I think a lot of straight folks don't understand the mental calculus that goes through a gay person's mind when they travel. I'm at the stage of my life where when I go on vacation, I want to relax and feel at ease. Why would I spend money to go someplace where I may feel unwelcome, or worse, unsafe? For example, there are a few Caribbean nations that are beautiful, but notoriously unwelcoming to gays. Jamaica can have someone else's money.
In an Airbnb, I don't think I've ever felt unsafe, but I'd also rather not feel unwelcome. I don't want to have to worry about some last minute thing coming up making the place unavailable if I mention my partner. With MisterBnB I know I never have to worry about that, and I know my sexuality won't rise to the level of anyone even caring. Even if that's true 80 percent of the time on Airbnb, I just don't want to have to deal with that 20 percent chance of having a bad experience.
I think that's the thing that a lot of (not all) average white straight able-bodied cis-gendered people dismiss. Every slight, every rejection, even if it's not blatant it's in your head: I'm being treated differently not because of what I say or do, but because of who I am. On a good day you might forget for a little while, but you let your guard down for a little and there it is again. It's inescapable and you have to build resiliency in every aspect of your life to not get crushed by it.
The flip side is also sad but ultimately useful, I know to avoid shops that proudly display the Trump, Let's Go Brandon, Blue Lives Matter, Confederate Flag, Don't Tread on Me, the one weird flag that's like fuck Biden but written with guns, or honestly the American flag. And look, I completely agree with the stance "those don't necessarily imply homophobia," you can hate Biden and love the gays, you can love America and the gays, plenty of my conservative friends do, but the kind of person who flies the flags at their home or business is on a whole different level.
For example, I miss a "good table" option on AirBnB.
I have to manually discard over 90% of the listings after looking at the images because there is no table suitable for work. That is so time-consuming.
It's not that I want to work at home all the time, but still I need a proper table to put my laptop on. A proper chair and a monitor would be golden of course.
And there are a bunch of additional things I do manually too. For example reading the reviews. Meanwhile, I am pretty good at predicting the quality of a place by reading the reviews. The stars are somewhat of an indication. But not reliable at all. I had really bad stays at places that got 100 reviews and an average of 4.7 stars. Hosts have too much influence on this metric.
Here are two examples of positive signals that help me find nice places:
1) How long the reviews are.
Hosts can remove bad reviews. And they can manipulate their guests into writing 5-star reviews. But they cannot really manipulate them to write long, enthusiastic reviews with many details.
2) How many of the reviews say "I have stayed at many AirBnBs and this one was one of the best".
This is something I usually write when I particularly liked a place. And it turned out a good signal to find nice places.
I often wonder if one could build a business by creating a site that lists a small subset of AirBnBs that are manually vetted like this. I already wrote my own web based tool to organize and sort AirBnBs that I am interested in. So it would not be a lot of work to make these lists public.
Why are you still using airbnb?
Like the person you responded to I also spend a great deal of time searching for suitable long term stays. I think there is a large gap in the market for reliable brands/services with solid customer service (which AirBnB lacks) and amenities for modern longer term tech travelers (desks (ideally standup), fast wifi, kitchens, suitable space for 2 to work separately, washer/dryer, etc). If I could just look in a city and say “oh there’s a X there around an area I want to visit, I’ll just book that” it would be oh so nice.
If I want something different or fun, or a place that's shared so I can talk to people, I'll use airbnb.
Airbnbs also tend to be cheaper for longer stays (more than 4 nights).
The type of standardized hotel room you describe sounds like the small rooms that are made to sleep during the night and leave during the day. Not for "living" in a foreign city.
s/AirBnB/lodging --> A travel agency?
Recently saw a little project from Czech Republic curating cottages with workspace: https://pracujvprirode.cz/
Yes and this is so frustrating to me that I'm going to force myself to use hotels more.
What people don't understand is how one manipulates information not from what one says that's false, but in what one omits.
We know for a fact it's easy for a host to remove bad reviews. Take a look at the AirBNB subreddit, which is run by hosts. They actively tell each other how to get rid of reviews. Biggest tip: find something in the review that is 'not something the host has control over'. Boom, success, the entire thing is silently canned, and the writer will never get notified.
I got burned a lot with crappy experiences the last few years. My biggest issue was unexpected noise never mentioned in 20 reviews. One apartment had a bedroom attached to the top floor of an elevator shaft, making clanking noises. Another had THREE restaurant courtyards literally in the yard.
Caveat emptor with AirBNB, because you won't get to leave early and get a refund, whereas hotels are often negotiable.
So, I built a Chrome extension called Offie that helps other remote workers using Airbnb view info about Wifi and workspaces from the search page:
https://www.offie.co/chrome-extension
After launching the Chrome extension we realized that to actually solve these problems will require a managed marketplace where all properties are vetted to have fast, reliable Wifi and high-quality workspaces.
We're working on launching an MVP marketplace for that in Austin, TX by mid-May. We've got a waitlist on the site to be notified when we launch if interested!
One red flag I always look for is a stream of comments mentioning only "good location" and nothing else.
You say that, and I believe you mean it, but that could actually be a good sign. Example: I'm looking for a place to stay that is close to the beach. I need the location to be good - if the interior of the BnB is bad, that isn't a big deal.
Additionally, my definition of "close to the beach" is unusual. There are plenty of places "10 minutes away", but we need to read the reviews and look at maps for public access. I have a lot of small children, and my wife and I are mapping out how far a walk it would take to "get sandy"
What I found useful is this Chrome plugin that automatically searches in reviews keywords like "wifi": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/roamer-airbnb-inte...
Curating Airbnb listings ideal for work (desk, office chair, good internet) in interesting travel destination can be actually a good MVP. Something like crowdsourced (and cheaper) version of https://wander.com/
1. If I set a filter, use it! As it is, it will show results matching filters first, but then also shows those that don't, and it's not obvious enough
2. When hosts have claimed to have amenities they don't have, and when hosts don't properly set what amenities they do have - makes it difficult to use filters to find what you actually want
1. X is a must-have; and
2. X, Y and Z are all on my wish list so I want to see the most matches first.
Even Google is kind of awkward with this. It used to be you could add + to a term (before the Google+ boondoggle). Now you have to quote things.
Other sites will do so for specific criteria. Take a real estate portal: the bedroom numbers will be absolute but it may include surrounding areas to what you specify. Or there may be an option to turn that off.
It is frustrating but I can see why sites err on the side of caution by treating it as a ranking suggestion vs a hard requirement.
A couple questions:
Why wouldn't Airbnb build this vetting process as a feature of their service if/when you're successful?
Once you've reached scale, what would make your service more valuable than Airbnb's attempt at copying it?
I absolutely dread having to go through the airbnb search. Just a better (lag-free) interface would already go a long way. The map is just awful. A neater way to search through listings would be nice.
Maybe something like nitter (for twitter), but for airbnb.
Sometimes I will look for that before even looking at the pictures.
That part isn't true. Airbnb doesn't allow hosts to remove negative reviews.
I used to Airbnb my place, which was well reviewed. I had one negative review from a problematic guest that I felt was unfair, and when I contacted Airbnb to have it reviewed, they were very explicit about not removing reviews regardless of the situation.
Actual upscale bnb? Gîtes de France.
I’m coming with 20-30 friends -> gîtes pour groupes, you’ll get an industrial kitchen and dormitories.
Those things existed long before the internet.
Taxis existed before Uber; but it was the app (handling location, real-time updates, and seamless payment) that changed things.
I disagree - the game changer vs previous minicab offerings is the centralisation. Instead of ringing 4 companies and being given different waiting times by each etc, a single source tells me (initially, before the inevitable split into lyft et al) what the next available cab time is.
In the same way that early netflix felt like a game changer because I had loads of stuff in one place. A lot of the utility drains away as soon as competition appears again and you're back where you started.
Yeah, it's not perfect, and some bad actors abuse the rating system: "the driver wants me to wear a mask? I'll report him for unsafe driving" was one that I heard before.
But ultimately, knowing there's a record of whose car I went into makes me feel safer than riding with an unvetted driver that no one else knows I'm with.
I'm not sure that Airbnb is the actual problem here, for me it was the host's expectation that people will just throw money at them whilst all they have to do is provide the location. The one half-decent place I stayed was, ironically, the only option without a hundred or so glowing reviews.
Alternatives to Airbnb exist for every niche and, in my opinion, you generally have a good idea of what you are going to get from the outset rather than with Airbnb where it is always a gamble - regardless of how much money you are willing to spend.
My favorite are Sun & Co (https://sun-and-co.com/) and Sende (https://www.sende.co/)
It might make sense if you just need a place to crash after a long day of traveling, but it's not a way to live.
I imagine it coming with a concierge app so you can add or remove stuff and the push of a button.
Look at it objectively: two people have to be able to make a profit off of you in this arrangement (the owner and their realtor) and both of those margins will be pretty fat since neither of them is a long-term employee of the other, like you'd see in an apartment complex with an on-site manager.
Real estate agents are always on the landowner's side. Just accept this and the whole system will make more sense (this goes for buying or selling a house too).
Whether or not that is true is of course a matter of opinion, but as I'm not in the business of spending upwards of $1k a night on accomodation, I don't think I'm the target audience and thus in no position to make that judgement.
