why is 6% drop in stock price such a big news these days? I'm sure it will be recovered in a few days. are they going to publish another article when it regains the lost value?
The modern Airbnb experience: Pay a 150 dollar "cleaning fee" and then be instructed to wash the bedsheets, vacuum the apartment, do the dishes, dust the TV and replace the candles before you leave
Imagine every single business you interact with acting exactly like this. Imagine ticketmaster, airbnb, tipping at restaurants, pre-tax/fee price tags exported into every aspect of business.
This is what a world without regulation could be.
The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.
I'd like to think that very few serious people want a truly unregulated free market. The free market can be amazing but it requires enough regulation to let it happen. We have to try and stop monopolies from forming, and break them up quickly when they do. That's the kind of regulation we need more of, not so much the regulations that dictate specific business practices.
Of course, we don't really have that at all in the US. We have a severely compromised free market.
Is there any country that doesn't have heavy subsidies/intervention in what it considers strategically important industries?
For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.
It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).
In theory the new ideas that come from competition outweigh the efficiency/brute force of state-backed monopolies. But this depends on them not simply copying the ideas as they come.
Many things aren’t about new ideas. If you heavily subsidize raw materials, or even finished products like solar, you can own an industry. They’ve been successful at it for solar, and now own enough of the inputs that it would be difficult to not include China. They’ve generally done the same with manufacturing (including a ton of infrastructure) such that the rest of the world is now uncompetitive… especially at their scale.
Regulation is the difference between libertarianism and anarchy. People always claim to want unregulated freedom, speech is the most common example, then someone starts defaming, harassing, threatening, and sharing child porn and suddenly we get into a no true Scotsman debate about what freedom actually means. You should therefore be skeptical of anyone saying they want something completely unregulated. They are likely either lying to you or too blinded by their own biases to even understand what they are saying because almost no one wants actual anarchy.
i view the need for regulations as through the lens of the seven deadly sins.
Until we can rest assured that 100% of you will treat me better than I deserve, we will have to be on the watch for pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.
That is pretty much the world that the original Star Trek was promising--an evolved human--but we are very far away from that now.
We could also look at it through the lens of Bertrand Russell's four unquenchable desires (acquisitiveness, rivalry, pride, power).
Either way, flawed humanity needs regulations backed by overwhelming power to force us to treat each other right.
Anarchy being the better version, with the anarchist members having to agree to such terms whereas the libertarians get to force their terms onto others by calling it property rights?
Sure it is. There are 130K+ places in the US that you can stay at that are professionally managed and legally zoned for short term stays. You don’t pay any undisclosed fees once you get there. You don’t have to worry about cleaning anything. There is no “checklist”. I just walk out of most hotels I stay at, click a button on an app and get my receipt.
You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.
Kids, people have kids and kids nap. It’s a nightmare trying to find a hotel that has a suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the room. Leaving you to either book adjoining rooms or calling hotels until you find one that has that. And typically at that price point it’s cheaper to stay in an Airbnb.
Embassy Suites and Homewood Suites are two that I know about. All Embassy Suites have two room suites with a separate bedroom and most have a sleeper sofa.
Another point regarding kids is it can be a lot easier to find an AirBnB and cook their favorite or required dishes (my son had bad stomach problems early in his life and needed a very bland diet) rather than try your luck 3 times a day at a random restaurant.
People say this a lot, but I don’t know why. Airbnbs are consistently cheaper pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled, so much so that I wouldn’t have even been able to visit many cities if I needed to pay for a hotel.
It's like how Uber utterly murdered the taxi industry. That kind of thing simply doesn't happen to an entrenched incumbent market player who doesn't have it coming.
As for regulations, when regulations fail to keep up with reality, well, guess who wins. If you want to tell your neighbor what she can do with her house, I guess maybe you should've outbid her when it went up for sale.
Nowadays it’s common for hotels to charge “resort fees” or “location fees”. Like airbnb’s cleaning fees, these are disclosed during checkout but often don’t appear in comparison shopping sites or advertisements.
No. You’ve got it backward. Regulation requires perfect information to get it right. Free markets adjust to new information much quicker than governments.
Airbnb could easily solve the issue by standardizing a level service and expectations. They could do what Amazon does when merchants don’t follow their market place best practices and hide the “book” button under a “other booking options” link. They won’t though and they’ll continue to burn through their customers who are unhappy with the experience.
wait, you're saying that amazon is aware of shit vendors on their platform? you're continuing to say that they don't actually remove them but just hide them? you're implying that amazon is complicit in not eliminating bad actors? /s
Ticketmaster specifically lobbied, contracted and purchased their way into near monopoly. Those contracts for sure really helped to block other free-market participants from entering the ticketing game.
not sure how rhetorical you're being, but...regulations ;-)
this is exactly why companies like airbnb, uber, and the other disruptors try so damn hard to not be lumped in with the exact market they are trying to disrupt. they all know that if they had to play by the same rules, there would be no disrupting. the disruption comes from them being allowed to skirt the rules and play on different playing fields. they'll all scream about corruption in the existing sytem, and some of that might very well be true, they are suggesting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. it is true that some regulations that help protect the consumer will hinder unbridled growth for the disruptor. tough!
I always reference the Airbnb pitch deck [1] to prove that "success" means you'll 100% lose your values along the way ("Share connection" which was big social selling point for early Brian C.)
Paul G couldn't be prouder of any other company ever from YC and it is well understood that not only are rent seeking slumlords and dirty/dangerous places a frequent problem, airbnb actively destroys communities [2],[3].
So this is what maximum startup success looks like folks.
Or better yet, charge you the $150 cleaning fee and ask you to bring your own linens (sheets and towels). Yes we’ve stayed at a place like this only realizing after we got there “it was all in the notes”.
Too true. I just stayed in two different resort hotels for the first time in several years -one for business and one for pleasure- and they were both a nicer experience than several AirBnBs I’ve stayed in lately. No cleaning required and one of them cost about the same as the average AirBnB these days.
I'm just happy that AirBnb wasn't successful long enough to start to degrade service at hotels. I was expecting things to get worse for consumers across the board if left unchecked.
I stayed in LA last year for a few days and it was really sketchy. When we checked in the guy said to say we were staying with a friend if anyone asked and then kept texting my girlfriend asking us to stay extra nights.
I had a similar experience in NYC circa 2019. Several weeks before the scheduled stay, the host wrote that we should lie if anyone asked us about the situation. I was not okay with that and canceled the reservation. Despite the sketchiness, Airbnb refused to refund any of the prepayment.
I've had mostly very good experiences on AirBnB, but I've definitely seen the pattern of "you have to do exactly this to put the trash out, please wash the dishes exactly like this, please strip the beds and put the sheets here" and paid a $200+ cleaning fee.
To be fair, the things those hosts asked me to do weren't anywhere near a full cleaning of the place, but I can see people who are used to doing exactly nothing when leaving a hotel being peeved that they had to do 10% of the cleaning and still pay a cleaning fee for the other 90%.
If I’m paying a cleaning fee why can’t I just pay that extra 10% and do nothing? Where’s that option?
You know what, the next time I stay at an Airbnb, I’m going to just say I didn’t clean anything but I left an extra $20 on the counter to cover the work I didn’t do. Shouldn’t be a big deal right? That should be more than enough to cover the 15 minutes of labor I was asked to do, at a rate of like $80/hr.
You can't go to McDonalds and pay extra for table service, or less to cook the burger yourself. But you can pay more at a proper restaurant or less at the supermarket. Even if what you're offering is "fair", we can't have every business offering every service.
You also don't pay extra at McDonald's to use the table.
Which is probably a better comparison for the chore lists and cleaning fees than table service.
I haven't really used Airbnb, but it seems pretty ridiculous that people would continue to use them if there are different, annoying to understand conditions attached to each listing.
And then in some sense, a media article criticizing them is the free market.
I just don’t understand, if they’re going to clean the apartment anyway, why should I clean anything at all?
It seems like a petty power move type thing, like a way to ensure guests don’t go too crazy or something because you make them feel like they will have to clean things up.
If the cleaners are going to be there 90 minutes, they won’t have time to load and run a full dishwasher cycle and put it away. But they’ll have enough time to put it away if you started it before you left. The other choice is they do everything, but you pay them for 2.5 hours instead of 1.5 hours. I’ve never seen a list of chores that was unreasonable, even if there was a non-null list of things for me to do, it was always reasonable.
>I just don’t understand, if they’re going to clean the apartment anyway, why should I clean anything at all?
That's the problem. I suspect many amateur hosts have scaled operations to the point that they don't clean between stays and outsource that job to consumers as a shortcut, cost saving measure.
Most Airbnbs I have seen have a "check-out list" that involve some sort of shenanigans like this. Host rate you back as well so if you get a poor rating then you may have difficulty getting bookings in the future.
Is there not also some way for the host to have you charged an additional fee for 'leaving the property dirty' or something like that? I'm thinking something along the lines of the Uber extra cleaning fees.
_Opens Marriott App, books a hotel anywhere in the world, quality standards met_
It’s annoying that hotels don’t do daily cleanings as often and resort fees only questionably add value but at least I don’t have to pack my bedding, look for cameras hidden inside the bathroom, or worry about somebody just casually entering at night
Do you change the sheets on your bed daily at home? Do you use fresh towels after every shower at home? There's the "it's a rental" mentality applied to everything that I think is just out of place in most areas. Maybe it's just me, but I tend to treat other people's things more precious than mine for the simple fact that I'm probably using someone else's thing because I can't afford my own. So treating their thing with the "it's a rental" attitude just means I'll be charged for the thing I didn't want to pay for in the first place. I know, I'm weird.
> Do you change the sheets on your bed daily at home? Do you use fresh towels after every shower at home?
I don't know why you're targeting this rant at me. I was just telling someone that hotels do a thing that they want them to do. I don't have my hotel cleaned daily.
In their defense, some people pay for hotels specifically for this luxury. You get to pamper yourself for a few nights, which might be meaningful if you're in an otherwise unpleasant place.
As for the rest of your comment, I found it pretty unintelligible. Do you want to use Airbnb or not? Are you for or against washing your own dishes?
No, I've never used airbnb, and won't for multiple reasons.
>Are you for or against washing your own dishes?
assuming you're referring to eating out at a restaurant, so no. otherwise, if i don't do my dishes, who else is going to do them? kind of left that question a bit vague.
You left your comment with the statement that hotels have stopped doing automatic daily room cleaning by default when a guest is staying longer than one night. I don't think this is a negative. I find it very wasteful to have linens and what not cleaned daily. How dirty were you when you got in the bed that they need changing that this is expected. If that's your expectation, is that a normal thing where you change your bedding daily at home? It's that "fuck it, it's a rental" attitude. Unless you had a really bad night and shat/pissed the bed, there's no reason for it.
Do you do your dishes at a restaurant? Clean the table after you eat and if needed move the table and chairs to another corner? And go throw the leftovers into a dustbin or pack it or put it in the fridge yourself? I guess not!
Yeah that sounded like a very absurd/weird comparison
> There's the "it's a rental" mentality applied
No it’s not a “it’s a rental mentality” — it’s more like “you’re paying exactly for that service”! Yup, exactly for that.
What you are saying is more (loosely) like — “oh my god, how horrible is it to expect this taxi driver to drive me to my destination just because I am going to pay the fare, if it was my car I would have driven it myself, right?”.
No, none of that. I didn't quote the exact part I was replying to since it was the last bit of text, but for those not following along:
>They just stopped doing them by default.
When you pay for a hotel, they still clean the room when you check out. They just don't necessarily do it by default each night if you're only staying for 1 or 2 nights. They will do it if you specifically request it, but is changing your sheets really necessary if you just slept in the for one night and will be the staying one more night? I don't care if it is the hotel or not paying for the water/electricity to do that laundry, but that just seems extremely wasteful, especially multiplied times the number of guests with the same duration of stay.
what you're going on about is totally different and just flat out being argumentative for arugment's sake. or, you just missed the point.
Here you go - I suspected I had missed the point while I was typing my comment but after seeing this reply of yours now I really think I was spot on. And seeing your these two comments I believe you ought to be the last person to be mentioning 'being argumentative for arugment's sake' :) Anyway, cheers! We have different taste and preferences in what one expects from a hotel room. Happy staying in hotels!
It’s been my understanding that the daily cleanings keep the bedbugs under control. People pack their suitcase on their bed at home, come to hotel, unpack their suitcase on the bed. Easy transfer opportunity. Daily cleanings can help eliminate a good chunk of them before they spread and ruin the entire hotel building.
Maybe I'm the odd one out. Everyone on HN seems to complain about over-the-top chores when checking out of Airbnbs, poor quality, no support when needed, etc. but that's never been my experience in the ~20 I've rented over the last 5 years in ~15 different countries. I love that I can stay in authentic or unique arrangements wherever I go. I get that predictability is something some people value, but hotels are so sterile and boring -- I have a strong distaste for them.
That's a selfish perspective. Many dislike airbnb because of what it does to the communities you are trying to commoditize the authenticity of. It does directly contribute to the destruction of neighborhood communities.
I was an early Airbnb adopter, but haven't used it in years...curious what types of travel people use Airbnb for these days?
For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.
Airbnb hosts in Québec are supposed to be licensed by the province and the company has only made a pathetic, token attempt to enforce the rules. Even after a fire killed 7 here.
The short-term rental market in Quebec is going to be under a lot of scrutiny[0], and I imagine that it's going to end up in the few burroughs of montreal that allow short-term rentals in residential area likely banning it [1].
Especially for seasonal trips, people will start cutting out abnb. It is advantageous for both parties. Airbnb fees are outrageously high, plus I have to basically cleanup the entire house before leaving. They are like car dealers, they get in the way without providing any real value. I bet, eventually people will be able to search for places directly on Google.
You know what is absolute must have information I need before booking a stay? The exact location or the exact address! And AirBnb by design doesn’t allow that. I don’t know how one can book without knowing that. At places even a variation of 200-300 meters can mean the difference between great and absolutely shitty stay and on AirBnb often you just know it’s somewhere in that 10-50km area!
Then the circus around not being able to easily get contact of host — some try in silly cryptic ways to share their number. All this seems really shady.
On top of that I have to deal with the fact that apparently all AirBnb hosts probably pay for some kick ass photographer that just metamorphoses their places. Yup! And unlike hotels and resorts I can’t verify pictures or reviews and even address and map location at multiple places.
And yeah zero service or help when you need it — neither from the host, nor AirBnb.
And no those are not cheaper at all, even more so if you factor in what it lacks in service.
AirBnb has always felt like something utterly broken, functioning between the cracks of regulations.
I've never been able to bring myself to use AirBNB. I have friends that have had good experiences (in fact, they will never use a regular hotel), but I haven't had the one thing that I think would make me seriously consider AirBNB: A long-term stay, somewhere. The longest stay I've had, has been 2 weeks, and hotels take the stress out of things. I tend to be places to do stuff other than worrying about where I'm sleeping.
I've stayed in 5-star hotels, and Motel 6. I tend to actually prefer the Motel 6. No bother, and the room is there, when it's time to crash. That's really all I care about.
I've used AirBnB for the first time for business travel recently, but was careful to rent only from "superhosts" who have a long track record with very high customer ratings. These people tend to be pros (sometimes literally) and there are few/no unpleasant surprises in my admittedly-limited experience.
It was no real hardship to load the dishwasher before I left and take the recyling bin to the curb on the day they requested.
The overall result is almost indistinguishable from staying in a hotel, except that you can take your own trash out when you want, there's nobody in the room next door who likes to sleep with Fox News blaring at top volume, you don't run out of towels as quickly, and when you do, you can do your own laundry easily.
Then there's the fact that I can rent an entire house for the price of a hotel room. Coming from a longtime skeptic, I'm now pretty much sold on the AirBnB thing, at least for stays exceeding 3 nights.
If you’re staying for a while or with a big group, airbnbs tend to be good value still and come with some things that are really handy (kitchen so you don’t have to eat out every day, large living rooms etc). Otherwise hotels are competitive in every other way
What will really kill airbnb is regulators stepping in to stop BS hotel/motel rentals that claim not to be hotels and motels. Seriously a single rule that says "this must be your personal primary residence for >6 months of the year, and cannot be owned by a company or trust" seems like it would fix most of the problems AirBnB has created.
Highly doubt that. Airbnb customers are the ones listing properties online, they are having time of their life on the platform. Its the _product_ that has unpleasant experiences.
