipping”. This makes the experience of using eBay infinitely better!
People just get around that by creating a multi-option listing and having one of the options be some cheap throwaway item like a dust cover or USB cable. That cheap price shows up in the sort and throws the whole thing off.
And then eBay implemented the Global Shipping Program and so now a $5 game has $15 shipping from Buffalo to Toronto because it needs a pitstop through Kentucky and needs to be rummaged and possibly damaged by a Pitney Bowes employee first!
Isn't it up to the seller to choose the GSP or some other means? You can always contact the seller and negotiate to use a more direct shipping route instead.
> But for whatever reason, a lot of US sellers have an aversion to int’l shipping.
For good reason. You could point to domestic USPS tracking information as proof of delivery (which occasionally worked in your favor) during PayPal disputes.
For international shipments, the tracking is lost as soon as the item crosses the border. Whether the item was delivered or not cannot be contested by the seller, who then has to pay out on 100% of claims brought against them.
> the tracking is lost as soon as the item crosses the border
That's variable and (often) not the case for shipments to Canada. USPS International First Class would yield a tracking number that has delivery confirmation to the destination.
> Electronic USPS Delivery Confirmation International service — abbreviated E-USPS DELCON INTL — is a tracking service available at no charge for First-Class Package International Service items to select destination countries (see 252.22)
I still have this problem on reverb.com which makes me not use it. Something being $15 cheaper and $75 shipping isn't helpful and wastes my time, so I stop using the site.
All the things people dislike about Airbnb comes down to hosts not being able to leverage economics of scale for their rentals in any coherent way. Typically hosts will manage a bunch of places across town and so a late or early checkout could easily see them have to redo their logistics plans for the whole day. On the other hand hotels get more efficient with scale since the reception is there 24/7 anyways and they can just make a not that certain rooms need to be cleaned a bit later and the cleaning staff is never too far away.
I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this.
Because all platforms face the temptation to become plantations. And while consumers have cash, hosts have assets and are much more likely to leverage them in the event of a dispute. The consumer goes in expecting a deal for $X, when all the fees are added on consumers feel bad, but don't want to lose the time cost they have already sunk into browsing and choosing a short-term rental property, figuring that other offerings on the platform will probably be the same. Really starting over means going to a whole new website and a whole new selection process and a whole new set of terms and conditions, and there will probably be junk fees tacked on at the end anyway.
I host on Airbnb, just two properties which are my holiday homes, and it’s also my biggest frustration.
I don’t do cleaning fees or any of that BS - the price is the price is the price. Cleaning is my problem - it costs me about £130 per stay in fixed overheads for cleaning, linen hire, stocking of consumables, flowers, etc., and that’s incorporated into my nightly rate and my minimum stay length.
I also don’t ask guests to do anything other than lock the door behind them when they leave.
The poor execution of Airbnb plus has been a disappointment - I signed up for it willingly, thinking that it would help boost guest confidence, but unfortunately so many hosts decide to nickel and dime and bait and switch that it’s meaningless. I’d welcome frequent inspections of what I’m doing, as unless I’m providing a stellar service, I am not content.
I have watched guests slowly become more paranoid over the years, as the crappy hosts have a corrosive effect on customer confidence across the platform - and I have had my fair share of crappy hosts when I have been a guest - demands for extra money, entirely fabricated damage claims, on and on.
It also doesn’t help that an awful lot of my competition is literally illegal - not registered with the council, not paying taxes on their revenue, not doing commercial waste collection, etc. - I have literally just responded to a Welsh government request for comment saying “yes, regulate the shit out of this and drop a big hammer on anyone who does not comply”, as again, I get guests anxiously asking if bedding and hot water are included in the price.
I agree they should kill the fees - they do nothing good for anyone in the long term.
Instead, they’re screwing around with broken categorisation which does nobody any good, and with making their search virtually unusable - they now only show you a small percentage of available properties, which is deeply frustrating both as a guest and a host.
"Double ticketing" (presenting one price to attract consumers and another price at checkout) is illegal in Canada. Airbnb lost a class action lawsuit in Canada over this.
eBay had (maybe still has I don't use it) that problem too. Sellers would list something with a Buy-It-Now price of $5, but when you got to the last step, you'd see that shipping was $25.
At the time we suggested that they limit shipping fees to no more than 50% of the total cost of the item, but it never got implemented.
I feel transparency in pricing is more valuable to the users. I've sold items that cost more to ship than they were worth; the problem is that if they choose to return the item I would eat the shipping cost if I offered "free shipping".
The result is that bulky worthless items have lopsided price/shipping. Ebay offers the UI tools to show users the bottom line and they can make an informed decision.
If it was a $5 item that cost $10 to ship, they are still out the $10 though. Buyer might pay return shipping but the seller has to refund the $5 and isn't getting that $10 back. I'm not aware that Ebay would allow you to have a 200% "return fee".
in the late 90s i sold dave matthews band bootlegs from their concerts on ebay. Ya not legal but I did it in college to make money since I had a cd burner.
If I remember correctly ebay didn't take a percentage of the shipping only the sale. So I'd sell it for $5 but charge $25 for shipping and they only took a % of the $5 so I'd keep a lot more money
Fees should be clear and upfront, But if a host is going to get a house cleaner after a guest leaves, it really does make sense for cleaning to be a separate lump sum fee.
I think alot of this is a symptom of both things Airbnb could definitely do better, as you outlined, as well a symptom of outside pressure on hosts.
Lots of hotels and cities lobbied to tax Airbnb hosts like hotels (via Airbnb) and have in many cases successfully done so. Corresponding with this trend is the rise of hosting businesses (LLCs and such) that see this as a arbitrage business opportunity to compete with traditional hotel / motels but extract either higher fees / rents, or dramatically lower maintenance costs (often, in the worst examples, both) by shifting much of the responsibility to the end users, because that's how the platform culture started off.
Its quite different to reasonably keep nice and tidy a spare room or maybe guest house and you interact with the host, have a neat experience. Its quite another to get stacked with fees and poor experiences and have expectations foisted on to you. Its very clear that hosting has taken too much of an entrepreneurial edge to it. Unfortunately, i think single experience driven hosts are driven out of the market because of overhead.
The other thing Airbnb didn't do well, is when guests were really bad to hosts, they didn't do enough to compensate hosts that had real, legitimate issues. There ended up being alot of overhead in hosting an Airbnb and I think alot of people who legit thought they were going to be able to give nice, great experiences at a reasonable value with reasonable expectations got exhausted after X many bad guests.
They haven't really done enough to police and/or support the platform on both sides to incentivize the original value proposition: unique staying experiences you can't get at a hotel.
Now, the upside is, Hotels feel the heat, and price more reasonably, and really got their accommodations down. As a result, I haven't used Airbnb since 2018 or so.
To be fair, this is something that hotels do as well. Ive been traveling to NYC a lot recently, and I consistently find that the nightly price seen in the search is usually about 20% less than the final price I pay due to taxes, fees, and resort fees.
> They should kill fees all together. Have it just leave that at the hands of the host to bake into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it.
It's perfectly reasonable for hosts to charge more for a single night stay than for a 2 week stay. Turning over an AirBnB between guests is a huge hassle and has real costs.
AirBnB should make the true cost per night more visible, but eliminating cleaning fees altogether would be a loss.
I mean, it depends on what you’re booking. Having private bedrooms as an option can work out nicely for a solo traveller. Cheaper than a hotel, fewer issues than a hostel.
> It should just be baked into the single nightly cost, and not a separate cost where you have to do the math to figure it all out.
Don't agree with that. I get the cleaning only once, I want to pay for it only once. What sucks is that airbnb doesn't show us the full, real price from the get go, but I'm not sure why the pricing model should change, especially since there are also tons of other fees like sales taxes, airbnb fees, tourism taxes and such.
What airbnb should do is show the final price when you search.
It's pretty much the same thing as the VAT. Displaying the final price rather than the price before tax could work, as witnessed by... every country that is not in North America. But I guess showing lower prices is good for business.
My favorite is the hosts who charge $nnn for cleaning fees but then expect you to basically clean everything including doing laundry, sweeping, etc.. then they complain when you have dirt on their floor mats asking for even more $$$
I think you touched on it but there is some reasonable compromise. Dirt on the floor mats and basic cleaning should be included, but if you are spraying champagne on the walls it would be reasonable not to be included. Where do you draw the line. If you want to charge for the "worst case" it will inflate your prices dramatically. If you charge for the average then people are basically incentivized to be unnecessarily messy. Of course many hosts will be unreasonable and charge extra for the very basics that should be included.
This doesn't seem that difficult? Hotels have solved this for decades already - if you trash the room they can and will charge you for cleaning it up, but you are also not expected to make the place good-as-new when you leave.
As a two-sided marketplace Airbnb obviously has no direct control over hosts and has trouble enforcing consistent standards... but at the risk of being a bit sarcastic: that's Airbnb's problem, not ours as customers. Other options (aka hotels, B&Bs, etc.) in this industry have figured this out and it's simply not a problem.
Well, yes... even in a hotel if you trash the place you're going to get charged extra. But that's not AirBNB. AirBNB hosts are usually upset if they have to clean anything at all.
I don’t think it’s that hard. You have some reasonable cleaning procedure that you always do (quick vacuum, make the bed, tidy up, etc.) and any problems beyond that you charge the guest extra. Of course you could quibble about the exact details but it seems like a stable situation for hotels.
when it becomes damage versus expected usage would be a good line just like hotels have been doing centuries.
basic cleaning services such as cleaning linens,dishes,furniture,light dusting, basic floor sweeping ,etc.
you destroy the property or require excessive cleaning because you had a party with excessive dirtiness like spilled drinks on walls , linens thrown all over the place and stained, etc. then include an abusive charge.
I browse the website in .com.au or .fr to see the final prices, then switch to .com to pay. It’s so dumb but that’s the American culture not necessarily Airbnb
Best thing I ever did personally was get a mileage credit card[0]. Made booking flights so much more transparent. I can see the total round trip price up front, and compare them easily, and never get a surprise on the final price. Its really nice.
[0]: mines through Capital One Venture but there's many ones out there, research which works for you!
They are on the side of hosts on many other things. Removing reviews, not caring when the place booked is completely off in comparison to the description. It's by design they want your money and keeping many dishonest hosts on the site makes more money (at least short term).
I refuse to use them ever again as I’m tired of their business tactics and their entitled hosts’ attitudes, but the real judge is if people stop using them due to the bait and switch baked into their product. If not, they’ll just carry on as usual.
By law, websites must show the final price in Australia. Set the location to australia, but the currency to USD. Now you are seeing the final price upfront.
Not that it matters. We haven't used AirBnB in ages because the fees are exorbitant.
EBay had the same issue. It's difficult to walk away from all of that cash. Some people are price conscious until they make a decision, then they don't care.
It's unfortunate, as they had a good thing going for a short time.
Also of note is fees hosts expect you to pay in cash outside of the platform. For example, paying the cleaning person. That won't appear in the price and may be hidden in the listing's "house rules".
Filtering by price is a frustrating experience when the service and cleaning fees aren’t factored into the prices I’m looking at. It’s more work than it needs to be to compare prices in areas with lots of listings.
It's also hilarious how you don't know what the checkout instructions will be when you pay for the reservation. Sometimes you don't find out until you're physically inside the Airbnb.
I'm curious, what kind of fees are hosts charging? I have a rental condo on AirBNB, our cleaning fee is $180, which is exactly what my cleaning company charges me to perform the clean.
The median in April 2020 was supposedly around $75 (1), but it of course wildly varies from host to host. The common perception is that they significantly increased during and after the pandemic, but that as far as I know isn't reflected in more recent data (2).
A lot of the objections around the cleaning fee are that hosts often have long lists of chores they expect guests to do in addition to a large cleaning fee, and sometimes those chores are not spelled out until you check in.
Myself I came to the conclusion I could usually find a hotel I liked better than an AirBNB for a similar price, but with much less risk that anything goes wrong.
I've seen plenty of airbnbs that require you to do all the cleaning but STILL charge a 200+ dollar cleaning fee. I'm done with it, there's just too much risk involved.
It's listed as an "early access" feature on the US website, and seems to be only available if you're logged in.
That seems disingenuous, because they've been doing it in other countries for a long time, including for logged-out viewers -- presumably because they were legally required to.
I added a note about this. Yes and now, I still find how it's done a bit overwhelming than what it should be. However, technically they do now show a "total" price in the search results. It still feels like a small step, way too late though.
AirBnB was fun at first when I could find someone renting out their personal beach house when they weren't using it, or an extra room in their house. I had many good experiences with family events or group get togethers at AirBnBs in the past.
In recent years, the majority of AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some guru's financial advice. The properties are barely maintained or have clearly broken features. Cleaning fees are sky high, but the houses don't feel clean when I arrive.
We showed up to one AirBnB and it didn't have any furniture. It was a completely empty house with some mattresses and blankets in the closets. All of the furniture in the photos was gone. AirBnB refunded us, but dealing with the issue consumed 1/4 of our trip and cost us extra money to find a replacement on short notice.
It's no longer the fun, personal experience of renting someone's property when they've got extra space. It's now a playground for pseudo-entrepreneurs who want to buy an investment property, hire a cleaning company, and then push the limits of what they can get away with without getting kicked off the AirBnB platform.
As a relatively early adopter of Airbnb, in 2012, I feel exactly the same way. Before my wife and I had kids, we'd rent a room in a host-occupied house, actually having breakfast and conversation with the host, and it was incredibly charming for a fraction of the price of a real B&B or hotel room. After having kids, about 2015, we started using the option to rent a whole house or apartment because it gave us more space than a hotel room (the key being a separate room for our kids to nap or go to bed before us) for maybe the same price. Then in the summer of 2019 we planned a cross-country road trip with a bunch of Airbnb reservations along the way, and it was a nightmare. About 2/3 of the way through the trip, after three or four bad (and very impersonal) experiences in a row (misleading descriptions, dirty but with lots of cleaning instructions, unable to gain access upon arrival, etc.), I contacted Airbnb and told them I was a loyal customer who just needed a break. After some argument, they gave me a credit that mostly refunded the cost of my two remaining reservations, but still we haven't used Airbnb since then. The idea of a whole-house rental for my family is still nice, but the costs have soared while quality has declined, so two-room or three-room suites at big chain hotels are looking pretty good again.
> "AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some guru's financial advice"
Pretty much this. Most Airbnbs nowadays feel like someone trying to operate a flophouse, but with 4-star hotel pricing. Value for money is just so incredibly poor, that plus the inconsistency and uncomfortably high probability of blowing up your hard-earned vacation time, it would take a lot for me to use it again.
I do like the format of renting whole houses, or at least places sized for families with space to hang out and gather. It's unfortunate that traditional hotels haven't generally stepped in to offer something like this.
I desperately want a "Vacation Homes by Hilton" offering, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least not broadly.
The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.
[edit] I have some pretty strong suspicions that this business model will be structurally limited to low-end lodging and extreme high-end lodging. Realistically the kind of service hotels provide (and that customers expect), at hotel prices, is only possible through economies of scale. Housekeeping is vastly cheaper because you have a single crew that services hundreds of rooms rather than commuting across the city to serve a smattering of far-flung properties. Likewise maintenance and customer service is vastly cheaper because the costs are spread across many rooms.
Without exploiting economies of scale AirBnbs simply won't be able to compete in this middle tier (which is where most hotel stays are at). It's only possible to make the math work for either very-low-rent flophouse-type places where services and maintenance is poor, or very high-end vacation properties where the lack of economies of scale is sustainable.
> I desperately want a "Vacation Homes by Hilton" offering, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least not broadly.
> The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.
There's Hilton Grand Vacations properties, which are kind of like this. I really like staying in them when I'm in Las Vegas for business, because they don't contain casinos, aren't designed to encourage you to leave the room like casino hotels, and generally provide nice spaces to work and gather your team if you want to work together on a project. They're much more family-friendly in general than a typical business hotel as well. The only downside is that they have a separate status system from other Hilton properties, so your Hilton status doesn't incur any benefits and you don't get stay credits towards status.
> In recent years, the majority of AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some self-help books online.
Airbnb encourages this, as it increases inventory for them and lets property owners engage in a race to the bottom on prices. Which as it turns out, affects the quality of the service!
Honestly somehow prices have just gone to a race to the top versus the bottom. If every time you march prices up it takes a week longer relative to the rest of the market to book that room, and you and the rest of the airbnb property owners don't necessarily mind waiting an extra week if it means you just hiked up prices, then prices are just going to keep going up and up so long as people keep coming. And they will keep coming, because as you are losing out your middle class tourists, you are gaining wealthy tourists, who are funding more luxury development and snowballing the effect until they are priced out for even more wealthy people.
I once showed up at an AirBnB condo and it had NO curtains, even though another building looked right into the bedroom. That also meant no curtains on the shower. I called AirBnB to complain and was told, well, did you see the pictures? And sure enough, the pics didn't show evidence of curtains. So no refund.
I now avoid AirBnB as much as possible, and when it's the only choice the amount of research I have to do is rage inducing. This is why brands exist, so you trust that every Marriott you stay at will have towels and curtains and all those other things, even if you don't see them in the pics. Meanwhile, the AirBnB brand is looking more and more like a lemon market for short-term rentals.
I can also trust Marriott properties to be reasonably clean, have working door locks, no cameras in the room, and the ability to change your room if the one they offered was bad. They seem to dish out OK room upgrades for free when the hotel isn’t booked out too. I was just at a Marriott property and the room AC didn’t work. One call later and the AC worked when I got back to the room. Mind blowing things that Airbnb doesn’t offer.
This is very similar to the scaling problem with Etsy. What started out as a way for creative people to make money from their quirky local crafts is now a marketplace filled with duplicative factory-made junk you can often also find on eBay or Amazon.
Lately Airbnb has tried to combat this obvious degradation in quality by highlighting high-end stays at unique properties that can cost absurd amounts of money (screengrab: https://imgur.com/nDu8tpL), so it looks cool but they know actual demand is low.
Airbnb is suffering from a tragedy of the commons. The higher quality units are subsidizing the reputation of the lower quality units, since they are all bundled together on a single platform (Airbnb).
Hotel chains solve this problem by punishing individual hotels for customer complaints (via fines).
Pretty sure every service like this goes that route. I rent a car on Turo, mainly because I don't need but it's upside down for now. It seems like there's many who run it as a side business, with a fleet of cars. This month Turo actually started issuing guidance on punishments for those who receive parking complaints, having too many cars parked at one house.
TikTok HATES AirBNB. I don't think that the tech folks have realized how reviled AirBnB has become. The main issue I hear about - and have personally experienced - are hosts requiring a ~$200 "cleaning fee," then ALSO requiring chores to be done at checkout time. There's also STILL a lot of reports of cameras in showers, toilets, etc - and total silence from AirBNB. They need to deal with these issues immediately.
Then, if you protest, they nuke your AirBNB rating and you can't book anywhere else. Ok, great - I'll go back to Marriott. It's cheaper, has on-site security, a pool, and I don't have to take out the trash.
Given TikTok's algorithm, it's hard to make a statement about TikTok in general. Most likely, you engage with anti-AirBnB content, so that's what you see more of.
That would require them to change their model to a curated list of rentals as opposed to a smorgasbord of shit. They know the more quality controls they put in place will result in less available units so there really isn't a motivation to crack down on shit rentals.
Eventually when enough people stop using the platform someone in a boardroom will ask why rentals are down and someone in market research will say quality control of rentals at which some pea brained solution will be dreamt up.
Also want to point out superhosts might of been attempt to address this problem but I've routinely picked superhosts and many have disappointed.
A small section may violently hate them (i've stopped using Airbnb as well) but the fact they are making increasing revenues is a sign that it's not working. I would love to know why some people aren't price sensitive.
Correct. Honestly, I'm a bit dismayed at the radio silence from AirBNB's Product teams in this thread. Vercel, Fly.io, AWS would be in here immediately.
i don't protest, i just don't do the tasks they ask me to. i don't know my rating but I've never had problems booking Airbnb's. if they want me to clean they can't charge a cleaning fee.
The last AirBNB I stayed at, I received a bad review. Their negative review stated, passively aggressively, that I had only completed "some of the checkout list items". The list of chores was 3 pages long and was provided after booking. They also charged me a $250 cleaning fee. Never again.
It seems like most people have a "never again" Airbnb story at this point.
I once rented a condo in a city on the east coast, and the rules mentioned that the kitchen is available but to avoid cooking anything "crazy". No further details were provided. My partner and I boiled two lobsters and sauteed a few scallops, thinking that wasn't a "crazy" thing to cook in a rental by the Atlantic ocean.
A few weeks later (one day after the review window closed), we got a DM from the owner telling us that they found the lobster shells in the garbage, and that us boiling the two lobsters was in violation of the rules. Supposedly, the odor from our cooking triggered their incredibly acute seafood allergy to the point where they could no longer live in their own condo, and they filed a complaint with Airbnb seeking $500+ in damages. There was, of course, no mention of this seafood allergy anywhere in the listing or in the rules regarding cooking.
Airbnb threw away the claim, but in an attempt to mollify the host, they allowed them to write a negative review of me (after the review window had closed) and how I permanently ruined their condo. Thankfully I don't care very much about having a spotless reputation of Airbnb anymore, but it's crazy to me that Airbnb did anything to appease someone who basically tried to extort another one of their users through their platform.
If this was a real business instead of a magical internet business you could take the 3 pages of chores and tell them where to stick it. Why are they allowed to alter the deal once you arrive?
Its not really a magical internet thing in this case, this reads like what a landlord would do with your security deposit. What do you know, let slumlords become unregulated hoteliers and they will do shady slumlord crap in the hotel industry too.
the last place i stayed in via Airbnb requested not only to take out the kitchen garbage, but to also deliver it to the city dump.
The place itself was nice and worth the money, but after paying the $100 cleaning fee i declined to turn my car into a garbage truck. I have not used it since.
Good advice, but I don't have to do any of this when I stay at hotels. I really like the core idea of AirBNB, but between their crappy hosts and the damage they do to neighborhoods, I won't deal with them anymore.
Amazing, a $250 cleaning fee AND a list of chores 3 pages long? So basically you were prepping the AirBnB for the next guest and were graded as if it were their employee. Is staying in private home or apartment over a hotel really worth all this? I just always think my time and stress level is worth more than this and opt for the hotel.
What's missing in this article is that Airbnb is actually profitable now. Operating income, last 3 years[0]:
2019 - $(0.5b) (loss)
2020 - $(3.5bn) (loss)
2021 - $0.4bn (profit)
2022 - $1.8bn (profit)
Like with Uber and WeWork, these startups only look good next to market leaders when they have billions in VC capital to undercut their competitors with. Once they IPO, they're on their own, and their business practices start looking suspiciously similar to the bloated, bureaucratic incumbents they once threatened to replace.
They grow like crazy at a loss and then take advantage of their market dominance to strong-arm the prices back up. To be honest I'm more shocked that hotels are still having trouble beating AirBNB prices. When we went to Hawaii we wanted to go to a hotel but the prices for the same view were so much cheaper with AirBNB.
That may be because Hawaii is small as tourist locations go, so hotels may be booked solid already. In many larger tourist destinations, I've found hotels to be cheaper. Not by much, but I will always take hotels over Airbnb.
It probably depends on location, but over Western Europe I'd generally say that if you just want a bed hotels are in the same price range as AirBnB while being much more predictable and reliable, and are available on short notice (booking the room at 11pm in the same night you want to sleep there isn't an issue, neither is checking in at 3am). AirBnB shines when you want more than a bed and a table, or when you want something more unique in local style.
hotels aren't really competing with Airbnb. it might appear that way, but they aren't interested in the same customers, and those customers will get scammed by an airbnb and go back to hotels anyways.
airbnb is for people who haven't learned the lesson about airbnb yet. Hotels aren't interested in competing on price with airbnb because they dont have to.
Most everywhere I travel I've found hotels to be cheaper. If I was willing to go with somewhat seedy motels, much cheaper. This may have to do with me mostly traveling to larger cities, though.
Marginally less than hotels. We were looking to book a condo in Hawaii for a month this year and the cost was 12-15k for a 1 bedroom with a pullout couch. This ends up being marginally cheaper than a hotel, but generally with a much worse property.
Typical accounting formatting represents losses in parens eg `$(5b)` and profits without, eg `$5b`. So you profit/loss annotations are redundant and your 2022 is confusing.
Airbnb's growth is pretty interesting when put into context of discussions I see about it in my own life and online. The company has gone from adored to reviled, and I myself have fallen back on classic hotels.
However, it seems that their bookings are up 20% year over year, so there must be a disconnect somewhere.
The last quarter's results reflect the impact of post-vaccination increases in travel and tourism. 20% up from a Covid-impacted landscape is not that great.
Airbnb was cool in the early days, when hosts were usually individual people just looking to make an extra buck on their vacation cabin in the mountains or something like that. Now it seems like Airbnb is dominated by companies who own/operate a bunch of host places. It's lost the personal touch. The last place I stayed at in Miami had an issue with the air conditioning - it wouldn't turn off, the place was freezing! I called the host, "Mark", the handsome guy in the Airbnb ad, who wrote all about his life in Miami. Well, I ended up talking to customer service rep in India. The dude just kept reading a script back to me, which was, of course, no help at all. I've heard other people with similar experiences - you get zero customer service once you're checked-in.
Exactly the same as Etsy. Last time my wife complained that even though the page states that the $100 item is located in the US, it dispatched from China. Sure enough, when I reverse image searched the product image, Aliexpress came up, with $20 as the listing price. Exact same images, even the wording was very similar. (And of course, with further digging, the original website came up, with their original product that the other sellers copied - with much better materials, a price tag of $350).
Etsy was real cool when it was a bazaar of small handmade items, and such. Now it's chock full of same garbage you can get on any large ecommerce site.
AirBnB has a super core problem: hosts are in short supply. This leads the entire service to see guests as a secondary concern. This leads to a pretty obvious problem: opaque pricing, poor customer service (never trust me, check trustpilot), and probably a serious problem for AirBnB: a resurgence of the vertically integrated hotel chain.
Airbnb doesn’t have a hosts supply issue. Actually in the past 3 years, hosts growth outpace guests growth
The issue is Airbnb attracted recently a lot of get-rich-quick types, similar to what see for Amazon sellers or crypto bros. We are far from the savvy host who want to share travel experiences and give you a unique experience
It now has quality hosts supply issue. Most of the places aren't designed or made for living, they were set up as bare minimum where you can crash on a bed (or, more likely, a couch) for the night and imaginatively call it "a comfy modern clean fully-equipped apartment close to everything" (where only the "apartment" bit will be actually true).
In 2019 it took me 30 minutes to scroll through a list and pick one of good places - or maybe I was just lucky.
In 2023 it takes over a week (I'm not exaggerating) of routine work every evening to find something that may somewhat match my requirements and wishes. All those filters except for price are now useless ("dedicated workspace" is a particularly bad joke), one literally has to skim over every single listing, review the photos and figure out what they really have. Honest good listings still exist but are drowned in sea of low-effort ones.
For a good portion of the airbnb market thats exactly what the guests want. They go, "I have 12 boys in new orleans for mardi gras, we are partying every day for a week straight, lets rent what is basically a frat house and make it cheap by sleeping 4 in a bedroom, and spend the savings on partying since the room is just where we pregame and pass out."
Sure, you can do this stuff in a hotel too, but sometimes the airbnb has cool stuff like a patio or a deck versus your bog standard hotel layout with too much bed and not enough floorspace for partying, not to mention a smoke detector. The lack of any staff oversight also makes it easy to party without fearing noise complaints or having staff see just how many people are staying in the unit. I'd wager airbnb has completely changed how big partying holidays like spring break works in a lot of cities for this reason.
Hm, maybe. It's very different from my typical forced-to-be-a-digital-nomad use case, which is "I need to be in $city/$country for {anything between 2 weeks and 4 months} and I want a private place to live in, with a comfy bed, proper kitchen with a large fridge, decent Internet, comfortable sturdy wooden desk with an ergonomic chair to work at, in a quiet area with a grocery store nearby". AKA home away from home, except that I surely won't find a proper coffee machine there (can't be helped), and that I'm having mini-vacations on holidays and weekends, exploring the new area.
The only alternative I know of is extended stay hotels, but those are extremely rare, especially outside the US. It used to be Airbnb was not just the only option, but also a blessing - I suppose because nomads were a major part of its guest client base. Now it feels like trying to find something tolerable in a pile of garbage.
It depends. I've stayed at many regular B&Bs over the years and many hosts try to make you feel at home. And, generally speaking, they're a more distinct experience than a business hotel is--though when traveling on business I tend to go with the hotel for predictability, 24 hour desk, etc.
If there is no supply problem, why have prices shot up ~30-50% in 4 years ? (Source : I am trying to book an Airbnb in London after a few years away from the platform)
The venture capital ran out. Same way the rideshare and food delivery services spiked in price. Freshman year of college, Uber was subsidizing rides, and was so cheap I would choose when to go visit a friend of mine on the other side of LA based on whether I could get there for less than $15. By senior year, an equivalent ride never fell below $30.
Prices have shot up 30-50% on a lot of things in the past 4 years(and mostly just the past 2) due to inflation. Real estate markets in most places have skyrocketed, so how would you figure real estate to go up but short term rental prices to stay low?
Tell me the price, make the host and tennant have a singular universal set of expectations. It's not hard. Holiday Inn Express has been getting my business lately. Everything is labeled, no wild sudden items after checkin like "don't forget to put the back door mat on the balcony railing so the racoons don't run off with it".
Everything that made AirBNB cool at first eventually made it bad inevitably. Glad to have made friends with hosts along the way before it went sour.
I have two friends that had AirBnB rentals, they've both given up. The initial novelty and fun quickly wore off and became a grind. The local LLC with 10+ properties will stay the norm now I think.
I think if you have an LLC booking hotel rooms and its not an individual booking out rooms, they need to comply with all building codes and regulations for hotels.
I wonder how much of this is just people being bigger jerks now than before. Just anecdotally service workers and small business owners in general seem to complain about a major shift in norms towards customers more often being abusive or even vindictive towards them.
Hosts often also get the short end of the stick, and get the similarly non-existent recourse opportunities. The issue is not with either - it's the way AirBnB does its business. Hotels began to seem attractive again also because vacationers don't want to risk their precious time and money. Hotels at least have experience, and the regulators up their ass.
Yeah, this is basically the true problem. Airbnb doesn't care about guests at all (they recently refused to refund a stay I had booked even though the place I was visiting was experiencing a literal natural disaster, and then deleted my negative review about extremely unpleasant interactions with the host). I agree that most people want a much more consistent and much less opaque user experience - the trick is how someone will be able to marry that with the sheer variety of places you can stay in on Airbnb.
I have a whole home AirBnB. My energy prices have tripled in the past three years. My labor costs have gone up 50% in the past three years. Guest has a problem connecting to WiFi? HandyMan charges $95 just to show up and $120/hour with a minimum of one hour. $200 just to reset the router. That eats into a $300/night stay quickly. It's always something and guests expect the same level of service as a hotel and that's not cheap to provide. That's why that even with a $2000 a month mortgage, I need at least $6000 a month to break even.
I leave 5 star reviews for all guests and my only checklist item is for it not to look like the hotel room from the hangover. I pay cleaners good money to clean your mess.
AirBnB has been vary guest friendly IMO. I have over 200 five star reviews. A guest tried to push for a discounted stay. I pushed back and they told AirBnB my place was unsafe and I was removed from search for a week.
EDIT: TLDR. I started this 4 years ago as a side hustle but I'm ready to be out of the game. It doesn't scale to provide a nice place that I also use as a vacation home. Also, I'm constantly replacing and repairing things. The only way to win is to be a slumlord AirBnB host
$300/night is more than most hotels charge with a lot of amenities and service. If you don't want to pay the handyman charges to reset the router, you can go and do it yourself for free. You're paying for convenience of not having to do it yourself and that cuts into profit.
Yeah, we also have a $2000 square foot home. That's correct. I can't stop what I'm doing at work to check on an issue with the home. $200 is the cost to get someone else to stop what they are doing and check on the home ASAP
There's no reason to think you must be profitable renting out a house by the night, or that you'll be efficient running a one client hotel that relies on a site like airbnb that has been in serious decline for some time.
In 2008 when the housing market crashed I got stuck way, way underwater on a mortgage. To avoid foreclosure I rented out the house (with a professional property manager), and I was shocked at the senseless destruction and idiocy of people. 3 times in a week the tenant complained that the furnace wasn't working. Each time a guy came out and said "the temperature on the thermostat is the temperature in the house. everything is working perfectly." and then billed me $120. Yet, each time the tenant complained (because he didn't believe the guy I guess??) the property manager had to send someone out. In retaliation for me not "fixing" the furnace (that was working perfectly) the tenant beat the living hell out of the walls and wood flooring, broke glass, and even put the knobs from the stove into the garbage disposal. Never again. I'll just bull doze the next house before renting it.
For future reference, that was a "inhospitable" scam (Aka uninhabitable scam.)
In many states (at least the ones that get cold) the lack of a working furnace means that the unit is not "hospitable" and the tenant is allowed to withhold rent until the unit is made hospitable. In some states, the tenant is not required to pay rent for the period of time the unit is not "hospitable." Your tenant tried to do that, but failed.
That's exactly it. That's the cost to pay a good handy man, that will definitely show up on short notice. I'm paying for those 5 9s of reliability. I can't stop doing what I'm doing at work at noon to drive out and resolve an issue that's likely user error.
That handyman is also blowing off other jobs and dealing with the fallback of blowing off of those other jobs. $200 is the market rate for that
It definitely is. I was lured in by the promise of 60K in revenue with 24K in mortgage expenses. There's so much wear and tear and so many things break. I agree that eventually it will be a race to the bottom. The good hosts and guests will leave.
I lived in Aribnb's for roughly a year and a half. They actually did a profile on our family on the Today Show on NBC about it.
I think the thing I hated about it the most was the system of hosts rating the guests. It was always stressful especially when our ability to simply secure our next place to live was dependent on, to some degree, a hosts subjective evaluation of how they felt the stay went. For instance I have a toddler, at one location my toddler played with some toys that were in the house. We put them back where they were but they were incorrectly arranged (not damaged just put back not the way they wanted) and the host left us a negative review. We disputed it and airbnb sided us, but the whole feeling of constant judgement makes it difficult to relax in a space. I wish they had some better / more objective system as you never know when you'll encounter an unreasonable person. To me this is the single biggest negative. A sort of cloud of social credit hanging over your head.
At this point I would never use Airbnb except for long term (30 days+) type of travel. Between the extremely intense chores you're basically given plus huge cleaning fees hotels are superior in nearly every way for short term trips. The significant % reduction for staying a month too makes it a lot more palatable. I think Airbnb sees this too which is why they're leaning so heavily into the digital nomad / long term travel user segment. It's a place they can genuinely win vs a hotel. For short term stays not dealing with unreasonable hosts, not getting surprise fees, and there not being a bunch of chores makes things significantly more enjoyable. As noted on social platforms by others getting hit with a massive cleaning fee and also then being expected to do chores also feels like a slap in the face.
It seems like the social credit system is actually quite good. The problem is it isn't page ranked or weighted. Low rated people should count for less and people who low rate everyone should count for less.
Dynamic range in your ratings should matter.
FWIW I use Airbnb and hotels extensively. They fill different needs for me. And sometimes I use the composites: Hilton Residences or whatever. So far mostly good. I generally don't do anything extensive. The most you'll get from me is putting the sheets in the dryer. If you want me to clean the shoe mat and stuff you need to have no cleaning fee.
Many Airbnbs don't let you do more than 30 days. In places like California, staying someone for over 30 days automatically turns you into a tenant, with tenant rights. There was a case where someone stayed in an Airbnb for over 30 days, became a tenant unbeknownst to the host, and then proceeded to squat there for months while the host had to go through the eviction process. It was a nightmare.
Airbnb would be great if it weren't for the damn cleaning fees and other assorted crap tacked on from the price that is shown when you search for a place. "Hey this is in my budget! Great! Lets go ahead and book it...hey why did the price triple now???"
Organizing on social media is probably a bad call, but many hosts have direct booking sites that they’d love to have people book through since they don’t have to pay the airbnb (or worse: VRBO) overhead.
The direct booking sites come free with most of the property management systems out there: Guesty, Hostaway, etc. so most hosts have them, they’re just not allowed to advertise it on the online travel agencies (Airbnb etc).
I used to heavily use AirBnB. I no longer do. I don't even bother checking it. The quality of experience / stay has gone down, and the price has gone up considerably. I now expect that an AirBnB will provide a worse experience for the same or higher cost than a hotel in any location I might travel to. The only benefit an AirBnB brings is that it may provide more square footage, but this is not worth the tradeoff when traveling solo or with my wife, it only comes into account when traveling with large groups where shared accommodations would be acceptable. I have a large double-digit number of stays with AirBnB over the years, and I don't even go to their website or app anymore.
A good example is over the summer, we had an AirBnB for my wife and my step-daughter and I in Rome for a few nights. We had so many issues that when we came back through Rome on our way back home I booked a 5-star luxury hotel. The hotel ended up being cheaper than the AirBnB when you count the tacked on fees, and had none of the issues we experienced, although there was less total square footage. It was in a better location as well, and the AirBnB was far from a luxury 5-star experience. I typically stay in 2-star or 3-star lodgings when I travel, and AirBnBs are now typically worse than a 2-star offer, but charging higher than 5-star prices. It's ridiculous.
Ya know, I remember a time when Airbnb was still pretty new (this would be 2010 or 2011 or so). Didn't have all the fees and other bullshit UX problems they have now. And it actually was pretty cheap. Often, you could get an interesting, cool, or off-beat room or whole unit/place/house for cheap and often the same or less than competing hotels. This made it compelling.
But then, one time, trying to get check into a place and the combination padlock or whatever wasn't working to get the key inside and I couldn't get ahold of the host took another 2 hours, I was like, I don't have time for this crap. That sort of problem would NEVER happen at a hotel.
And now, 12+ years later, while some things have improved (like keyless entry and whatnot that lots of hosts have finally), the situation is worse in many other areas, including cost.
Generally speaking, hotels work better for me. No bull shit fees (except some of those resorts that throw in the ridiculous daily 'resort fee' on top of the room rate, which is not reflected when you are searching and booking the room, except in fine print). No bullshit like cleaning up the room/place before you leave (isn't that why you are paying a cleaning fee?).
I think it suffered from a cobra problem to an extent. Airbnb was saying "rent out your spare square footage on the side for some beer money" and that model worked fine for a time. People would rent out a room for $50 a night and that would be great for them, because it was $50 they didn't have before that they wouldn't have made otherwise, and it was great for guests because it meant they could pay $50 and not be in a smoky motel.
Now we have people breeding cobras instead of being paid for cobras they already have so to speak. You have people building entire apartments with plans to put the entire thing on airbnb. Suddenly $50 a night doesn't cut it when you have a huge loan to pay off on that build, then if enough people in the market are operating like this prices just go up and up just like the wider landlord rental market (relative to the polite couple renting a backroom for way under market rate market, perhaps). You have people buying property and renovating it just to justify higher rental income, which only serves to feed the beast without creating any new supply in the market of course.
My team develops a platform (data.rabbu.com) thats based in large part on Airbnb data and I swear its kind of ridiculous how much hate Airbnb gets on social media. Like for one thing - compared to the other options Airbnb is doing WAY more for both hosts and guests. Try to get someone on the line at VRBO or Booking.com that cares one iota about any issues you have. Everything else is anecdotal. I think having a bad experience when you're on vacation is like 10x worse than anything else. So any bad experience with an Airbnb gets amplified and whenever people get a chance they'll go blue in the face telling you about the time some shady host tried to put them on ice and harvest their organs. Cleaning fees going up? Guess what - cleaning sucks, and the hospitality industry got completely gutted by Covid. So maybe they're not trying to rip you off, maybe they can't find anyone to clean for the price everyone stills expects based on pre-Covid travel.
For me it’s absolutely horrible staying in a hotel with kids. You either all stay in one room (so no fun once they’ve gone to bed and we sit in the dark) or you buy two rooms (normally really expensive) and then either try and find the normally-unavailable option on hotel websites to buy interconnecting rooms or sleep one adult and one child in twin beds in each room. It’s rubbish. There’s nowhere for them to really play either. AirBnB fixes all of this.
As an American with four little kids, I agree that this is the most compelling reason to choose Airbnb over hotels at this point, but we've still fallen back on hotels in the last few years. Places like Embassy Suites or Residence Inn with two-room and sometimes three-room suites have proven to be competitive for us in terms of price vs. space, especially when adjusted for risk after a string of bad Airbnb experiences. You can see my earlier comment on the thread. I do agree that there are some remote places where there's maybe an Airbnb and little else. Sometimes we've found cabin rentals in state parks to be hidden gems.
Yep, Airbnb more often than not is the only option for families, especially those with young children.
I recently ended up booking a 2 bed apartment for essentially the same price as a nearby hotel. I don’t like the overall Airbnb experience, but I also don’t want to pay ~2x for an additional hotel room.
Not necessarily true. The suite/long-stay brands like Residence Inn usually have kitchenettes. (Not that I usually use them other than the refrigerator.)
Some people will rent a house to throw a party. Maybe their place is small or they just don't want 50 people in their house or maybe they want a swimming pool for their kid's birthday party.
I've been using AirBnB for about ten years, about 30 or 40 stays in total.
There are a number of issues.
1. When I come to use AirBnB again, and so to log in, I never know if I will be able to log in. AirBnB repeatedly break log in, and in ways which can be problematic - "your account has been frozen, click here to notify support, we'll email you in a few days". That's not what you want to discover when you are looking to book now.
2. Relating to that, AirBnB support is Satan's method on Earth to cause and spread screaming psychic and emotional torture amongst the human population. It is the worst. Screaming, dribbling, rabid insanity. It is unspeakable. There is no support, because you do not use it, ever.
3. AirBnB seems completely unaware, or uncaring, about the actual outcomes of the various mechanisms they have in place in their product. The "clean fee" problem is a recent example, but I've heard many more. This is classic large-company syndrome; completely oblivious to the actual experience of the end user.
4. I increasingly hear now of negative reviews being removed by AirBnB. This is putting their entire proposition at risk; if I cannot trust reviews, every booking is blind, and that's not good.
5. A long term problem is that most hosts do not know how to price their property. You can see a lot on the map, but look more closely and a lot of it is crazy money.
6. Finally of course, AirBnB keep raising their fees to landlords and tenants. They now charge monopoly rates, and they need to, because the company is I would say vast and bloated.
The big advantage AirBnB has over every other company in this space is they bake long-term stay discounts into their UI/pricing model, and so they are normally offered. I do not see that on VBRO, etc.
I constantly see bad feedback on Airbnb and Twitter, and when I ask where these things happened, it's usually USA. I lived in Airbnbs almost exclusively the whole 2022, and travelled through various european countries, moved 32 times total. I've never had any of these problems, any cleaning fees or other stuff like that. I've rented full apartments for $70 per night, where I could cook, do laundry and in general feel much more comfortable than in a hotel for a stay longer than a week.
Yup, everyone surprised by the ticky tacky cleaning fee nonsense has probably not gotten a security deposit back in recent years. Now you have the management companies that make a slumlord mom and pop look like a kind relative running some of these vacation rental properties as well, applying the same rigid Orwellian policies designed to shake out as much money from you on your way out as possible.
There must be some books or trade magazines out there where they are all getting this stuff...
Small sample size but the only time a host complained about how clean I left a place was in Tignes, France. Their complaint? There were crumbs on the floor, _under_ the overhang of the dishwasher.
I've probably booked 15 airbnbs in the US, and they've all been great. No complaints of unruly hosts, or crazy checkout chores. I think if you stick with superhosts or any property with lots of reviews, you'll usually have a good time. My biggest problem with airbnb at this point is the hidden fees until checkout.
My wife and I are what I call “hybrid digital nomads”. We stay in a unit in a “Condotel” [1] we bought last summer six months out of the year - October through mid March - and we fly around the US staying in mid range extended stay hotels the rest of the year.
We experimented with AirBnb one time last year while we were in Florida looking at places before we bought. While the experience wasn’t bad, we really prefer hotels.
At a hotel, we always have access to a gym, the vast majority of the time we have access to a pool and we have consistency.
I know exactly how much we will be paying, we check in before we get there on the app, our digital key is usually ready and we go straight to the room and unlock the door with our phone. When we get ready to leave. We leave. We don’t have to wash anything. Clean up anything. Nothing. We just leave.
We don’t have to worry about auditioning to find a place to stay our ratings as guests and we know the exact address of the hotel.
We usually fly out on Sunday. When I land, I want to know what I’m going to get. I prepare my work setup when I land. My wife does an Instacart order.
I don’t have to worry about shady owners, renting places that aren’t zoned for short term stays etc.
If I have an issue, and the hotel can’t or won’t fix it, I can look for another hotel, cancel the reservation with no questions asked and move on.
Not to mention that I’m also getting loyalty points along the way - worth around 25-30% - of each dollar spent for future stays.
We are using the points we earned to stay free for a week this year in a San Juan, PR, Los Angeles, Niagara Falls Canada and Toronto. We stayed in downtown Savannah for a week free New years week.
Just wonder about your lifestyle, you must live minimal in a "suitcase", no? Do you use some storage services? Where you eat? I wonder as hotel room with kitchenettes are limited to very basic appliances.
I'm curious, how did you find a condotel to buy into? This is the first I've heard of something like this, and I live in a pretty touristy area of Florida.
Our original plan was to move to Florida full stop. We were looking on Redfin for a condo with a view, access to pools, walking distance to restaurants and it showed up.
We called the real estate agent and she explained the concept and said we could only live there 180 days. I was initially disappointed. But then my wife said we wanted to travel anyway, so why not travel around the US the rest of the year.
BTW, I tried to find the most even handed article of the pros and cons. Most of the sites you find are by real estate agents who want you to buy. Let me be more clear.
You will lose money over the course of the year on almost all of them even if you put the required 25-30% down.
The income offsets some of the holding costs.
I had a plan going in and this was never meant to be an investment.
Hotels are light years easier, and I don't worry about anything. Last AirBnB I had to read a list of rules a mile long. $200 cleaning fee and I still have to take the trash out. Also every host has a different set of rules. No thanks. Quality between bnbs is also wildly different, I simply don't care that much.
Similar experience. I used to feel like a pro. I was always very particular and would spend a lot of time parsing reviews, and as a result always got amazing AirBnBs. I assumed the haters were just bad at picking rentals! But the last few years I've had a string of very sub-par places with stellar reviews. Now, I can't trust the reviews. That, and the price gap between decent hotels and AirBnBs has certainly narrowed.
For comparison, US median house prices are up by 42% over the same period [1]. Hospitality prices (especially for traditional hotels, which raised rates by about 10%), are actually significantly trailing inflation.
I stopped using Airbnb after being scammed by it two times in a row. Both times the property rented was unliveable and completely different than the description. They said they couldn't do anything about it. I asked if I can at least review it so others don't fall into the trap. They said sure.
A few days after my review went online they removed it because "checkout didn't take place". It did take place and I am out several hundred Euros. I guess they wanted me to spend the night with the scammer in unliveable place.
The whole experience was refusal of cooperation by Airbnb and protecting the scammer. I think it's very likely they are on the scam themselves. Afterall the only person who is out of money is me and I am not even allowed to warn others (being left late in the day to find emergency accomodation in the high booking season is another small problem I had to deal with).
The whole process is designed to make it as difficult as possible to win a case vs dishonest host or even leave a review (ridiculous design like max 1000 words of review, no ability to go back if you make a typo and click next, several minutes of chatting with bots before you can get disinterested human the line etc.)
If you don't want to get scammed with no recourse don't use Airbnb. The reviews you see are heavily filtered to make hosts look better. Hotels are better and cheaper. Private apartments are way better via Booking as they take customer's side regularly (which is why many Airbnb hosts find Booking hard to work with).
Do hosts get to set the price for their offerings? I remember talking to the owner of a place I was staying at, and he asked me how much AirBNB was charging.
He said it was completely algorithmic, and outside his control. Because the place I was staying at was new, without a lot of reviews, it was a crazy good deal — he probably made $50 for my stay, which by rights should have been more like $300.
I suppose that, in that situation, the cost of those hidden fees like cleaning might be a knob hosts can turn to feel in control.
Three years ago we made a list of recipes. We're not very creative in the kitchen, so we've just been cycling through them.
When we started, I wrote down the price of each ingredient. For the last three years I've been buying the same things at the grocery store and watching the total increase.
I know the official inflation numbers are lower than 33%, but that's about the increase I'm seeing in the grocery store.
I'm no lover of Airbnb, but I think this is just money getting worse.
According to comments, seems like airbnb is a victim of its own success, too few hosts. But hosting is already a problem in many places as it pushes up rents for 'ordinary' residents. Where is this heading to, will everything become an airbnb, and we all become nomads? We will finally own nothing and be happy.
Also a lot of people talk as if airbnb and hotels are interchangeable, but they are not. In my touristy european area, airbnb is everywhere and hotels can't match what people offer there. It's really about the different types and locations of accomodation that airbnb promotes in its homepage now, not for simply finding 'a place to sleep' like a hotel. Both of them have their place, but airbnb has a lot more space to expand in new types and modes of accomodation that we haven't discovered yet, and hotels cannot directly compete with those offerings.
How about all the hosts that think I should pay insane cleaning fees and then ask me to clean up? I'm not doing sweeping, loading a dishwasher, or taking out your trash. I'll never trust AirBNB again and I used to be an avid supporter when I was travelling 1-2 times a week.
The last straw for me was when the host refused to communicate for for 5K stay during XMAS in NYC. It took 2 days of hounding AirBNB and them also not being able to communicate with host. I also had to point out that address in question was a commercial building with no apartments in it. They went out of their way to steal my money. Finally my wife ended up getting someone who cared and when she rattled off the company values aka empathy, it changed the entire conversation and we finally got a refund. I can't and won't do that again so hotels is where it's at for me moving forward.
AirBnB is a scam and is incredibly harmful to local populations, so I am enthusiastically happy that their increased rates have resulted in so many vacancies.
I can either utilize a hotel which will take care of virtually every need I have wherever I'm at, or use an AirBnB and get stuck with doing my own housekeeping for twice the price.
>'Last month, Amanda Morari spent her sister’s bachelorette weekend at a lakefront cottage in Ontario province. The washer was out-of-order and the vacuum wouldn’t charge so the women spent their last day “wetting paper towels and wiping the floor,” she said.'
>'The host told her not to worry about it, Ms. Morari said, but then came the unexpected: she got a three-star review because the cleaning wasn’t up to the mark. Her perfect five-star rating dipped to 4.1.'
Protip if you're looking to travel to a typically well-toured place (eg Vail, Tahoe, Wine Country, etc.) --
The old school vacation rental companies are still the best game in town. These are often small local businesses with names like "Tahoe Mountain Rentals". They've been doing this for years (decades?), know all the local property owners, have the best inventory, and are usually professionally-run operations that come as close to the actual hotel level of hospitality as possible.
They've had to co-list a lot of their properties on AirBNB recently, but you'll often find better rates just searching for the properties and booking directly from the management companies.
Unequivocally no, Shadowstats is garbage. Their methodology doesn't even make sense -- if they were actually "calculating" it, their measure would continue to diverge from CPI instead of just adding some fixed amount to the CPI number.
If you look at their chart from say, 1990 to today, they show something like 8-9% annual. 8% annual inflation for 33 years would be ~1,300% cumulative. Do Hondas that cost $15k in 1990 cost $200k today? Does a gallon of milk that cost $1.50 in 1990 cost $20 today? Even housing -- a $100k house in 1990 would cost $1.4M today based on that rate... that may be true in very specific neighborhoods but that's not inflation as much as supply:demand mismatch in Tier A cities.
I stopped using Airbnb and went back to hotels. It's gotten too expensive with draconian rules, it's just not worth it. And at hotels, they clean your room once a day, there's no value in Airbnb anymore.
But I do find it interesting that even in the face of rapidly rising price increases, companies like Airbnb and Uber are very profitable and it hasn't hit them at all. I wonder what this phenomenon is, if it's just acceptance of higher prices or a convenience factor.
I get that CPI is calculated so carefully, but when all is said and done, I think my personal inflation being at 50% average through most of the pandemic is going to be the final settling number, and they won't admit that until 2025 I think.
In my personal opinion this was driven by the massive hiring sprees that elevated a lot of bus boys, waitresses, and other jobs to "experience officers", "diversity officers", HR positions that never existed before.
I've been applying to companies at size levels that I've worked at before that had just one HR person that was dedicated to payroll. Now there are entire teams of workers that process applications.
The average startup is operating as if it's UnitedHealth Group or something.
Now don't get me wrong, I am so glad people are getting higher paying jobs, but the pandemic causing that job rush so fast and furiously is what brought on this inflation.
Every layoff article we see where they are letting go of 15% here, 20% there, it's nothing compared to the actual 80% hiring these companies did 20-23. That 80% hiring rate IS the inflation we're seeing.
We elevated a lot of people to wages all us programmers had about 15 years ago - 90 - 120k. And of course us programmers are now asking 160 - 220k. Again, great that people are more employed and there are higher wages. However the inflation that went so fast and furiously with it - it's causing the people that aren't so lucky to quickly fall into homelessness, drug use, depression and suicide (by drug use mostly).
I'm a heavy AirBnB'er. As in, I live in them part-time.
I just want a kitchen, a laundry machine for longer trips, and a nice place to work. I also don't want a hotel even if it has those things because then there are lots of other guests around.
AirBnB is the best way to do this especially for month + stays; but you have to carefully check host reviews and cleaning fees. Any hint of host weirdness in the reviews (I've seen some truly odd things) and I book elsewhere.
So many of the places aren't that good for the price, or they have strange rules attached.
I cancelled one place, after it turned out to be (quite a nice) shed at the end of the owners garden... with the owner present and their family - you had to walk past all the toys strewn about their garden; I don't want to wake them up because I come back late.
Similarly, others with crazy intrusive rules; only mentioned after booking.
I feel like airbnb fees have gone through the roof, and I am done with them. So much so that we are no longer using them. I am now booking hotels, and if we want to rent a house we just use short term rental companies(who also post the same houses on their site and also on airbnb). We spent almost $60k on airbnbs the past 3 years so thats money that airbnb will no longer see.
We've been staying in hotels or hostels a lot more ever since the price and fees for AirBnB went through the "roof". As others have mentioned, the quality of hosts have gone from actual caring people to a shit side hustle. Really disappointing.
What other services are people using instead of AirBnB?
It's quite convenient to keep a book of contacts where you have stayed before and then can negotiate directly on a rate the next time you travel there. Something to be said about returning to the same places you've enjoyed before.
I've stopped using AirBnB, it's a worse experience than hotels now and usually very similar price due to all the fees. It was an awesome service several years ago but not anymore.
With the increases in fees, hassles, cleaning procedures and whatnot, it just doesn't seem either cost effective or convenient to book an Airbnb in the vast majority of circumstances. Most mid-level chain hotel/motels are cheaper, cleaner and more ubiquitous. I'd rather book a $100/night room at a Holiday Inn Express that I don't have to worry about than an Airbnb that comes with a whole host of unknown hassles and fees.
Anecdotally, I am traveling to a beach town in the off season (east coast US) next week to see family. A lot of Airbnb's were showing rates competitive with local hotels, ~$120/night. Staying 3 nights, I expected to checkout seeing ~$400, but upon checkout I see a bill for $800! Needless to say, I am staying at a hotel for $400. At least I won't be given a list of chores to complete upon checkout ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It looks to me like AirBnb has an equalizer effect on property rentals - I looked at prices at some remote places in Argentina before a trip to Andes and they were pretty much similar to US prices. There is a little benefit in using it now whereas 10 years ago when I did my first trip around the world AirBnb actually allowed me to visit many places without killing my budget, but it wouldn't be possible these days.
I really love AirBnB. These guys are marvelous at disruption of the oldest market on the planet. Thanks to AirBnB competition hotels are much more pleasant to stay, offer better service, better amenities and facilities, tidiness and cleanness, and their prices are really in check. Hotel staying experience is a best than ever before.
I also tried to stay with AirBnB couple of times and avoid it ever since.
Tbh, I much rather spend money on resorts and hotels. I don't want to pay any extra fees for anything else. Last time I used one was 3 years ago. We had to cook, clean, etc... We decided to just save more and go to a resort/hotel.
Of course Airbnb has its use cases but in general, hotels are way better, and let's not talk about hidden cameras on properties, etc...
I would like to be able to leave negative reviews for guests when I'm not their host. This could be automatic, just add a "didn't put out the garbage correctly" to everyone who stays at a particular listing.
This kind of housing inflation is not exactly unprecedented. Nominal rents in my city "shot up" 41% from 2013-2016. It's just what happens in supply-constrained markets.
Or there is not and the "Walmart of Hotels" is already the goddamn Holiday Inn.
And AirBnB is discovering what every "disruptor" is discovering: the system existed for a reason. The rules were there for a reason. Things cost what they cost for a reason. And the only way to come in under those prices is to cheat someone somewhere.
Hosts want to show lower prices, so in search you don't see all the fees, but then when you get all the way down the funnel you finally see these completely ridiculous fees (usually around cleaning) of what you'll actual pay. I don't understand why Airbnb is still on the side of hosts with this. They need to change the UX, and it would expose so much of the BS hosts try to pull around rates. This would quickly kill the need for hosts to try to game the system like they do now.
Also in general, I refuse to use Airbnb these days when it's not only more than a hotel, but the audacity of some hosts have for checking out is hilariously dumb (cleaning, vacuuming, laundry, etc.). The reliability of hosts is all over the place, I see so many horror stories of last minute cancellations, hosts trying to pull one over on guests, and other sketchy practices they continue to allow.
Note: I could be wrong now though (maybe they do show up front pricing now/), but they already burned the bridge where I stopped even looking at them as an option.
Note (again): I just checked, and it does show a "total cost" in search, but it's still pretty deceptive. It should just be baked into the single nightly cost, and not a separate cost where you have to do the math to figure it all out. They should kill fees all together. Have it so it's just left at the hands of the host to make into a single cost that they want to charge per night, and simplify it.