For single travelers IMO there isn't a good reason to pick Airbnb over a hotel. But there are types of properties that aren't really available widely in hotel-form: the vacation house.
Want to gather with your family in a big house for some holiday? There isn't really anything else other than Airbnb (or Vrbo, which has many of the same issues). Some very heavily vacation-oriented places have hotels that rent out properties of that sort, but in most places this isn't an available product category.
Buuuut even with this said, I'm very hesitant to stay in Airbnbs nowadays.
I just had a terrible experience a month ago - rented a vacation house that had great reviews and looked great. Arrived after a red-eye flight and a long drive... and the lockbox code is wrong. The house is also in the woods so there was no cell reception, so drove a half hour to the nearest area with reception, contacted the host (hosts are never available on Airbnb, naturally), sorted that out, and got into the house... and it was filthy. Top to bottom filthy with air fresheners in every room to cover the smell.
Immediately left and booked a room at the local Hampton Inn, which was overall a far superior experience. Airbnb in all of their grace only gave me ~70% back despite y'know, a totally unusable product. I'm still out over ~$1,000 over the whole thing, and Airbnb seems entirely ok with... what feels a lot like fraud?
The reliability of the Airbnb experience is so poor that I'm at this point completely unwilling to hinge a family vacation on it. It's like rolling a 1d6 and needing to score 3 or above. Just way too risky.
Seems like the Hampton inn suites are the hotel alternative for family vacations. The ones I’m thinking of are basically complete with a fridge, cooking range, and apparently on premise laundry. Being able to get a separate room for kids with a door open between the two is a thing at many places too.
And of course you’re just dealing with a corporation. It’s not someone’s personal home. The management might be weird at a hotel or something but that weirdness would still be spread across many more units-and it has other mechanisms and people in play to normalize the whole experience. AirBnB seems much more ripe for abuse.
This seems to be a very common experience. I suggested booking an AirBNB for a team off-site a few months ago and heard half a dozen variations on it from a ten person team: code wrong and no host overnight, blatantly misrepresented properties, toilets overflowing upon entry, no power, etc. I haven't travelled much in a good number of years so I was very surprised how much the situation had changed.
Want to gather with your family in a big house for some holiday? There isn't really anything else other than Airbnb (or Vrbo, which has many of the same issues). Some very heavily vacation-oriented places have hotels that rent out properties of that sort, but in most places this isn't an available product category.
Buuuut even with this said, I'm very hesitant to stay in Airbnbs nowadays.
I just had a terrible experience a month ago - rented a vacation house that had great reviews and looked great. Arrived after a red-eye flight and a long drive... and the lockbox code is wrong. The house is also in the woods so there was no cell reception, so drove a half hour to the nearest area with reception, contacted the host (hosts are never available on Airbnb, naturally), sorted that out, and got into the house... and it was filthy. Top to bottom filthy with air fresheners in every room to cover the smell.
Immediately left and booked a room at the local Hampton Inn, which was overall a far superior experience. Airbnb in all of their grace only gave me ~70% back despite y'know, a totally unusable product. I'm still out over ~$1,000 over the whole thing, and Airbnb seems entirely ok with... what feels a lot like fraud?
The reliability of the Airbnb experience is so poor that I'm at this point completely unwilling to hinge a family vacation on it. It's like rolling a 1d6 and needing to score 3 or above. Just way too risky.