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0 pointsdustinmoris5y ago0 comments

I was speaking specifically of AirBnb because a clean, good reviewed room in a central location in any city comes almost at the same cost as a hotel room minus all the other things. Here is the thing, my wife and I did an around the world trip for an entire year and we did not stay once at an AirBnb. I checked AirBnb in every new country and every time it lost against a hotel or a hostel. Most AirBnbs were priced at the level of a hotel room, so if we wanted to splash out (after roughing it for a few weeks) then we booked a hotel for the price of an AirBnb and if we wanted something cheaper than a hotel then hostels beat AirBnb by miles every single time. Especially outside Europe many hostels were offering an unbeatable experience where you could get so much more comfort and value for little money than what the cheap AirBnbs had to offer. If during an entire year of travelling we didn't book an AirBnb once (despite trying) then this speaks for itself IMHO - at least from my point of view.

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everythingswan5y ago· 2 in thread

It sounds like you hired it for specific reasons, finding a low cost option quickly or treating yourself to _all the things_, and I don't think AirBnB tries to do those things well.

Try hiring hotels or hostels for large gatherings: bachelor/bachelorette parties, weddings, family vacations, etc. and I think it will be easier to see the difference. They compete more with vacation rentals, which seems old-fashioned since their online inventory always sucks.

I also think hotels are impersonal. As mentioned in this thread, they market themselves as "having a local experience" and I think that's been an effective message. I have gotten great recommendations from hosts on food, dining, and things not to do and I get to choose the location/theme of my stay too. Do I need to work? Am we relaxing for a couple days? The choose your own adventure aspect means that AirBnB is the starting place for all those searches, not hotels.

I also think there is a real lack of comparable options to hostels in the states so those could be similar jobs here (not abroad). I know of 1 hostel in my hometown near the airport (top 20 US city by pop).

I do agree that great hosts will push up prices to be comparable to hotels and the gap is closing steadily. I think you can still find great middle ground in most cities.

dustinmorisOP5y ago

> Try hiring hotels or hostels for large gatherings: bachelor/bachelorette parties, weddings, family vacations, etc. and I think it will be easier to see the difference. They compete more with vacation rentals, which seems old-fashioned since their online inventory always sucks.

I agree with you that AirBnb fits much better into that category. Having said that, I also frequently rent an entire chalet with friends for skiing and even then we use websites which cater specifically for those types of accommodation (especially in France there are so many good websites to book chalets) that the offerings on those websites exceed AirBnb again in every possible aspect.

Besides that, I don't think that investors have valued AirBnb at the current levels with the idea that AirBnb only caters to bachelorette parties and a few odd student gatherings. That market is not nearly as big as AirBnb is currently going for.

alpha_squared5y ago

I think the key here is the brand, which does go a long way. When traveling to a new place, I don't know what to look up to find whole-place rentals in the area and Airbnb is a default to finding what's in the area. In that way, Airbnb's value is in its listing/"aggregation" platform, not necessarily the listings themselves. After all, there's very little to stop a competitor from cloning Airbnb's model (and those clones do exist).

Personally, while I default to Airbnb's for finding stays when I travel, I've found myself gravitating back towards hotels as of late because they were generally better value propositions for what I was looking for.

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