Technology

Exactly!

I have young kids, and airbnbs offer a lot that hotels don't, and they don't have the crap I hate about hotels (housekeeping, sketchy parking lot, etc).

Surely we can find a solution where you and I can get what we want, while residents get what they want.

Yeah they can improve their UX all they want but since their co-founder is part of DOGE and wants to mess with social security, it makes choosing alternatives easier.

hotels have been cheaper and better for a while now

Strongly disagree. Here's stuff I hate about hotels:

• housekeeping - just leave me alone and clean up when I leave
• rarely have separate bedrooms - I have young kids, so we can't use the room once they go to sleep
• parking lot is a crime magnet
• more expensive for larger groups - we often travel w/ friends, so there's often 10 or so of us
• minimal included entertainment - usually just TV and maybe pool; airbnbs often have kids toys, private hot tub, etc

Airbnbs are essentially the inverse of all of that.

We occasionally go to hotels, but if we can find an airbnb that's a similar price for the scale we need, we go for that every time.

Richard Wolf had a very good take on all of these Silicon Valley "disruptors". It's basically been the neoliberal US american MO for the past quarter century:

Step 1: get a bunch VC money by promising the moon

Step 2: "disrupt" by undercutting the established moon due to lack of regulation. Even though it's an inferior product, it's VC subsidised, so it's cheaper than the established businesses.

Step 3: due to lack of regulation, your business drives established operators to bankruptcy. This is basically dumping but the regulation hasn't caught up.

Step 4: become the monopoly and suck as much money as possible from your customers to generate "shareholder value"

I’ve been the weird one in my friend group because I’ve refused to use Airbnb. Why would I want a less guaranteed place to stay that doesn’t have amenities and now costs more?

don’t forget the rudeness of some people. they behave like the whole building is a hotel and they can do whatever they damn well please.

If it were up to me, I would obliterate this concept. Hotels are for holidays, not people’s houses where everyone brings along their holiday brains and are being generally disrespectful towards the communities.

yeah I get things like its the only option yet somehow people traveled and found a place to stay before it existed.

While Air B&B has done irreperable harm to the housing market, I'm not 100% convinced it should be banned. I propose if a house operates as an enterprise, it be taxed according to commercial rates, not residential. It would go a long way to resolving the inequities.

Where I feel like they have a suitable place is for vacation rentals. Like when I was a kid our family would rent a house at the beach for a week as our summer vacation. The beach we’d go to had several real estate companies that would manage the rentals and published little booklets every year with the listings. The houses were privately owned, though, so as Airbnb and especially VRBO came along this gave the homeowners another option that was perhaps less expensive than the agencies. These are houses in a vacation area, though, generally not taking away housing from locals. This also was traditionally a family that owned one extra house for family getaways and trying to rent it out when they weren’t using it, not investors creating “hotel” chains. Setting up what is effectively a hotel in a residential area and cutting off housing from people who need it should be an obvious problem yet many people don’t recognize it.

Originally, they did fill a niche. If you have a big group of people, a hotel breaks the group up into rooms. Airbnb lets you have one place all to yourself.

Nowadays it's gone to shit with low quality spaces, hotels listing themselves on Airbnb, stuff like that. I hope there's a middle ground.

Yep instead of lowering rent because your unit is unaffordable you just buy up and rent them all out creating housing scarcity and prices will increase right up until the point ppl can't afford to vacation anymore... Which is pretty much now anyway. Queue up all the BS stories. "Millennials/zoomers don't 'want' to vacation anymore"

The Snake is going to eat it's tail.

This. They help destroy housing markets.

Hotels do that also

Depending on country, that might be the law.