Posted by babelfish 2 hours ago
Granted, Airbnb has taken on the hotel industry, and so I'm not surprised that their rules have evolved.
It’s not just Airbnb the company that moved away from it, it’s the Airbnb hosts that moved away from it as soon as opportunists started becoming mega landlords renting out ikea-furnished party houses. It hasn’t been the original “person with a spare room for a weekend” Airbnb in a long, long time.
The relationship to homliness really has nothing to do with this. Your friends never charged you to stay then charge 4x that because you left some trash.
As a personal example, I once stayed at a place that charged a $150 cleaning fee, but also required dishes + taking the trash out and down the street, which wasn't known until we opened the door. And of course there was a threat that failure to do so would incur a fee. Also a bit of ceiling plaster fell on my wife during the night. Still had a fantastic rating because it was a castle and I'd stay there again if someone else paid.
[edit] I checked and they changed this in April of 2025, as of then the fee is rolled up in the advertised rate.
It’s ultimately an issue of consistency. If I book with a name brand hotel I have some comfort knowing they have corporate standards that tend to be enforced consistently across properties. If a Hilton, Marriott etc hotel has issues it tends to get dealt with quickly because those brands know consistency is their brand. In extreme cases they will kick hotels out of their brand. That randomly named hotel that used to be a brand name was likely kicked out of the portfolio for compliance issues.
With an AirBnb it’s a total crapshoot. Sometimes it’s totally fine, other times you’d end up in the dirty lair of a psychopath.
There's also quite a big perception bias towards guests when it comes to discourse about Airbnbs. As a host I have to deal with so many unbelievably disgusting and disrespectful people renting my places on a regular basis, but nobody is ever talking about that. Social media would have you believe all guests are victimized angels and hosts are greedy and evil. I would love to see some of these people host and find out what it's really like. If you've worked in retail or hospitality you know.
Airbnb has actually gotten extremely sensitive about this perception the last couple years. They've changed a lot of policies to bend over backwards for guests to avoid the PR. Anyone guest you see complaining online about a recent experience should be taken with a _large_ grain of salt because Airbnb very rarely sides with hosts anymore and it likely means the guest did something very egregious to get penalized.
Nothing about this is ragebait. Clean after yourself was the norm, cleaning fees often a full days cost or more, and I had bookings that I never checked into make claims about stains or damage!
Most hosts were bad by hotel standards. I will never use one on my own volition.
That use case is absolutely better suited to hotels btw. I’ve stayed in many cheap Airbnbs while traveling myself and didn’t have that experience myself.
That's only _part_ of what I experienced though. I stopped using the service by my own volition. They have changed some rules since, but those fees and rules were not the tipping point. The decline in service, misadvertising of spaces, poor customer service and general decline in value stop me from continuing to use AirBnB.
I've been forced into an AirBnB recently, and it was the same nonsense. I could not pull into the driveway because the curb was incorrectly built. Host argued with me that it was fine, drove over and couldn't get their OWN car into it. Then they claimed they hadn't been to the property "in months" and "since the work was done"????? They told me I could park at a nearby grocery store and walk over, but they wouldn't be refunding me. AirBnB sided with them. I logged everything with photos (including the hosts car unable to get into the driveway), screenshots and had my company file a chargeback.
Doesn't even make it into my top 50 worst experiences. Total joke.
I'm a host, I've had hundreds of stays over several years, and I have stellar reviews. It's a large house so there's a $250 cleaning fee. I ask guests to start the dishwasher and take their trash to the dumpster at the end of the street.
I'd say I have two types of guests. The first type is the 99% - they are friendly, grateful, and make the whole thing worthwhile. People who ask for recommendations on the area, leave a nice note in our guest book, and are grateful and respectful of our home. They never complain about taking care of a few things before they leave, and often ask what else they can do. It's honestly a source of positivity for everyone involved to have them stay in our home.
I can count on a single hand the number of times I've had the second type of guest. Exploitative people who have it out for us the second they check in and won't be satisfied until they've extracted money and apologies. As a host, I have literally zero recourse against these people. The system is set up to let them behave this way, and they make me more cautious and my home more expensive for everyone else.
Getting to my point - everyone comes to conversations about Airbnb with an enraged, polarized point of view. It's still a thriving platform with absolutely everything in a single place. The homes range from bare bones crash pads and neglected side projects to true luxury experiences. The guests range from people you are happy to have met to true predators.
Unfortunately, Airbnb and Vrbo have created an absolute race to the bottom. As a host I have next to zero ability to screen who stays with us, and I'm basically at the mercy of bad actors. They extract huge fees and are unhelpful to me and barely helpful to my guests. They introduce ham-fisted rules like this every few months and are revenue optimizing themselves off a cliff.
This is a market that could benefit from more choice.
Turn it off and come back to a sauna that will take 3 hours to cool down. I'm not doing that.
For me personally I only ever use Airbnb's now for big trips with at least 3-4 bedrooms needed. These types of Airbnbs usually have more professional management in any case. But otherwise I think Airbnb just offers a poor value:
1. For a long time Airbnbs skirted hotel taxes and other fees. Those days are long gone, so I often find Airbnbs to be just as expensive or more than hotels when you factor in cleaning and other fees.
2. Like this article points out, quality control and rules can be all over the map, and people are sick of it. With a hotel you usually know what you're getting, with an Airbnb it's always a crapshoot.
3. A huge benefit with a hotel is that if something goes wrong you can almost always be moved to another room, sometimes a different hotel. With Airbnb, while they may help you rebook it's much more fraught and you don't know what the next place will be.
So for me I use hotels for most stays now, though I am curious about house swapping for longer overseas trips. I have friends that have raved about it so it just seems like a better option.