I guess you know what you're going to get if you're staying at a national chain that you've stayed at before, but there's not always one available or in your budget.
Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.
In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.
In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.
Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable.
After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city.
Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.
Between HotelTonight and the actual property (a Kimpton Hotel), it was resolved in under 90 minutes.
Look -- I've had issues with Hilton, Marriott, and HotelTonight -- that just comes with the territory when you spend 200+ nights a year in hotel rooms. How they deal with the issue is what brings you back (and honestly, it's why I'm lifetime diamond at Hilton, even though I did a LOT of work for marriot.com a few years ago).
How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?
That would never happen with a hotel.
You can't leave a written review, but maybe that's appropriate if you haven't actually stayed at the place.
That said, in December my ex wife had an Airbnb cancel just before her trip. She had to find another place in a hurry at twice the price.
Also, every time a hotel has not had a room when I showed up, they put me in a nearby hotel of similar or better quality. I'm sure that doesn't always happen, but it is the standard for quality hotel chains.
Another is that it's much harder to run a scam at scale. "Becky and Andrew" can get away with this for an extended period because tomorrow they can be "Melody and Joe" and "Jane and Todd" the day after. Marriott has been Marriott since 1957, and can't change quickly. They know that if they start running scams, they will hear about it. Initially from reporters, eventually from state attorneys general.
A third is that AirBnB, especially in their IPO runup, has a strong interest in a) maximizing revenue and profit nubmers, and b) covering up problems. Many billions of dollars are on the line here. As we've seen with Groupon and Uber and WeWork, individuals can get very rich if they can create the appearance of runaway success at IPO time, regardless of long-term prospects.
I often find hotel reviews are a mix of pre and post-renovation photos and it’s a roll of the dice for what room I’ll get when I show up.
Maybe it’s just because there aren’t too many Airbnbs that have 15 year old listings.
Hotel chains are also experts in misrepresentations and omissions often fueled by fake positive reviews. During my recent stay in Manhattan at $350+/night hotel - the whole building was wrapped in construction fabrics and workers were walking right in front of my window all week.
This of course haven't been mentioned during reservation.
But at least you deal with host management in person, and not with some shady pimp hiding in a background.
And then of course - you can file chargeback with credit card if everything else fails.
It is more accurate to say "You don't get what you don't pay for".
It's a lot easier to get an idea of what to expect from a given hotel (especially chains) because they have more volume than any single AirBnB, and you get more value out of that knowledge about one hotel (or especially chain) because it applies to more than one unit (and for chains, in more than one location) so it's not only applicable to travel in one place when one unit is available.
