Stayed at an Airbnb last year where I left a ~4 star review taking off one star because of excessive noise from the bus stop outside (otherwise positive). Couple months later I get an email saying my review was removed for violating Airbnb policy. Had to contact support where they told me the host had submitted (fake) WhatsApp screenshots of me asking them for money to post a positive review and so they removed my review. No matter what I said customer support refused to reinstate my review. The most alarming thing is that they removed my review without any input from me. Interestingly, the property had added additional co-hosts where that property was their only property after my stay. Presumably these are fake profiles they used to file the dispute so it wouldn’t impact their main account.
In any case, I am never staying at an AirBnb again. Be aware that any rating on AirBnb can be easily manipulated by the host.
Also if you have status at a hotel, perks like room upgrades and late checkout are invaluable.
Value proposition isn’t there anymore either, airbnbs used to be super affordable but now match the price of hotels and if they don’t are in inconvenient locations.
Not to mention the impact it has on local housing supply and pricing.
Pricing is still relevant, at least in Europe (from my experience). I’ve done a lot of low-budget traveling with small groups of students in France this year, and AirBnB was (unfortunately) consistently and significantly less expensive than hotels.
Also, many hotels don’t give you access to a kitchen, which really sucks if you don’t want to spend money eating out every day.
There are probably better local websites in the countries you’re going to if you want apartments. I don’t know any in France, but they have them in other countries. Ask around. Vacation destinations are literally all apartments for rent by tourists.
Ask around
All right. Do you know any for any European country?
Yes. Adriatic.hr is good for Croatia.
But that requires effort on my part!
Unfortunately, the pricing still makes sense for larger groups of people.
There are far too many of these leeches taking up valuable housing in the most desirable part of my city
I can’t find a place to rent, but oh boy! look at all these temp stay airbnbs owned by vacation companies, my bad guess I should own a house.
Why should you get to use that desirable space 100% of the time instead of many different people being able to enjoy it?
Dropped a /s?
Be aware that any rating on AirBnb can be easily manipulated by the host.
This is the same reason that Yelp is bullshit. And Amazon reviews. And pretty much any reviews you can find online. It’s why people used the reddit search flag. Everything is gamed and manipulated. People suck.
Which is why reddit has been a target for gorilla marketing campaigns for a while now. I only trust review sites that I follow now
now we can’t even us reddit anymore
Dang so all I have to do to scam is have another WhatsApp account and send myself threatening messages 😯
Turn your chicken coop into a 5 star Airbnb listing with one simple trick!
Praxis would be to weaponize this and get your room comped while your staying at the Airbnb by having the host threaten you while your in the room. Karen’s have taught me to fight these fuckers at their own games just for the trill
Sorry brainstorming
Hotels don’t make you clean their rooms spotless before you leave or have a random pile of hidden fees either, those things always spoils the mood. Plus, you also get to see your points go up if you stay in a hotel.
While I agree that hotels are generally better than Airbnb, I have always had really good luck with Airbnb. I traveled across the EU staying almost only in Airbnb’s and it was great. It also let me kind of see what the housing market was there if I ever wanted to move. Also one of my hosts in Amsterdam firmly believed in the “bed and breakfast” portion of Airbnb, and cooked breakfast in her kitchen for us every morning and had all kinds of great info about the city. Plus she had an old orange cat that liked to sit at the breakfast table with us.
I have almost always had good luck. Just one bad experience comes to my mind - my host in Germany was a psychopath. I didn’t have any problems with her, in fact I hardly ever met her during a one week stay. But I forgot the heating on when I left. She got so pissed off that she left a long, insulting review, where she said shit about how we never got along. Airbnb refused to delete the review, so I deleted my account. By the way, I don’t pay $200 for a night. I take the cheapest $20 room that I can find.
Anyway, I created a new Airbnb account. The nice thing is that I was able to use a referral link from my wife again to get the referral bonus. So by deleting and recreating my account, I actually made $50.
Also at a hotel: “It smells like smoke.” “Let me take you conveniently to another identical room for free.”
Or any problem, really. I once had to move rooms twice because the AC wasn’t working. In an Airbnb, you’re boned
They only reason I started using hotels again is because my fiance gets good deals and they usually upgrade us because she works in the industry 🙂
The pay isn’t great (even in upper management, unless you are at corporate), but working in hospitality does have its advantages. It does make travel planning a lot easier.
AirBNB was great when it first started out. It was basically people renting out a room in their home for a night or two, for far cheaper costs than hotels and in areas where a hotel wasn’t as readily available. It was a good way for those folks to make some cash on the side and helped the traveler find convenient low cost housing for a couple nights
Unfortunately companies and people decided they could buy up properties and start a business selling out rooms, prices skyrocketed and it no longer became worth it. I just stick to hotels now (or hostels if I ever decide to backpack through Europe or something)
The last few times I’ve used AirBNB it’s been a pretty much like borrowing someones home.
For one we were travelling in Portugal and stayed in this old portugese lady’s home in a small village along the coast. Really sweet lady, but a bit of a language barrier as she struggled with both english and spanish.
Next weekend me and some friends are renting a whole 4 bedroom summer house in southern Norway to use as a base for a weekend of diving.
But in general I’ve grown tired of the concept, and the scarcity it brings to the housing market in some cities is predatory.
I’m Portuguese, Airbnb “crappy clean before you leave” and 600$ fees haven’t caught up yet luckily. Last time I used a Airbnb was in 2016, rented a room on S. Miguel (main Azorean Island) for a fair price.
Since then I mostly just book hotels wherever I go, be it Europe or abroad. In Europe, because it’s just easier, often times cheaper, more flexible check-in/check-out and doesn’t have the language barrier like you said. And abroad because I just don’t feel as comfortable and it’s expensive
It was honestly quite nice. We could communicate decently enough, and I believe it was her kids who handled the booking. Was down by Vila Nova de Milfontes, super nice and calm place, would definitely want to go back one day.
Oh yeah, English is very widely spoken in Portugal, mainly the younger generation but a good part of 40s to 50 year old people do have a good enough grasp of it. Older than that usually French is the main 2nd language and English is very basic to none.
You’re welcome back anytime! Portugal is a great place to retire, not to work though :p
Good gods how can you afford to go on so many vacations? :o
Portugal was in 2019 and this years is just a 5 hour drive from where I live. The Norwegian krone (NOK) is pretty weak right now, so we decides to not go abroad this year and save money for an upcoming mortgage. I’m doing well, but we’re by no means in a financial position to do multiple vacations a year 😅
Oh, 5 hours? Wow, yeah, sorry about that. I sometimes forget just how more compact everything is over in Europe compared to the US (or at least the Midwest in the US). Over here, driving for 45-60 min is pretty common for a commute. If one goes on an away-from-home vacation over here, it’s usually for far longer of a distance than 5 hours’ worth. (Not that I can afford that. Lol. 😅)
(Note: I just realized this may come across as making fun of you or sounding superior. Neither of these were intended if so.)
AirBNB is only good if it is an extremely unique/convenient location and there are no hotels reasonably nearby. Otherwise Hotel absolutely > AirBNB
My problem is that people talk as if these are the only options.
There are other services, like VRBO, that do the same thing and usually have the same properties. AirBNB is garbage now, so just use an alternative that doesn’t have the same bad policies and high fees.
Agreed. If I’m going on vacation I avoid cities as much as possible and want to be in the middle of nowhere in nature. That means no hotels for 10s of kilometers, but there’s usually at least one person renting out a room or something similar. I’ve also never experienced any of the things in this meme in places like that, but that could also be because it’s an American thing, which wouldn’t surprise me.
Exactly. Hotels are maybe good in the cities, when you need a simple boring room. But when you’re out in the nature or wish to stay in the more interesting place, have a celebration for family/friends gathering - it’s Air BnB all the way.
225 a night hotel would be a freaking dream. Most hotels cost 100 a night. I agree a cabin in the woods our somewhere else special.
But landlords are putting up ordinary homes up and people actually rent them. More money then sense.
It’s useful for short term renting. I’m interning and it’s stupid hard to find a 3 month lease.
I rarely go for airbnb if I don’t find a good deal, whether in terms of price, location, architecture etc. Sometimes there are good properties on airbnb. And yes, a lot of it is just run by buisnessmen and rich landlords. But there are also decently located cheap apartments sometimes.
If I travel alone and need to be on budget and only need a bed I can always go for a good dorm.
I’m just here to say fuck air bnb. Ban that shit for it’s contribution to the housing crisis.
In my neighborhood, half the houses are AirBnBs… Because we’re close to tourist destinations. 4 of my 5 neighbors are AirBnBs.
How do you even combat that ?
Enforce zoning regulations and apply rental laws or hotel regulations to Air BnBs. If you make them actually follow the rules, it suddenly becomes vastly less profitable.
Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it’s so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they’re non-specific about the unit you get, so it’s very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.
Like any business, they should be subject to audit and inspection at any time.
In my small touristy town the people in charge of the town are all in on the rental property game so they push hard against new policies about zoning and hotel regulations on homes. My uncle is doing it and I know if he was audited be fucked seven ways to Sunday.
Eliminate zoning and other regulations that make it impossible to build sufficient housing supply.
At it’s core, this is the root cause of the housing crisis. We do not have enough supply. The amount of Airbnb’s that exist is extremely miniscule and the targeting of Airbnbs is an intentional distraction tactic.
Depending on the source, 1% to 0.2% of all dwellings are listed for short-term rental in the US. That’s crazy small and has very little impact on housing prices overall.
The fact of the matter is that Single Family Homes are an incredible luxury that our parents and grandparents were able to enjoy when the country had half as many people as it does now. It is no longer sustainable to expect a SFH in the US, and the American public continuing to cling to that dream and restrictive zoning practices are really what is driving up prices.
If you want an affordable house you will need to move to a rural area where land and labor are cheap. If you want to live near any reasonably sized city, you better be upper middle class to even think about buying a SFH.
I totally agree. More housing would be built if we were to just fix our broken zoning regulations and building approval processes but everyone is obsessed with banning Airbnb.
…Or actually enforce zoning and regulations that ban short term rentals in residential areas? Most Air B&B’s in America are already illegal, real estate interests just have a ton of sway in local governments.
Why would you want to ban short term rentals when you could instead build more housing supply? Short term rentals bring in tons of money not only to property owners, but to the local area at large. Housing isn’t a zero sum game where in order to have short term rentals, long term rental supply must go down. Zoning laws make it impossible to build high density housing and approvals for large building projects are subject to the whims of the local planning board or city council rather than concrete laws and requirements. If we were to fix zoning regulations and improve approval processes, you could have plenty of housing supply for both short term rentals and long term, and the community would be better off.
Because while you wait for housing to be built there is currently a housing shortage, and existing houses are being used as short term rentals. And you’re assuming developers will act in good faith and not just use multiple floors as short term rentals which already happens. I’m all for building more housing and saying fuck short term Air B&B’s. There’s no reason we can’t do both.
I live in a place that is plagued by short term rentals. It sucks for the neighbors to have a different bachelorette parties next door every week of the summer. Lime scooters get littered all over the sidewalks in front of said houses. And we’ve already voted to ban them in residential areas but there is 0 enforcement.
I’m not assuming anyone will act in good faith. Developers should build whatever is profitable. If they build a whole building of new short term rentals, that will increase the amount of existing units that become available to long term rentals. It seems like you just don’t like tourism in your area.
The community must pass laws to protect occupancy expectations.
I hate all the “fuck Airbnb” hate when it isn’t coupled with “fuck my local council, etc” because they are the real enemy, they and their buddies are all in cahoots
The housing crisis is caused by property taxes being too low, particularly on land values. Banning small rentals won’t work because they’ll continue to extract rent under longer-term leases.
We already have plenty of houses. Increase taxes and their market values will drop.
The housing crisis is caused by many things.
Ban the ownership of single family residential properties by corporations. I don’t see a world where it makes sense for houses to be owned by companies.
Tiny soapbox time: I don’t trust AirBNB hosts to actually treat for bedbugs if they get them. I figure a reputable hotel chain at least has a fighting chance of taking it seriously.
Dodged bed bugs at an airbnb in LA earlier this year. When we made the report it didn’t allow us to comment on the listing. So somebody else could possibly run into the same issue without resolution
PSA: learn to how to check for bedbugs now instead of when you travel. Here’s a video that’s kind, but thorough.
In Montreal an Airbnb cought fire and killed 6 guests and one tenant because the owner converted a house to multiple Airbnb ignoring all regulation (including fire marshal rules)
English article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-old-port-fire-1.6788756
The province ended up banning Airbnbs but I don’t know the details of the bag
Airbnbs were already illegal in the old port before that event. The company still allowed them to be posted. I’m quite sure the province didn’t ban them too, there are still legal postings. Unfortunately, not much happened after this event. Media pressure made it so that Airbnb closed a bunch of illegal ads, but without legislation and enforcement its only temporary.
How did they end up banning AirBnBs? I was just browsing Montreal AirBnBs yesterday ( funny enough).
I didn’t really follow up on it. Maybe it was just politician saying stuff or it’s banned but not enforced so nobody cares
Tbh I never looked before all this went down (cause why would I lol), so maybe there were changes and it wasn’t a “all airbnbs are banned” sort of thing. Maybe it removed a lot of listings.
Hotels are quite heavily regulated in all parts of their operation, many have unionized staff. AirBNB owners are wannabe landlords with no oversight.
Maybe in your country. Here in France AirBnB are both cheaper and the rooms are nicer than hotel. Some of them could be landlords and profit… but some others rent something that would not be fitting as a location (like a vacation flat or a subpart of a house) but is OK for staying just a couple of days.
So I disagree heavily with your generalisation
I have to take issue with your assertion about hotel staff being unionized (although I recognize that could be true for your region). I’ve worked in hotels before and the reason they stay “cheap” is because they pay the cleaning and non-customer-facing staff the absolute bare minimum.
I’m coming from Midwestern America which certainly colors this experience, but in my case the housekeeping staff was made up almost exclusively of non-native English speakers. They were paid minimum, or close to it, and had room quotas that left them with 15-20 to “clean” a room.
On the events side of the business, the guys who set up tables and chairs were almost exclusively young, poor black men. The hotel only ran the air conditioning in those ballrooms when guests were present so it was regularly 80-85 f in those rooms with minimum wage staff doing manual labor.
Please understand I don’t have any love for the investment vehicle model that has taken over air-bnb, but hotels are by far the most disgusting socioeconomic workplace I’ve been in. I really don’t have the money for air-bnb, but I’ll certainly take some person paying off their rental over large corporation exploiting unskilled workers and immigrants.
In Montreal an Airbnb cought fire and killed 6 guests and one tenant because the owner converted a house to multiple Airbnb ignoring all regulation (including fire marshal rules)
English article https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/old-montreal-fire-airbnb-1.6801216
The french media had some follow up stories describing the owner total lack it respect for regulation. The province ended up banning Airbnbs but I don’t know the details of the bag
It was worth it back when it was people renting out a spare room in their house or their whole apartment when they were away for a small bit of cash on the side, there was a mutual understanding that you are staying in another individuals private space with all the rules and caveats that come with that, so the pricing will reflect the arrangement. For me, this made the inconvenience worth putting up with in most cases.
Now that booking an AirBnb costs as much as a hotel room and the service has been overrun by landlords looking to use it as their primary rental income though? I’m booking a hotel every time. If I’m paying hotel money I want hotel service and convenience.
Airbnb is great for groups. It’s basically the only time I use it. Getting a whole two bedroom apartment for an affordable price is really nice.
Stayed in Japan for two weeks in a group of 5-6 people, and our experience with Airbnb was great. But the two places we stayed at were basically proper hotels (one of them very small though), who just used the Airbnb platform.
Since I work at one, I stay at hotels free (within my brand) so I can’t say I have much experience with airbnb. I do feel they cater to very different markets though, I don’t necessarily begrudge the existence of airbnb, even if they are kind of our competition.
OTAs on the other hand, can all get fucked.
Air&b is a plague on affordable rentals and housing.
Nah. NIMBY-ass zoning laws, which prevent building and limit supply, are the root cause of unaffordable housing. It’s basic economics; zoning laws literally limit the production of a necessary good, and when that happens, prices increase. Fix zoning, and you will solve your problem.
Those two points aren’t mutually exclusive
Correct. But, providing temporary housing is a good people value, and abolishing it or meddling with its market forces will do more harm than good. Focus on the root cause.
The last time I used Airbnb, we rented 2 rooms in a guy’s house for a few days. At first, the guy seemed okay, only a minor reminder about leaving dishes out. I left a fairly positive review, but when it came time for his review of us he implied we were racist for not keeping eye contact and conversation with his roommate. I never saw the roommate, and my husband is the kind of introvert who doesn’t initiate conversations, especially when alone. It was ridiculous. We were also told that we had access to the rooms, bathroom, and kitchen and not to go into any other part of the house.
I’ll stick with hotels.
Didn’t know that my autism made me racist too. Damn.
Sounds like a real shitboot.
