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.