We can but dream.
EDIT since every reply is the same: AirBnb operates 0 rooms. To be so willfully obtuse about AirBnb is wild.
Clearly the operators of these rentals are small businesses, the vast majority operating less than 10 properties. They use several major booking platforms for their rooms including AirBnb, Vrbo, TripAdvisor and a dozen other vacation rental platforms. Their rooms are not AirBnb's. Their service is not AirBnb's.
I don't even know how to begin to reply to someone who treats AirBnb, a booking platform that operates 0 hotels and 0 rooms, as the same as say a Marriot, who operates 1,423,044 rooms worldwide.
So the actual choice isnt between globo-monopolies and small business. It's between monopolies that don't spread bed bugs and one that does.
You're granting the hypothetical world of the upstream commenter where an anti-bed-bug regulation is put in place that's so bent towards hotels that only hotels could survive, but we'd need to see more details on that before we grant it. What would that even look like and would it be worth it beyond the HN knee-jerk of "lol Airbnb bad"?
People with enough money to buy homes to rent out as Airbnbs can buy or build small hotels with a little extra effort.
I don’t see how this can be true. A half decent hotel in even cheaper parts of the US is going to cost $100k per key, and in any popular city, multiples more. Plus, if you want to buy a franchise from Hilton/Marriott/Hyatt, they are going to ask one of the owners to already have another hotel as a credit check.
Buying a house or condo, on the other hand, only requires a few hundred thousand, outside of the most expensive areas.
And building a hotel is a completely different ballgame than buying an existing property. Cities long ago stopped approving small motels to be built, and clearing the permits/buying the land/getting a construction loan/ensuring your GC does the job on time is a whole lot of risk.
