There aren't many things an Airbnb does in a place like NYC that a hotel can't do better. Hotels are ubiquitous and uniform. You generally always know what you're getting into, and if something is amiss you can usually get it corrected by staff on-site or migrate to a nearby competitor. With Airbnb, you'll be lucky if you can reach a human to help with what will inevitably go wrong. Instead of full-time housekeeping, you'll have to put up with the shoddy resetting that a bottom-rate contractor cleaner does between visits, and Airbnb will happily mark up prices for the privilege.
I'll check out Airbnb again if I ever get the itch for an "experience," but otherwise... hotels, despite their flaws, are just a better product.
Good riddance.
Most Hotels are short term bedrooms/bathrooms with some extras.
Where air b&b competes is against medium/long term stay hotels that try to give a more normal living environment.
Initially airb&b had price attractiveness for even short terms stays but that's largely gone now as it became a business opportunity rather than a side income option.
The failure of Airbnb is that it incentivizes this business model as opposed to incentivizing great experiences. Similar to how Amazon incentivizes low quality no-name brand products and fake reviews.
For example, I know people who use Airbnb because if they need somewhere cheap to sleep for the night and they don't need a nice hotel room so they're happy to rent a cheap bed at someone's house for the night. The reason I've personally used it before is because I'm staying somewhere (often for an extended period of time) and I want a place with a kitchen or living room.
If what you're looking for is basically a hotel room, then yeah, hotels are going to be better 99% of the time unless you're looking for something a little more novel.
I also don’t understand the appeal of Kardashians
- and for working vacations (yay, remote work) with kids.
- They’re great in areas poorly-served by hotels.
- They often let you stay directly in or at least much closer to nice places than hotels do. Have coffee on the deck among the trees, smelling the pines and listening to the birds, and feel the mountain breeze as you wake up, versus continental breakfast among the sights and smells of a typical dreary hotel, then driving 20 minutes to reach the mountains. That kind of thing.
- If you’re looking to move, they let you sample living in various parts of a city or in several towns in a way that hotels very much do not.
And I also do not understand the appeal of the Kardashians, and so that was a strange thing to try to equate.
In some cases the AirBnbs got me a much better location at a reasonable price. Vienna and Paris in particular. But then places like Prague and Berlin had more reasonable and central options w/ hotels (both 25 hours Bikini Berlin and Numa Prague were incredible experiences).
They’ve improved a lot in recent years but I’d still want to have that explicit guarantee.
Nowadays they're all made exclusively as investements, not as people sharing their own apartment anymore, so they get the cheapest connection they can get away with.
It is possible to dig deeply when reviewing AirBNBs to see how many units the host has, if they're associated with corporate owners. It takes more time, but it is still possible to find people renting parts of their home like it was originally.
Early in my experience, I had the internet crap out at one place and the host wasn’t responsive to fixing it, so I petitioned Airbnb support to cancel my reservation.
They did so on the grounds that I had happened to ask the host about the quality of their WiFi prior to booking and was assured that it would be solid.
Since then, I always make a point to give the host a minor 3rd degree about the WiFi quality prior to booking, and have gone years without major trouble.
Hotel WiFi reliability has improved greatly during that time, but I need some sort of explicit guarantee from them before I would make the transition to more hotel stays.
I've heard this is a major issue but I feel like it's very rare thing, usually it's what I'd expect for having to clean a 500 sqft space. The only time I'm disappointed is say a $50 fee is assessed for use of a bedroom.
For once, scaling up made it more expensive. All these people and jobs want to be paid a living wage. And so costs stack up and it became no better than a hotel. In some cases, worse than hotel because at least a hotel is a mature and professional service. People involved in this airbnb "gig" aren't guaranteed to be.
I’ve used it to stay everywhere from DC to the Appalachians to the Carribean and it’s been an outstanding experience every time. You just have to know how to filter and choose the right rental. If you’re looking for a hotel in NYC, get a hotel room.
Hotels are "I just want a bed to sleep and get out and about".
AirBnBs are when you need more privacy because of imperfections like kids, or when you'll be somewhere for a while and you need a chill-out place, and you need some more normal house-like amenities.
In recent years my pendulum pushed back toward hotels, from almost exclusively AirBnB, but I still book AirBnBs about 50-70% of the time.
Doesn't this mean the neighbourhood became more socioeconomically diverse? In the US especially, socioeconomics are often tied to race, and the dominant race reduced by 20%, a minority race increased by 18%, and I assume another race increased by 2%.
In the space of a year, prices doubled, and then there was fees not included in the price so when I accepted those prices and fees and went to book, there was more fees under the "checkout" section.
That might have been 7 years ago when good quality hotels were parity to the final price. Obviously I haven't been back on any of these since but it was definitely amazing at one point.
The experience is not that bad except when you inevitably get a shit!y renter but that's on the renter.
I feel like it is only people who were satisfied by hotels, taxis, cable companies for whatever reason that keep expecting/hoping airbnb,uber,neflix and the like to go under. If anything, I fully support tax payer money bailing out these companies instead of banks or subsidizing them instead if oil companies. Their value to the average person's quality of life is immense.
It's a middleman that needs to go extinct.
This one article is mostly about NYC (and forward looking) but it’s part of a larger tapestry of “Airbnb is dead”, “nobody uses Airbnb anymore” articles and social content (particularly on TikTok) that might lead you to think Airbnb and its hosts are in freefall.
The problem is that the reality looks to be totally different. Airbnb keeps putting up record quarters, and while the economics are changing for hosts (many markets are definitely becoming saturated) the platform and the model appear to not have actually lost much if any strength over the 12-18 months that this has been a popular narrative.
