Sorry Airbnb, you've screwed too many people too many times. You've allowed, even enabled hosts to abuse travelers. I'm not rolling the dice anymore. The last straw for me was last year traveling to NYC for Christmas. The host refused to contact us back, never a peep from the host. Airbnb fought us tooth and nail in terms of refund. How am I going to put small children on a plane and hope everything is fine when we land? They didn't care. They were doing everything they could for the host. Finally after 3 days of arguing back and forth one of the off shore customer service representatives gave us a refund.
I shouldn't have to spend 12 hours on the phone over the course of three days, having my vacation completely ruined, just to get what I deserve which was my money back.
The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you. The host has the property, the host sets the price, the host assumes all responsibility (even if they often do not live up to those responsibilities).
You're just one more weary traveler who will be near-instantly replaced by someone else, so fuck you.
This is also why I've never once booked with AirBNB, and why I've always booked a hotel wherever I travel. Yes, it's more expensive. It's also guaranteed. I also get someone to clean my room everyday. I also don't have to worry about walking into the kitchen and seeing an entire sink full of dirty dishes. I don't have to worry about a random teenager in the hotel taking up my bathroom for an hour. I don't have to worry about another teenage following me around and talking to me. I don't have to worry about the bathroom being dirty, and I don't have to worry about seeing a roach in the house.
What I just described was the experience of a former Marine buddy of mine who booked a 6 week stay in Plantation, FL. He was moving down here from Brooklyn, NY and needed a place to stay until his apartment with ready. The AirBNB provider he booked with labeled a SuperHost.
If that's what a SuperHost rental gets you, I'm totally uninterested in seeing what anything less gets you. I'd rather stay at a Motel 6.
AirBNB is now almost as expensive as a hotel in the city centre. There are some very nice properties, but increasingly a lot of crappy properties - flats converted into multiple airbnb 'apartments', bare minimum furniture, often in dodgy areas, and your neighbours are also airbnb tenants so expect lots of noise.
For this reason I also have gone back to hotels unless I'm booking a place for more than 2 weeks. Airbnb often has a monthly discount so remains a decent place for long stays, although if you put in the work (and pay cash) you can usually find cheaper options.
Yep, that's why more and more countries or cities are banning short-term rentals. Imagime living in an avrage apartment building, and your neighbor decides to rent out the apartment to airbnbers, every few days, a new group of people, partying all day and night long, not caring about neighbors, and in the meantime, the property prices are rising sky high, becuase every apartment in remotly touristy areas is bought up immediatly to serve as an airbnb rental property.
I wonder how hotels could do this effectively and safely.
Include a mini-kitchen with 2 burners and a small counter. Burners are disabled but could be enabled by request, or some keypad on the wall (child proofed). You can pick up a box of kitchen supplies (pots, knives, etc) from the front desk or request room service to cart them up.
Put the supplies back in the box before you leave (box is lined with a rubbermaid dish bin).
This would offset the cost of furnishing each room with supplies, while also killing one of airbnb's value props.
The place I've stayed at in London a fair number of times calls itself a "serviced apartment" and includes a kitchenette. I don't really use it much other than the refrigerator but it's there and I've stayed there with a friend who would cook eggs in the morning.
I'm pretty sure some of the suite-style chains in the US do as well.
In Oz, you can often and easily find rooms in an ordinary motel that has pots and pans, a little 2 element cooktop/oven combo & a sink. They're more expensive to rent of course, but they're very widely available.
We also have serviced apartments, designed for the longer stays, but are generally only to be found on the cities.
I was looking for long term stays in an Airbnb while waiting for my apartment to be ready in a cross state move. I was baffled at the amount of listing that looked like duplicates - until I realized that they were massive houses carved up into multiple “rent a room” offers. I can’t imagine traveling and renting just a room and finding a bunch of travelers living there too.
Renting out just a room in your house seems ok. My cousin did this when she bought a house to help cover the expenses after she lost a job, but to book out the whole house as some sort of crappy hostel seems unbearable.
My girlfriend went to Italy a couple of years back with her kid, kid's friend and kid's friend's mom. They rented something they thought would be nice (according to reviews) in Italy. Two women, two girls - it was worse than a hostel. I ended up having to use booking.com to find them somewhere reasonable yet nice because they didn't feel safe. Airbnb ended up crediting them back the stay.
Eh. As an Airbnb host, honestly I've never been given any slack by Airbnb. Maybe they've made some recent changes, but in my experience they pretty much always side with the guest even over minor things and I'm the one that has to fight tooth and nail for fair treatment when a guest abuses my house or breaks the rules.
Hotels are definitely nice if you like the pampering they provide (e.g. clean your room everyday), but the value of Airbnb is getting amenities and space of a house for an affordable rate. Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc) without paying insane rates north of 1k a night. That's where Airbnb shines.
Can't speak to your experience, but there are heavy, heavy penalties for the behavior you're describing - you can't just do that carefree as a host. I would probably lose my business if I let that kind of stuff happen even just once or twice.
That being said, shitty hosts are out there. If they have extensive review history and positive remarks (over ~4.7/5.0 rating) it should be fine. I've honestly never had a bad experience as a guest over 5+ years of staying at Airbnbs with that criteria.
> Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc) without paying insane rates north of 1k a night.
Isn't this the domain of extended stay hotels, like Residence Inn (Marriott), Staybridge Suites (IHG), and Homewood Suites (Hilton), and serviced apartments? They don't tend to be in the $1k/night range.
It really depends. They may have a lot of charm, but also cut every damn corner with basic things like forks and knives. I've been in a few places that I swear must have purchased their cutlery from some aliexpress outlet for $5 or something. The edges of the forks were razor sharp.
Don't even get started on how few of them clean the dishwasher filter or anything like that. Ever looked at the filter trap on one of those places? Yuk!
> Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc)
This seems like a huge luxury that is not needed for most travelers. If you really need the kitchen and entertainment spaces then you're going to pay a lot even with Air BnB ("alot" being super subjective).
For 1-2 nights? Probably not. I don't think having access to a kitchen or sitting area is a "massive luxury" for someone staying a week or longer for a vacation, work, etc. though.
The point is you get these amenities (or at least of them) for around the same price as a hotel room.
In some big markets (New York City or similar), it might be above a hotel room rate, but still a really good deal if you consider the value.
I just feel like there is an adequate "middle option" where you get a hotel room with a den and rely on the breakfast bar / hotel and local restaurants, to plug the gap while still paying the average hotel room price. I could see marginal cost savings cooking, but even the price of groceries (especially when not local-savvy) is quite high.
This is the common scenario if you have multiple family members who want to jointly rent a house. A hotel doesn't quite cut it for that. Granted you can all book at the same hotel but it isn't the same as renting a whole house for a week.
Recently stayed in hotels in Seattle and Sunnyvale, CA for a few nights. The one in Seattle greeted us at the reception with "we don't do room service", even though we were staying for a week and it was about 300/night. Ridiculous.
Sunnyvale was a Hilton garden Inn and while uninspired, was completely fine - clean and quiet.
Are you talking about daily housekeeping or actual room service (food delivery)? In all my life, I've never ordered room service as it is criminally expensive.
The last few hotels I've stayed at, including one in Seattle, didn't do housekeeping unless you were staying more than 2 nights and then only on request. They would happily send up more towels or whatever you need but were limiting the number of rooms they actually entered each day. Covid was the excuse but really I think it was short staffing.
Either way, I'm shocked that they would refuse to clean your room for a week. Of course, if you didn't ask, they won't.
Partly why I just stick with the chains, at least for now. Very very predictable, and while you won't get the best experience at the hotel, you get a lot of guarantees that it at least won't be a bad experience.
Maybe this will be different when I'm traveling more for the sake of traveling, but for the most part I'm traveling to see something specific in a city rather than the city at large.
When I was in a hotel last time, there was no room service either, but that's fine for me as long as clean towels and bed sheets are provided at the lobby whenever I need.
I haven't been staying in a lot of hotels recently but not servicing rooms has been pretty common over the past year in my experience. (Ostensibly because of COVID.)
"SuperHost" is such a joke because most of them are professional airbnb managers who don't actually own the properties. If they're good at their jobs maybe they would only accept properties that meet some standard, but from what I've seen they will work with anyone who will pay them.
This is the Amazon quandary: your core product is ostensibly "quality" (from an end user perspective), but at some point you've consumed the total available market of quality sellers...
So AirBnB has to keep allowing (and encouraging) property management companies, because no one else can bring them the volume they need to grow.
Yes... because this is just one in a litany of horror stories that I have:
* Read about online
* Heard about personally from friends & family
Do you need to step in a pile of shit personally to realize it's unpleasant, or would you rather take the word of the people who already stepped in it?
I have used AirBnB on at least 20 different occasions and had almost entirely fantastic experiences (and maybe 3 sub par ones). So you can add that to your anecdotal evidence.
I'll be honest, I'm not interested in hearing about entirely fantastic experiences; indulge me while I explain why.
When I'm traveling, if you want to entice me to use your AirBNB, you need to provide - at the minimum - an exactly equivalent or superior experience to what I can get at a hotel, and for a cheaper price. If you can't, then logically there's zero reason for me to book a stay with you. Why would I pay more for less service? That isn't logical.
Yes, I understand some things are, more or less, impossible to do with an AirBNB (I don't expect turndown service, or room service for instance). However, most other things that a hotel could offer, I would expect, such as a coffee maker, a mini-fridge, a microwave, Internet connectively, and perhaps printer access (after all, a color laser printer isn't prohibitively expensive, and the toner makes usage cheap).
Everything I mentioned I can get at an Extended Stay America, or a Residence Inn, or some other long-term hotel-like setting. As for actual hotels, I can frequently get either better service, or a more extensive suite of services, many of which are complimentary, some of which are available for small fees and which no AirBNB could ever realistically offer.
Now having said all this...
I'm only interested in unpleasant stories. I only want to hear about when things go wrong. Because just like a good site reliability manager, I'm looking for 99.999999% uptime. I expect everything to go smoothly, always. And when it doesn't, I expect, at the minimum, steps taken to rectify the situation, and if the situation becomes an inconvenience to me bordering on a disruption of stay, then I expect a refund. These are all areas where AirBNB is significantly worse than large hotel chains - even the modest hotel chains like Holiday Inn or Microtel or Motel 6.
This reminds me of Ron White's bit about staying at The Ritz Carlton in Atlanta...
"I get to Atlanta and I check into the Ritz Carlton Hotel. And, uh, the next morning I go to take a shower and there's no hot water. And I called the front desk and I tell the girl at the front desk, I said, 'There's no hot water.' The girl at the front desk said, 'Sometimes there's no hot water.' Didn't I just tell you that? I said, 'I've stayed at $20 a night motels. The water was so hot you could cook your nuts with it.' She goes, 'Well, every once in a while, everybody will wake up at the same time and they all take a shower at the same time and we run smack outta hot water.' You guys didn't think about that? They thought about it at the Motel 6. But that whole concept of people wake up in the morning with shit to do got right by the Ritz Carlton Hotel?"
This is why I'm interested in hearing where it all goes wrong, when, and why. No hot water in a $500 a night hotel is completely unacceptable, anywhere, anytime, ever. There's nothing you could say to me that will change my mind.
"Power went out, sir." Well where the fuck is your backup generator and why isn't it running?
"There's something wrong with the natural gas lines, sir." Well why don't you have an on-site backup tank for these situations?
"Everyone woke up and took a shower at the same time!" Well why the fuck don't you have secondary boilers that monitor the primary ones and anticipate and correct for that?
"Internet access is down sir." Why the fuck don't you have multiple connections with failover to ensure connectivity is maintained?
This is why I want a hotel and not an AirBNB. AirBNB doesn't have the scale to deal with these kinds of issues because it's essentially Hotel Uber. I understand not everyone is this exacting. That's fine. That's more than fine. More power to you, book on AirBNB all day every day if you want to. But I'm not going to, because I've heard enough of these stories.
I guess some people don't enjoy a little adventure. I commented in this thread elsewhere that AirBnB is a risk/reward proposition. The rewards can be awesome for those who take the (carefully calculated) risk.
> The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you.
I don't share the same opinion.
This is the fault of Airbnb, they chose to operate that way, it's not a market force.
Take Uber (not a marvellous company or service, but certainly better for consumers): drivers own cars, they choose when and how long to drive, they're the money makers.
Yet, I've never experienced bullshit service from Uber as I have with Airbnb. The same for everyone I've talked about this around me.
How many hosts are in the area you're staying, open and available for your travel time range, with the same quality and amenities that you want?
Who cares what kind of uber car you get? There are thousands of them, and they just get you from point A to B.
I tried Airbnb once, only to find out just before departure that the host had booked the place for someone else on VRBO. (I only found out because I asked the host a question about parking!)
Hotels aren’t necessarily more expensive for short travels unless you are booking some of the bottom end airbnbs. For long stays though airbnb almost always wins out.
> The reason AirBNB will always have garbage service is because the hosts are their moneymakers, not you. The host has the property, the host sets the price, the host assumes all responsibility (even if they often do not live up to those responsibilities).
I disagree. The marketplace is the moneymaker. It would be like saying that app makers are the moneymakers, and not the iOS/Android store as a whole marketplace.
But most people don't appear to prefer Airbnb to anything else? Hotels are still a far larger market than airbnb, 5-10x as big in revenue, in number of rooms that exist, in almost any metric - and that doesn't even take into account that there are tons of hotels listed on airbnb now.
I am in the same boat. Never booked with them and probably never will. I will pay more for hotel chains to get predictable service, and a help desk to talk to.
When I go on a vacation with the family the last thing I need is some unpredictable situation with a shady host and then fighting overseas AirBnB support for refunds.
The only use case where AirBNB sort of makes sense is for poor young solo travelers (like backpackers) as an alternative to hostels. I can't understand why anyone would even consider it for a business trip or family vacation. What are those travelers thinking? Like I seriously don't understand why anyone would take that kind of risk instead of making a reservation with a real hotel. Caveat emptor.
As a parent, an Airbnb (or any vacation rental) is 100x better than a hotel. We've got 3 young kids, so multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, and a separate common space where adults can hang out after kids are down is absolutely crucial.
The thought of cramming the whole fam into a hotel room, or having little kids sleeping in a separate room (and freaking out alone in the middle of the night) sounds like hell to me.
Hotels are fine for business travel for me, where I don't care much about the space and just need a clean, reliable place to sleep.
But hotels have all of those options. "Hotels" I've stayed at include a place in Ireland with standalone 3 bedroom houses, two bedroom extended stay suites with kitchens and living rooms around America, etc.
In the contrary, AirBnb only makes sense for a larger group of people. For solo travel, hostels or hotels offer much better value. But for a group of 3-5 friends, it's often significantly less expensive to book an apartment then multiple hotel rooms, and you get a kitchen to cook in to boot.
If you pick the least expensive option then you can expect some problems. Marriott Residence Inn hotels are located near most major US destinations, and can accommodate groups of 5 in a suite with a kitchen. This may be slightly more expensive than an AirBNB, but they won't randomly cancel your reservation and there are trained staff on the property to resolve issues.
I should have mentioned, I don't have any experience with the USA. In Europe, I don't think you have any realistic chance of finding a hotel offering a room for 5 people, except ultra-luxury suites. At least nowhere that is actually inside a city.
I'd say one thing in favour of an AirBnB type rental is having a kitchen where you can cook your own food... I find on holiday sometimes it's quite nice to just have some "normal" food at home rather than eating out all the time.
I'd rather book a proper dedicated rental flat from another platform than someone's random flat on AirBnB these days though, after all the horror stories (personally I've never had an issue).
Edit: I read another comment lower down talking about hotel rooms with a kitchen. Personally never encountered this, maybe it's a US thing, but that could be an OK solution if it included all the stuff you need to cook a basic meal.
Responding to your edit comment:
I've found hotels and apartment-hotels with kitchen or kitchenettes through Expedia and their subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, Mexico, and Brazil. Agoda offers similar features, but I've not tried it out yet.
They're usually well stocked with most of the things needed for a basic meal.
I use them versus AirBnB because they seem to look out for me very well. I've had minor hassle getting a refund only once in last twelve years, but they did come through for me. I also like the simple reward program. They've added some fees in the last few years, but it's still good.
Ah yeah good point, I forgot about “aparthotels”. They’re a pretty good in between, a nice Airbnb can be nicer but an aparthotel is probably more reliable.
I book AirBnBs (and VRBOs) for work retreats fairly regularly. Going to one next month, in fact.
Rent a huge house (8+BR, 6+ bath, 3500-5000 ft²), bring the leadership team together to live and work together for a couple of intense days. In Monday evening, cook dinner together, work Tues/Wed, leave Thursday AM.
There’s no hotel-equivalent that I’m aware of. (And given that it covers 3 nights’ accommodations and cheaper meals for 8-ish people, it’s notably cheaper than a hotel and restaurants in almost every case.)
I think can explain one possible reason. tl;dr: For long stays, as hotels typically don't offer home-like experience.
I have two typical modes of travel.
One is a short (1-2 week) trip somewhere, for some business (work or personal). A hotel is totally fine, but I still check both hotels and Airbnb for price and feature comparison. In this scenario I don't need a proper kitchen but I still want a microwave, a proper table, a decent chair, and good Internet connectivity - which sound like some basics but aren't exactly common. But, yeah, a hotel is typically a good option. Airbnb quality seem to degrade, so I'm typically looking at the hotels those days. E.g. my last trip was to San Diego, CA and Airbnb offerings I've seen were much worse (based on my personal preferences) than similarly priced hotels.
The other mode is multiple months of living somewhere else - like as in "digital nomad". Hotels typically cease to work for this purpose. For those scenario I want a full apartment (or a house) to myself, I don't need any room service (I can wipe dust and vacuum on my own, thank you), but I want something comparable to home. A full kitchen (with a dishwasher and an oven), a good working area (separate area - ideally a dedicated room, with favorable lighting conditions, normal height sturdy table, an ergonomic chair, etc.), a separate rest area (comfy non-leather couch and a correctly placed big TV with an accessible HDMI input), proximity to a grocery store, etc. It is very hard to find merely a suitable place - I spend multiple days, sometimes weeks, going through the listings, looking at the photos, checking neighborhoods etc. - but at least there's a chance to find something. I do check hotels (because why not) but most of the time they're simply not an option at all - they're tailored for very different use cases and simply don't offer this kind of service. And, well, my other alternatives are local classifieds and searching Google Maps for advertised rentals (which I do), but at least Airbnb has some standards so it's my first option. Last year I had a 2-month trip to Tbilisi, Georgia and the apartments I've found on Airbnb were almost perfect - I'm sure my experience would've been worse (and significantly costlier) if we would've stayed in a hotel.
Best kind of Airbnb is when a host had a place for themselves to live, but their circumstances had changed (e.g. they bought a second property) and now they're renting it out. Such places are simply made for living. Worst kind is a property bought specifically for renting out.
So here's how I attack these issues you've mentioned:
Extended Stay America. Almost every large city has one ("large" defined as more than 100,000 - 200,000 people). You can book for months at a time if necessary. They have WiFi at all locations, however...
I just donate to The Calyx Institute. My $750 pledge bought me a year of Sprint (now T-Mobile, and far more reliable) cellular access with a 5G WiFi hotspot and absolutely no data cap, ever. I ran 1.1 TiB through that access point one month and never had a moment's trouble. Long story short, Sprint bought Clearwire, Clearwire had a deal with the federal government to provide non-profits with cheap unlimited (actual unlimited) 4G / LTE hotspots and no fuckery (no slow-downs after X gigabytes transferred, no "preferred tier" customers like how MVNOs are second tier to the host provider). When Sprint bought Clearwire, the Feds only approved it with the provision Sprint had to honor the deal. Now that T-Mobile owns Sprint, they have to also honor the deal.
I've added a bit to my comment after the initial posting - an example of my last long-term stay. It was in Georgia (Sakartvelo, not the US state), and it's a good but developing country - to best of my awareness they don't really have anything similar, or at least my searches hadn't found it. So I suppose it depends on a country.
But you're absolutely correct, Extended Stay America is probably a very good option. When I've immigrated to the US, it was very high on my list. I still went with an Airbnb because I needed to find a new permanent home anyway (so I was renting short-term only as I was looking for a job), and Airbnb was in a more favorable location as I needed things in a walking distance (had no never driven a car at the time, hah), and maybe that was a mistake - it was OK but not exactly great. Anyway, I do have a home in the US now (and love the country) and I'm not really exploring the country just yet - but if/when I'll have a long-term trip somewhere else here, I'll definitely consider Extended Stay America. So far my US trips were all fairly short though.
And thanks for the tip about The Calyx Internet Membership. I don't have use for this right now, but this might come in handy!
BTW, does anyone know - is there something similar in Mexico, in safe(r) areas, ideally a gated community? This is the next country life is sending me to - because of some family circumstances I'll have spend some months down there...
The first city I checked, DC, does not (listed in Google's hotel search). The suburbs have several, but that's a terrible option if don't want to "commute" during the trip. Downtown DC does have other chains that are extended stay, but I haven't found a good way to search for "hotel with a kitchen and living room" - basically requiring me to know which brands have those amenities.
I've used Airbnb in the following places, usually traveling as a couple for vacation. Domestically, with our dog as well. We like Airbnb for more space (proper living room, sofa, etc) and a kitchen during extended stays.
- Iceland, flat in Reykjavik, 5 day trip. Kitchen and more space vs hotel, similar cost.
- Italy, flat in Florence, 5 day trip, part of longer trip, used hotels in Rome and Riccione. Lower cost, kitchen, more space vs hotel
- Scotland, cottages in Portree and Stornaway, 5 days each, used hotels in Fort William and Inverness (1 night each). Less expensive, more space, full kitchen vs hotels in this area.
- Roanoke VA, 3 night weekend, dog allowed, kitchen and more space, lower cost vs hotel
- Mt Rogers VA, 7 day, no hotels nearby, plus dog
- St Michaels MD, 3 day weekend, dog, kitchen, limited hotels in town (though plenty on the outskirts)
- Emerald Isle, NC - house, 3 day weekend, needed 4 dogs and 2 couples, and kitchen
- Cape Canaveral, FL - flat, 14 days, needed kitchen and dog alllowance
- Cocoa Beach, FL - house, needed 2 couples, 1 solo, and 4 dogs, plus kitchen
Maybe I'm being naive, but filtering to Superhosts and entire home, then checking for multiple listings and high ratings seems to work ok. And for big cities, I'd probably just get a hotel, since Airbnb is likely to be a small flat anyway.
To me a hotel and an airbnb are 2 totally different products. I prefer using airbnb (or vrbo) because I can get an entire house (yes I know this is technically possible with a hotel, but typically not) with a kitchen, multiple bedrooms, etc.
And I shouldn't jinx myself, but I've used Airbnbs on every trip I've taken, and I've yet to run into a real show stopping problem. Not saying it doesn't happen, just pointing out that it's not as frequent as you are making it out to be.
If you think about it, that's more or less the original idea. Affordable accommodation for young solo travelers. People that do not have the time and energy to face the inconveniences of Airbnb's are better off in a hotel after all. When I book an airbnb I do not expect to get hotel like service.
Edit: maybe drop the "solo", it's probably not worth it if you don't travel in a group.
AirBnB makes sense from my experience for a very select set of experiences which require considerable research. In these situations, I wasn't optimizing for lower costs which most travelers are probably doing. Examples:
1. Several nights on a houseboat in Amsterdam.
2. Two weeks in Cape May, NJ in a walkable location to the beach with enough space to bring kids, laundry facilities, and a garden to entertain friends joining us.
3. Long weekend with extended family in the middle of Harper's Ferry, WV.
Finding and organizing these experiences would be harder without AirBnB. There is no way I'd use AirBnB for a regular trip though.
>I wasn't optimizing for lower costs which most travelers are probably doing
I suspect that, as with many other marketplaces with suppliers of widely differing quality (e.g. Amazon), there are a lot of people who optimize for price and then are surprised when they get burned on deals that seem too good to be true.
> The only use case where AirBNB sort of makes sense
Here's a weird case where AirBNB might make more sense than a hotel:
I have a medical cannabis licence. Hotels don't seem to like the idea of me vapourising cannabis indoors, but an AirBNB host might be okay with it if I ask first (assuming otherwise legal in the area).
Just don’t ask. They won’t hit you with a cleaning fee because vaping doesn’t leave the stink that cigs do. And vaping is basically not only socially acceptable but most likely socially encouraged by your average hotel worker.
Airbnb puts you in a local neighbourhood (not the city centre) and gives you a full apartment and a kitchen so your trip feels a bit more like living in the country. That's the reason I used it, anyway. There are definitely advantages to hotels too.
AirBNB is terrible as a place to stay, but it's great for destination vacations. If you are having a family vacation with 10 people it's a lot more fun to be in a big house than in 4 hotel rooms.
I likewise had a horrible experience where 5 hours before check-in the host asked me to send an additional $1k as a “deposit” over Venmo before giving me the key code, I had multiple other people arriving as well. Needless to say Airbnb support was useless so I ended up paying. And upon arrival the apartment was not even close to what was advertised. When I left a review detailing my experience Airbnb took down my review. I had to do a chargeback on my credit card to get back my deposit since Airbnb was also completely useless in this regard.
Never using Airbnb ever again. Hotels know how to treat people correctly.
Before then I didn't know AirBnb was moderating bad reviews in such an aggressive way. Good reviews mean nothing if all the bad ones are automatically taken down. It's ridiculous, and made me very wary of ever booking again with them.
(There's an interview of Bezos somewhere where he explains that when starting Amazon, publishing houses were complaining to him about the bad book reviews, and he told them something to the effect of: it's because we let bad reviews up that people trust us. Obviously things have changed and Amazon reviews aren't what they used to be, but still. Bezos in 1997 understood something that AirBnb fails to grasp.)
I have experienced something similar as well. I was visiting NYC, and the place we booked did not look anything like the online listing showed. Regardless, the hosts were nice and helpful, so I left them a 5 star rating on all parameters except cleanliness. This was the first time rated something on Airbnb that is not 5 stars, and I have travelled quite a bit before.
Few weeks after that I receive racist messages from the host on my personal cellphone. I am shocked Airbnb would share my personal details just like that. I reported it to Airbnb, but they were pretty clueless as this was happening outside their messaging system. I finally had to share screenshots of the text messages, and they said they will take down the hosts account. They did for sometime, but after a couple of months that host's account is still live and his place is still accepting reservations. My review has been taken down though.
I would say hotels are better in general, sure, but there's plenty of exceptions.
The worst for me was a hotel in Paris I booked via Booking.com. It was completely different from the announced, and had several issues, such as having an outside bathroom without a lockable door. Luckily it closed during the pandemic.
Booking.com not only fought tooth and nail to charge me, claiming to my credit card that I needed to be charged since I "actually stayed at the hotel", but they then deleted my review claiming that "I didn't stay at the hotel". The key to getting a chargeback was sending the email of the deleted review to the credit card company.
Today I just search using Booking.com but make reservations via phone.
The problem is not AirBnB or Booking.com. The problem is "internet companies". They all suck.
I learned (the hard way), that hotels have "ghetto rooms," that they can't book out to other guests (think next to the elevators or vending, or with dysfunctional amenities).
If you book with one of the booking agencies (I will not name the two that I used), the hotel will often give you one of these rooms, off the bat. You can complain, and they'll get you another one, but that is not something that you want to do, when you just checked in at 11PM, and your first meeting is at 8AM, the next morning.
BTW: Hotels are not supposed to do that, but they do, anyway. It's hard to prove.
Of course, I've had pretty bad [1] hotel rooms booking directly with major chains as well.
[1] Bad as in little or no natural lighting, unusually small, etc. Some of the time a tall big city hotel abuts other buildings and has a lightwell and, especially on the lower floors, things can be pretty dark.
Every hotel has 'good' and 'bad' rooms in this sense, and they will absolutely prefer putting their loyal/higher-paying/most-likely to complain[1] guests into the 'good' ones. The 'bad' ones are often the last on the list to get filled.
[1] That's because if the front-desk guy/gal has any agency in this, they will absolutely not try to put a Karen into a bad room. Because they don't want to deal with his/her freakout over the noise of the vending machine, or the elevator, or some other factor that they can't control, but will get the guest to complain to management.
I'm not up to doing that, because lawyers. Also, the fault really lies with the hotels; not the booking services (one hotel was in London, another in Manhattan).
However, if you search the English alphabet for the letters between "N" and "Q," you are likely to find the first letter of the name of each booking service (not hotel).
Well, I choose not to post anonymously. As a result, I am more careful about what I "say" online, than many (Actually, a lot of folks that think they are "anonymous," are not, in fact, "anonymous," if a Big Dog gets pissed at them).
That's a nightmare-level experience! The scary part about AirBnB is how differently hosts can handle things.
I've used AirBnB only once exactly for these reasons. That uncertainty is killer when I'm gonna be staying in a city where I don't know anyone who lives there and can help me get out of a jam. There's a piece of mind to getting a hotel and knowing for sure that I will have somewhere to stay. If something goes wrong, there's a company policy I can review that has explicit steps for recourse.
I also swore off Airbnb after a couple bad experiences. Then went back to hotels, which are better in their own way, but still couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m getting swindled every time I check into one, between resort fees, $30/day slow wifi, rooms that look nothing like the pics, etc.
Then I realized that the entire travel industry just tries to rip everyone off as much as possible since they know you’re probably only coming to that one destination one time anyway, so they might as well slaughter the cow instead of milking it.
Once the pandemic hit and I couldn’t travel, I realized how much I actually don’t need to travel to have a relaxing vacation. Between airlines packing you in like cattle (if you can even get on a flight on time that hasn’t been delayed/cancelled 7 times first), the TSA, being treated like a drug lord at every border crossing, tourist trap shitty restaurants and hotels manipulating their reviews and every other business in the tourism industry trying to swindle you as much as possible, no thank you. I would need to take additional time off just to recover from the stress of that “vacation.”
Now I just spend travel money on home projects to make my house so good I never want to leave, and couldn’t be happier.
I travel for work 6 months or so out of the year and your experiences are definitely not representative of mine.
"between resort fees, $30/day slow wifi, rooms that look nothing like the pics" This is 100% because you are staying in "luxury" hotels. Less expensive hotels don't have any of these.
That is a fair opinion but probably not an accurate representation of travel for most people. I've never paid for hotel wifi ever for example. It might be because you're using resorts, where they know you're going to be stuck in that place for a long time and can exploit that to charge more for everything.
I'm admittedly a member of pretty much all the chain loyalty clubs. But, for the most part, paying for WiFi access is mostly a thing of the past. Other than mandatory resort fees that include WiFi in some places (e.g. Vegas and actual resorts), I don't know the last time I specifically made for WiFi either.
When Airbnb is bad, it's really bad. You're gambling with the possibility of completely ruining whatever trip you had in mind. I've had both cases where a host cancelled last minute and also where I tried to cancel months in advance and was denied. Both of those experiences cost me more than I'll ever save by using Airbnb in my lifetime. I'm never using Airbnb again if I can help it. The last time I booked a hotel I felt so much less stressed and I realized whatever premium they charge is 100% worth it.
That's probably true. Your chain midrange business hotel probably has some rooms that aren't in a great location and maybe it's a bit overdue for a refresh. But I can't remember the last time I had a genuine problem with a hotel whether room availability or billing.
I have used Airbnb once. And it was quite pleasant. In a tourist area where the hotels were really pricey and this was somewhat cheaper (though not cheap)/likely better. So it worked out. But I'm aware it's probably a bit of a crapshoot.
> You're gambling with the possibility of completely ruining whatever trip you had in mind.
Exactly. Landing in a new city with the family, taking time off work and then gambling on some random guy with a house coming through and not ripping us off is just too much risk.
AirBnB might even “fix it” but then we’re running around at night, with suitcases, to a new part of time and then spending days on the phone getting refunds.
Maybe that sounds adventurous and exciting for someone else but just doesn’t work for us.
I'm done with them as well. ~10 years ago, it was a novel, fun way to travel and meet new people. Now it's become a business for many hosts and it shows. I have never appreciated a hotel room as much as I do now, having gone through the AirBNB gauntlet one time too many.
Doing Airbnb over hotels also contributes greatly to city housing shortages and gentrification. Major US cities have large swaths of apartment units sitting empty, held by some management company to rent out as a pseudo-hotel room.
I won’t disagree with this take, but why should I care about any of this? The reason I don’t own a house is because prices are so high. But my solution is to just live like a local wherever I want and pay someone else’s mortgage. It’s a lifestyle that suits me and I have the cash flow to do it. Do I care that I am in a house next to some owner who doesn’t want me there? You own a house and I don’t, so screw you. I know this sounds a bit nasty but I am offering a genuine take that puts airbnb as sort of a weapon between the haves (house owners) and have nots (nomads).
I think you focus on the neighbors alone, in which case I can understand the "f you" point of view.
From my POV one reason to care about is because AirBnB is making it harder for the "have nots" to become "haves": those that could have afforded their starter house suddenly can't because available properties are now AirBnBs, and those that could have rented near their work must now live further away, taking hours off their free time. Meanwhile, the "haves" reap more cash with less effort.
> I am offering a genuine take that puts airbnb as sort of a weapon between the haves (house owners) and have nots (nomads).
AirBnB is one of the weapons being used to keep you as a have not, though. You're basically helping to pay for the rent increases that are keeping you as a have not.
You're paying many times the mortgage payment to rent these homes in violation of zoning laws prohibiting them from operating as commercial properties and you're angry at the result?
I am not angry at anyone. If I can’t afford to own a home or don’t have the job stability for it then I am happy to pay for short term flexibility (vs renting long term) and live anywhere. It is more just a “dont give a fuck” attitude to home owners because I aint one
Gentrification and housing shortage is caused by bad policy. That's the root of the problem. Enforcement of existing zoning regulations, and also zoning regulations that dramatically under-provision the city for number of homes.
Yep.. showed up at my Airbnb in NYC around 8pm. Followed the instructions texted to me by the host, let myself in and waited in the living room with no one around, not sure which room was mine.
Host came after 30 mins to tell me he double booked me and that I had to leave. He could barely make eye contact with me.
!
The only thing airbnb did for me was to give me a coupon for my next booking. It was small, and expired before I was able to use it.
A coupon is such a ridiculous way to try to “make things right” by the customer in that situation. You need a place to sleep. That night. Not some night in the future. Why would someone even use the service again after they’ve been left without a roof over their head?
> Why would someone even use the service again after they’ve been left without a roof over their head?
I still use it.
When the only other option is $300+/night for a hotel, a $100/night airbnb is mighty nice. And I often stay for 1week to 1month, and Airbnb's give a nice discount which I'm not sure hotels would. So often the comparison is.. $2000/month for airbnb, or more like $9000 for a hotel for a month?
That gap is closing in larger cities though. In Toronto it's hard to find an Airbnb where i get the whole place that isn't a basement for under $150/night, so creeping into hotel territory.
Had this same experience - my girlfriend and I booked an AirBNB for New Years roughly 5 years ago. I spent considerably more than a hotel on the AirBNB for a luxury highrise condo. We show up, host is MIA. Of course trying to book anything on New Years in NYC is like pulling teeth. I had been using AirBNB for years before I realized that my only hotel experience had been cheap Holiday Inns and I had bought into the marketing that Airbnbs were universally better in my early 20s. When it works its great, when it doesn't, the stress alone makes the whole thing not worth it. I haven't used Airbnb since.
> They were doing everything they could for the host.
For some reason AirBnb is very protective of their hosts. I had a bad experience a few months ago with a so-called "Superhost" where the property didn't match the description or the reviews. After my stay I left a negative review (my first ever; always left very nice reviews before then).
Well... AirBnB simply removed the review, for completely bogus and irrelevant reasons.
Made me extremely suspicious of any listing; it will probably be a long time before I book again.
>For some reason Airbnb is very protective of their hosts
The host is Airbnb's customer, listings are non-exclusive (e.g. VRBO), and switching costs for hosts are low. The hosts bring an extraordinarily valuable asset (real estate) and without the hosts, Airbnb has no business.
You are the hosts' customer. You might argue that without the renter, there is no business, but that's true irrespective of the platform. Those hosts will list somewhere and get renters, as long as there's a market.
Presumably, bad hosts (not Airbnb) would take the hit of offering a poor experience over time, and better hosts would prevail. So, Airbnb's goal is to stay out of that fray and keep as many hosts as possible on their platform in order to capture as much revenue as possible from the good hosts, as well as any revenue available from hosts on the descent.
Yes, that's probably right. But they are slowly (or not so slowly) destroying their brand for short-term gains. It doesn't sound clever, or sustainable.
One solution might be for all listing platforms to outsource reviews to the same third-party, and get out of the business of moderating reviews. It's really a conflict of interest, so this would eliminate the pressure and incentive to whitewash.
There's always another fool who has yet to be burned bad enough ready to roll the AirBnB dice. Guest churn is expected. But no hosts in an area means AirBnB has nothing to offer in the area.
Their competition isn't much better, either. I spent ~3 months trying to get a refund for a canceled booking from VRBO, that the host happily and enthusiastically provided. VRBO kept the money until I started trashing them online, then all of a sudden my case was escalated to someone who could correct the problem. For everyone who has sworn off Company X, there is someone else who has sworn off Company Y.
I've currently got a month-long AirBNB booking coming up and every day I cross my fingers and pray for no surprises. I don't remember ever having this kind of uncertainty and anxiety when booking with a plain old hotel.
Thankfully I haven’t had this bad of an experience but I agree with the sentiment. It’s good for “luxury” rentals like a whole craftsman house for 10 people in an interesting part of the country. For short notice/basic stays I have had a much better experience with Hotel Tonight and standard travel deal sites.
I think the biggest issue is that the three way dynamic between guests, hosts, and AirBnB leads to weird situations where the guest needs to thread the needle between everyone else’s rules and pass through rules on a rental that represents very little margin for anyone involved above you. It’s easy to run afoul of them and get a bad rating or fine. There are the extra fees that are not shown by search results that may make the stay cost more than a hotel. And often the “it has a kitchen” remark means a bunch of single serving oats, a kettle, and a toaster. A random hotel breakfast has as much variety.
It's weird to read this and also see how hosts are absolutely pissed over Airbnb not doing anything about guests abusing hosts - trashing the place, making false claims, etc etc. It's almost like if Airbnb just doesn't do anything to resolve issues, both for hosts and guests.
All this said, my personal Airbnb experience was positive. Surely beats rental classifieds or searching Google Maps, and I'm not aware about any serious general-purpose alternatives. My issue is that hotels are simply conceptually (and practically) different - there's a huge difference between a proper rental house/apartment and a hotel room (though Airbnb goes there, it used to be good but today many listings aren't better if not worse than a hotel room now). Sure, hotel brands had realized this and started to offer some curated properties, but this is very uncommon.
In these kinds of situations, I prefer to just dispute the transaction through my bank, get a temporary credit for the full amount (with Capital One at least), and let my bank investigate it. Most of the time this will be the end of it but in some cases you will need to provide additional documents/info to settle the dispute.
Airbnb has been more expensive then hotels lately and there is absolutely no reason to book airbnb unless traveling in large groups for larger homes or secluded mountain locations.
Or for stays of more than 2 weeks - airbnbs often have a weekly or monthly option and in certain countries the price isn't too much more than what you'd pay to rent a real property.
I’d have to look to be sure, but I’ve likely got over 100 nights in over 50 AirBnBs. Most were as-expected or better. One was definitely dirtier than I’d have taken the family but I was crashing there during a trip in support of one of my hobbies and spending only sleeping time in the place.
The one “screw job” I got was in Vegas staying in a sub-$40 place for one night waiting for my family to join me. Place had no running water. AirBnB support asked me if that was a problem. “Yeah, it’s 100°F outside and I’m going to need to shower and probably going to use the toilet at some point.” Got asked to wait about 15 minutes while they tried to reach the host and then got a refund with no fuss. Was no problem to find a crappy casino hotel room in Vegas in July.
But plenty of the AirBnBs are places that I couldn’t find an equivalent. Two nights in a tree house in Costa Rica. Two massive houses on Martha’s Vineyard. A cabin backing up to a nature preserve in Belize.
It's not guaranteed to work, but I'm always extremely careful about choosing my rentals and I have been disappointed on very few occasions. Everyone has an occasional bad experience with a business (see: all of Yelp) but I'm not going to write off the thousands of highly-rated hosts I haven't interacted with because a few in the past have given me problems, especially if those ones did not have exceptionally high ratings and plenty of them.
But it is a risk/reward proposition, and a hotel is always going to be the lower risk option. But I like the "reward" that you can sometimes find in the form of unusual locations, interesting living spaces or just a cheap place to stay.
Glad you got a refund. I booked one for a month and because of travel delays got there after midnight. On first sight, I refused to stay there as it wasn't anything like the pictures or description. On trying to get this sorted out, found out I should have read the fine print. Monthly rentals are subject to different terms and conditions. Paid for the entire month, never stayed there, no refund.
Now that I'm reading all these horrible experiences, I'm wondering why there isn't a review system for businesses where I can read about such issues? I guess Trustpilot has a rating for Airbnb, but it's not very well known. How else could we make other consumers aware of such cases?
Scheduling a vacation with family (kids) over Christmas, flying into New York City and using Airbnb is rolling the dice. Spend the extra few dollars for a hotel room and enjoy your vacation. You got what you were promised: a discount for an unstable experience and easy to use booking platform.
Clicked through to type a similar comment. They have let me and my family down so many times, the trust is gone. They should have been harder on this stuff from day 1. Their marketplace needs both supply and demand to work.
I empathize, but there are terrible hotels too, right? It sounds to me like you're better at distinguishing decent hotels from fleabags than you are at distinguishing good rentals from bad ones.
Now I usually stay in Sonders and hotels. Better prices and similar locations and more stable outcomes. Hotels and Sonders won't cancel you last minute.
I shouldn't have to spend 12 hours on the phone over the course of three days, having my vacation completely ruined, just to get what I deserve which was my money back.