I understand that there can be exceptional circumstances. However, I've stayed in more hotels by a factor of at least 25, and this has never happened once. In fact, any minor inconvenience at a hotel is usually remedied promptly, and user reviews generally feel accurate.
Airbnb wouldn't share any information about why the host was allowed to cancel (I understand there may be privacy concerns, but I'm left wondering if they simply found a better paying private offer, given it was for the holiday season and booked well in advance). In one case I found an alternative in the same building, so there was no widespread issue.
Those two are enough to put me off Airbnb forever. I just don't want the additional stress of wondering whether I'll receive a last minute cancellation, even if they're exceedingly rare.
In both cases, Airbnb would only offer us a refund plus maybe like 10%. They would not make any effort to rebook us at an equivalent property.
My theory is that because Airbnb does not sufficiently penalize hosts for these sort of late cancellations, hosts are incentivized to cancel cheap bookings to get a more expensive booking on another platform if prices meaningfully increase.
Never opened AirBNB site again after that. Zero customer protection plus shitty fees and hidden traps (no linen/towels rental was a nasty surprise one time).
This has bitten me in the ass. I fully prepaid for a booking via Expedia but due to plane delays arrived a few hours late (1am). By the time I got there the hotel had rented the room to someone else, had no more available, and everyone else in town was booked.
They blamed me for not checking in on time but considering there was a room available for the couple that came in after us, the real story is that there was a convention going on in town and last-minute attendees were willing to pay 10x more than I did. So they silently dropped my reservation and left me to fuck myself.
Don't count on hotels letting you check in whenever you want. Times have changed...
I don't think it ever makes sense for an AirBnB host to honor early reservation for holidays. The price they lock you in advance is just their stoploss, while the actual market closer to the date provides an almost guaranteed upside. Bonus points if they collect your payment in advance: free credit!
I've had several AirBnb hosts cancel. Airbnb provided an alternative option the first time but the second time did not. Luckily my credit card's travel insurance treated it like a hotel booking and was able to secure a reservation at a nearby hotel. And that was the last time I used AirBnB.
Airbnb hosts are not expected to have professionalism.
This happened to me on booking.com, twice. The host didn't allow prepayment, and when the payment time arrived, they cancelled saying there is a problem with the credit card. I tried to contact them but they didn't respond. Booking.com didn't care. From that time on I generally prefer hotels than private apartments.
That would, in turn, incentivize them to minimize this behavior. And it would alleviate my concerns. Yes, they'll eat the cost occasionally, but they'd arguably still have my business - so they can weigh the benefits of that
Who is creating the perception of what the product is? Airbnb. Who is making decisions that piss off both groups? Airbnb. But they're also squeezed by the unrealistic expectations of both sides.
I don't see a good way out of this, and the comment section isn't encouraging. People are either "hosts" or "guests" and they only care about the side they relate to.
It is not a serious platform IMO. Just like über, it invests absolutely nothing in the infrastructure it feeds off.
But it should never be on the tenant to ensure that the property is prepared for the next guest.
I'm not seeing it. If there isn't a dishwasher then you do the dishes.
I'm not a fan of Airbnb but I agree with the GP that you should clean up after yourself in this respect (cleaning dishes that you have used).
Are you serious? I do the dishes and take out trash/recycling (and other regular cleaning work) as an obvious matter of course to not live in a total stinky shithole. But also once a month we pay for a real service to do a serious cleaning that gets into all the corners and under furniture and ceiling and descaling in the bathroom (hard water) etc etc, which my SO wants kept up with and I think that's reasonable. Between kids, pets, guests and so on more accumulates in a house then trivial regular clean up deals with. They're not the same thing; everyone is expected to do their dishes and contribute to taking out the trash or other chores, but not necessarily to putting on heavier duty protective kit and dealing with bathroom tile or oven accumulation. And obviously there's a fee for that (and putting it off to 2-4 months isn't actually necessarily helpful if it ends up meaning each cleaning takes much longer and thus costs more).
Not having used in forever nor ever run an AirBnB, I will say that yes, I can see it being annoying to get charged if you were just there overnight and caused no issues. And I strongly think that anything which is part of standard practice after every single visit should also be part of the upfront price not a "fee". Extra fees should only be for unique things, like someone actually creating a big mess that takes extra time. But I also think basic humanity that takes a few minutes is different from something that takes an hour and extra equipment. If you leave a sink full of dirty dishes or trash laying around that's disrespectful, gross, will get worse much more quickly then dust bunnies. I'd be ok with dinging someone for that. Cleaners aren't lesser people servants, they're specialist professionals there to help not be maids to spoiled brats. A hotel room (or BnB) mini kitchen isn't a full service restaurant. If you want that level of help that to me feels reasonable to say is extra.
I'm not in any way saying it's respectable to leave "a mess" in an accommodation which charges a cleaning fee, but a small amount of dirty dishes in a sink (if there is no dishwasher) or not having washed linen is not in my view leaving a place "in a mess" as the host is expected to do a certain amount of cleaning regardless since trusting guests to do it would be reckless and this can be unreasonably time consuming for guests and challenging if they have small kids.
If there is _no_ cleaning fee and the terms were clear that full clean-up of the accommodation is expected, then fair enough, guest saves on cost by doing the work themselves and if they don't they deserve a negative rating.
I guess AirBnb has found that many hosts use it as an excuse to penalize guests or to claim it's not the host's fault if the place was not clean on arrival of the next guest, so it's just simpler for AirBnb to set a baseline of host service expectation.
If anything it means more of the $150 cleaning fee actually goes to the cleaners. Otherwise the cleaners only get paid for 30 minutes of light dusting and changing sheets while the owner pockets the rest.
I did have someone once ask me to strip the bed but that's just boomer hospitality etiquette expectations. It takes no time to strip a bed and the cleaners will need to touch the sheets anyway so why am I doing it?
It really brings down the price of a single night or weekend stay when you're just using the bed and bathroom and cleaning is a 10 minute job.
I think it only works in a high trust society, my fellow American countrymen are mostly incapable of actually doing what they promise in this regard, the nordics have enough societal responsibility and shame involved that you can reasonably expect people to do what is asked of them. A system like this in America would probably fall over from abuse by people who would not pay for the cleaning and then not do it
My father runs a few guest suites out his house and the cleaning cost, wear and tear of washing linen makes single night stays really impact his bottom line, hence him having a cleaning fee which is per stay rather than per night.
Prospective guests can then choose for themselves if they feel the overhead of the cleaning fee for such a single night is worth it for them and my father doesn't land up with uneconomical stays.
18 days later I’ve get notice from Airbnb that I’ll be charged $50 (45 EUR) for damages. The host decided that this required deep cleaning. What’s more important for $50 you can find a cleaning company for 2-3 hours in Warsaw.
I think it's not a big issue for people who clean up after themselves daily, but on the other hand, sparing those last 10 minutes on the checkout morning... ;)
for example if i spend a several days or longer in a place and instead of washing and reusing dishes as i would at home, i never wash any dishes but use up all the available dishes instead then i would not consider that normal.
dirty dishes also contain leftover food which can rot, or dry up, making it hard to clean, etc, you don't want to leave that stuff out for to long.
bed sheets on the other hand i wouldn't wash unless i am there long enough that i want to reuse them myself. the rest is just keeping things tidy and not leave chaos behind.
the whole thing with a cleaning fee is either to allow the advertised room price to appear lower (but doesn't airbnb now factor the cleaning fee into the price shown?) or alternatively to make longer stays cheaper because the cleaning fee is not applied for every day).
I know hosts that do this.
The guide for guest behavior is pretty much good guest guidelines like ensuring no trash is left out.
Its past time airbnb standardize the experience here more.
I think if homes were presented as a home, not a residential hotel, along with lower prices, cleaning would be perceived differently.
I mostly stopped using AirBnB due to the impact of their existence and lobbying on cities and affordable housing, but after my final few stays I was ready to quit over the huge fees, the fact those fees were hidden when searching, and the absurd rules BS.
The new rules already clearly and explicitly describe leaving things "in a civilized way". No one is suggesting it's ok to destroy a place.
Which hostels are these? Because all the ones around me cost €50-€80 a night for the privilege of sleeping in a room with twelve strangers.
If you live somewhere that only has bad deal hostels that no one should use, oh well. So do I probably. I've never looked in NJ. It just means there also exists hostels in the world that I would not use or would not do chores for.
What do you think would have been my experience at Airbnb?
Host isn't available. There might or might not be extras. Wash the dirty sheet yourself. Wait until cleaning can come by next day.
Hotels win every time.
Sorry you seem to have had so many problems with your rooms though, usually mine are a lot better than unclean sheets or worse.
I.e. this wasn't "and I want to speak to your manager!" it was "oh, I guess needing to start by comparing what happens when we just assume things are going to go wrong is where we're at nowadays?". Marriott is good because these kinds of things are rare in the first place, not because you get a nice apology.
The vacation rental companies offer very consistent cleaning services and local contacts for any issues with the house, and were relatively cheap because they were typically able to fill these houses with weeklong rentals all summer.
With Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes they are just a marketplace for the exact same rental companies that already existed, under the same terms and conditions, but a higher nightly price, and sometimes they are far less professional operations, and it's not easy to tell which is which when you are initially paying.
Last summer we rented a house directly through a vacation rental company that was also listed on VRBO for a third of the nightly price it was listed on VRBO for. We're dreading the day when the only option left is VRBO.
We got a much steeper discount, I'm assuming because we were solidly in shoulder season (a couple weeks after kids return to school in North Carolina, and during hurricane season), which the vacation rental company accounts for in their seasonal pricing, but VRBO didn't seem to. At this beach in particular, it is a summer vacation for families and you get a steep drop in prices if you don't have to schedule around school holidays, but VRBO didn't price that in in the same way that the local companies do.
Would be so much better if every region just started their own again and you just looked up property managers in the yellow pages haha
I've used them a lot and have found them very responsive with none of the Airbnb type horror stories. For vacations where you want a house instead of a hotel room, companies like this are a VAST improvement over Airbnb because they offer the type of local service that Airbnb will never be able to do at scale.
Call me lazy but I’ve always wondered why I need to take out the trash when a cleaning crew was coming in 10 minutes after I checked out.
People would have accepted this principle just fine if they just put it in the damn total price shown, so you could do a fair comparison between your lodging options.
They could have structured their reservations system the same as say, Hilton does - when you book 5 nights, and the nights vary in price due to demand, say it's $100, $100, $200, $100, $100, they just show "$120 per night (avg)".
Instead AirBNB thought they could get cute and pretend that this fixed part of the charge is not part of the price at all, it's this one separate purpose. Well, of course people are going to expect that if they're literally paying $200 for a cleaning crew (a cleaning that will take maybe 90 minutes max and cost the owner far less than $200), why the F can't they take the trash out? They did this to themselves.
There’s a reason municipalities have landlord/tenant laws, and Airbnb’s whole thing was offering hotel-like services at sub-hotel pricing, without hitting landlord/tenant.
They’ve arbitraged themselves out of existence (but not before making a nice profit for Airbnb shareholders).
Any service with terms basically that say "we have the right to charge your card whatever we like for whatever reason " will eventually abuse it
See also: car rental
Externalizing the costs and privatizing the profits.
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 other part of the theory is since it is owned by a former NFL player (and a Seahawk, at that), that local police were reluctant to rock the boat too much. Neighbors got frustrated, and well, maybe?
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.
The more often you wash linen then the faster it wears out and needs to be replaced.
While he has a cleaner who daily makes the bed and does basic cleaning (labour is far more affordable in South Africa), on checkout rooms need a more proper clean with additional use of a cleaning detergents.
Without a cleaning fee which is charged per stay, you'd have to increase the per night fee to cater for single night guests.
With the cleaning fee he can still keep per night rates as low as possible with single night guests still covering their actual overheads.
Airbnb offered more space and also a kitchen so I can save money cooking, and in big cities it was amazing. It still is in vacation spots when renting a whole house. But it's very very risky. Fact - hosts can get negative reviews censored by Airbnb support, as in sentences deleted or the whole review removed. If you don't believe me: first go to all your old reviews and see what remains. Second look at the bizarre grammatical structure of sentences on reviews. Little essays turn into fragments.
Also check the Airbnb subreddit. First notice how hosts tell each other how to get reviews removed. Second look how they view guests - as entitled garbage.
That to me is the bigger scam, the reviews thing. I'll happily take out the trash, just don't lie to me by removing half of the opinion spectrum. Oh and also I'm sick of having construction next door in almost every Airbnb I've stayed at the last two or three years. What gives?
I welcome this move to ban host rules that detract from the experience.
Never again. I haven't booked an airbnb in 12 years and I never will again.
Air B+B used to be good about 10 years ago, but its scraping the barrel now and most of the time your better off on another site if you want a house or just booking a hotel.
I think this move will be more taxing for hosts who have long-term guests as this will allow guests to treat their property more as a hotel with room service.
The ones requiring the most absurd cleaning procedures are the ones most likely to ignore the rules and continue their policy.
You arrive at the Airbnb. You look at the cleaning rules found on a piece of paper on the table but nowhere in the Airbnb description. You don't do the dishes and the host complains to Airbnb. You complain to Airbnb as well. Host is compensated for damages, while your inquires are ignored.
Besides, I don't even mind doing dishes. I find it relaxing.
I don't know if they really exist anymore, but I did stay in an honest-to-God B&B, long ago. I cannot remember where it was or why I was staying there. But I do recall that it was a rustic, quaint, actual residential house, that had many bedrooms converted into guest rooms. And my room was well-decorated (nothing like a Motel 6) and it had a very nice featherbed with flowered comforter, and all sorts of comforts just like home.
And of course, the key to a real B&B is the breakfast. When I awoke in the morning (I only stayed one night!) the hosts were downstairs, serving a delicious homemade buffet breakfast spread. It was a fantastic time.
The hosts were very personable and kind, and I felt very welcome there. It was, of course, regulated just like any hotel in the hospitality industry, so it went without saying that these hosts carried insurance and had a lot of rules to follow, letting strangers into their "home" which was obviously, 100% a business at that point.
Yeah, I don't know if there are any bona fide Bed & Breakfast hotels left in this world. AirBNB has certainly ruined the traditional terminology for that sector.
1. Just like all the add-on charges with air travel like having a checked bag or choosing a seat, a lot of negative experiences come from consumers making decisions solely based on price. This creates an incentive to leave things out to have a lower sticker price. Hotels with non-optional "resort" fees, cruises, and car rental all operate on this model.
The specific issue with Airbnb is the supposed lower cost comes for hiding costs like cleaning. Cleaning is expensive when you start talking about an apartment let alone a house. This is built in to the hotel price (minus tips, which are minor). Also, hotels avoid having the potential for a lot of cleaning (eg a full kitchen).
You might stay in an Airbnb and never use the kitchen, existing totally on eating out. Or you might cook a full Thanksgiving dinner for 20 people and use every dish and appliance in there. How are you meant to handle this when the cleaning cost could be $100 or $1000?
2. Airbnb like oh so many "tech" companies profits by pushing the negative externalities of their business onto people who didn't consent. The most notable negative externality is running an illegal hotel in a residential neighborhood. Hotels have staff, fire codes, licensing and inspections. Some random house does not.
Another is that the house owner never has to suffer from disruptive behavior from guests who may never return. I really think more places should restrict Airbnb to ADUs only when the owner is on-site.
Also, the evidence that Airbnb has driven up rents is undeniable at this point with more than a decade of evidence.
At the same time, hosts clearly profit off of unreasonable charges, like charging $300-500 to "clean" a studio apartment that might only take an hour. It's a bit like landlords stealing security deposits. It's particularly egregious when you're given a random list of tasks you must do, such as stripping sheets and starting wash cycles, etc.
Intermediation businesses are generally bad. The only way to increase profits at a certain point is by cutting costs and raising prices. The other parties want to avoid the middleman charges and go direct. It's why all these businesses like finding cleaners, tutors, etc all only go so far because people go off-platform.
They could take user feedback seriously, but chose not to. Case in point: we booked a place in Hawaii. We (2 people) arrived the day of, tired as heck from the beach activities. Place looked fine, except for the crumbs of food in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. No big deal. We crashed almost right away, too tired to do anything else. An hour later, my wife jumped up, claiming some insect was walking on her legs. I turned on the lights sleepily, and lo and behold, there were cockroaches on the ceiling, scurrying about (and one had fallen and landed on my wife's legs). In the middle of the night, I contacted AirBnB help. They wanted proof. So I took a video and sent it, along with photos. Finally around 2AM they agreed that we should get out of there. We packed up and left for the beach, to wait things out.
My first reaction was: I should leave a review telling people about the roaches. But guess what? AirBnB cancelled our reservation, so there was no way to rate the place or leave a review! They did refund me, but we wasted a day trying to catch up on the lost sleep.
After that experience, I stopped booking AirBnBs if I could help it. They (and VRBO) are a last resort for me (no pun intended).
On leaving, the host offered us a discount on future bookings if we left a 5-star review. This 'beg for a 5-star' practice is common in every Asian business. We got it from a Hilton in Vietnam. (It's probably global. Our recent experience happens to be in Asia.)
In fairness, hotel ratings are the same. My SOP now is to ignore all 5-star ratings. Simply don't read them. Instead, sort by lowest and that gives you the true measure of a place.
Ratings are totally broken.
Which, of course it is. There's a reason we're going back there, again, next week.
I forgot about my other Airbnb experience. The place was mediocre, I rated it so. The guy called me and offered me money, just cold hard cash, to change my review. I refused.
It happens to host with hundreds of spectacular reviews.
That's why Airbnb likes to get proofs.
It has long been obvious that many scammy hosts exist on the platform, and it ought to be easy to detect such hosts if they bother to try. Yet, that never happened until now.
So what changed? I would bet that until now they have always worried about having enough inventory to sell, and that now they are noticing they have too much inventory. That changes the dynamics from "be extra nice to those who bring the inventory, and even tolerate a little fraud from them" to "be extra nice to those bringing the dollars".
I do wonder if this is an early sign of a coming recession.
If it was just the filth, it could be like any other terrible experience, but this mid-rise was standing next to the rubble of a razed building beside it and there was literally an open gas pipe hanging upright two floors down with people smoking above. The doorman who showed us the unit seemed unconcerned and it was nearly impossible to get our money back until we literally threatened to sue Agoda. We had sent them all our evidence (we took pictures) and even had the doorman talk to them on the phone and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to refund us.
To add insult to injury the place was more expensive than nearby hotels and I just checked and the place is still listed (we went a year ago)!
IMO this is basically the only category of AirBnb that's worth considering and it doesn't seem like a big growth area.
Toward the tail end of the pandemic, well after vaccines and the average person even remotely cared about it, I stayed in a small studio apartment.
The cleaning fee was $200.
The host gave me a list of at least 30 things I needed to do, including vacuum the floors & washing all the dishes and returning them to their exact initial positions - along with photos of where everything should go, exactly, along with a list of fines as high as $100 PER ITEM for each infraction the cleaning crew could find.
I have never stayed in an AirBNB since outside of hosting a large group, and I never will again.
They've banned this now.
What about all the hosts using AI to pretend guests trashed their place?
No thanks.
Hotels are just fine. I hope all these get-rich-quick scumbag AirBNB speculators get wiped out by high interest rates and lose every penny they have so that people who actually need housing can afford it, and people who actually know how to run a hospitality business can keep doing that correctly.
Why did you even try the place in the first place ?
I try to leave airbnb in exact same condition as it was upon our arrival (obviously I am not washing sheets). After reading comments here I feel weird or is this difference between Americans and Europeans? Do HN readers like to live like pigs to stay in mess and leave mess after themselves?
edit: I checked my airbnb receipts and I see everywhere only Airbnb service fee, there is no extra cleaning fee on any of them, if they charged extra money for some cleaning fee maybe my approach would be different
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.
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. Any 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 don't know where you are using Airbnb, but seems statistically odd that 100s of stays have been miserable for you. If it were that bad for everyone nobody would be using it and yet Airbnb is still growing YoY. Pretty much everyone I know (including myself) has maybe 1-2 bad experiences over dozens of stays. And sure some stays are "fine" and not exceptional, but that's true of anything. Hotels are not necessary much more reliable these days either - I've had to leave more hotels in the last 2 years over broken/missing amenities, smells, dilapated rooms, etc than I ever have Airbnbs honestly. Many don't do daily room cleaning any more. It doesn't really line up with the rosy view of hotels that proliferates on here and they have far fewer excuses with dedicated staff, spare rooms, etc.
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.
Several years ago, I had to take a very early flight so wanted to stay near the airport. I rented an Airbnb VERY cheaply. This was a room within an apartment of an old lady who was renting his son's (gone to university) bedroom.
It was a great experience, very kind, comfy and she even made me breakfast.
But nowadays, prices are crazy. A hotel room is usually only 10% higher (if higher). And I have also been victim of last minute cancelations.
If the room is unavailable, the hotel makes it its problem. But in the case of AirBnB, they make it YOUR problem. So that's worth 10% or more for me now. After they ruined a new year's eve vacation.
I no longer rent Airbnb. I might try if they hardened host's rules and gave me a cancelation guarantee of 'we will put you in the closest hotel if necessary ' . Kind of like car rentals: if the car is unavailable, we give you a better one.
The problem is a lot of AirBnB hosts want to offer the hostel experience for hotel prices.
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.
There's an inherent tension between the person providing the service and the person consuming it that has to do with fairness and leverage; each person always feels they are on the wrong side of the deal. In reality, it is the aribtrator, who sets the rules, who gets the upside of both deals, so they're right, ish, but they blame each othner.
And no, I don't have the ability to see a guests' reviews before they book. To have any hope of visibility on the platform I need to have instant book turned on, and they've removed the ability to require any sort of floor in terms of a guests' rating.
The platforms have intentionally engineered both hosts and guests into all sorts of prisoner's dilemma situations to drive booking volume at any cost.
Again these are clear expectations set up front before someone books, and I've never had a guest complain about them. If you are really that averse to taking out the trash and sticking your dishes in the dishwasher, my property probably isn't for you and you probably aren't the guest for me.
If I don't have the ability to make simple and reasonable requests like this, I'm going to have to work around it. In this case that means telling my cleaners I need them there immediately after someone checks out, which almost certainly means my cleaning fee is going up to $350.
Most guests of AirBNB like clean homes, and usually tidy up pretty well themselves. Maybe there's a way to incentivize those who choose to, or want to and offer a discount if they want it.
Turn it off and come back to a sauna that will take 3 hours to cool down. I'm not doing that.
My maid service will not wash dishes. They need me to clear the sink every time before they arrive. It's often a point of contention, because I leave dirty dishes quite often, and I simply forget what needs to be done. I don't have a problem with doing it for them, I just forget.
But I believe that the reason they will not wash my dishes is because of food safety. In a commercial kitchen, even the dishwasher needs to hold a Food Handler's card or certificate. The sanitizing of dishes and utensils is serious business. If they're not clean enough to eat from, you could be passing foodborne illness.
I would never want to stay at a place that didn't professionally wash its dishes. I've never stayed with AirBNB and I plan to keep it that way. Thankfully, the hotel industry is still a quite viable business, and hotels have staff, insurance, and regulation on their side, even now. I recently had a "staycation" in a 98-year-old classic hotel, and it was so wonderful, worry-free, and pleasant, and cost-effective. I am thankful that they are still operating like that.
Yes, if it were an add-on service, they would ask me for permission and then go ahead and charge me for the service. That is something they do with cleaning the oven and such other things. They simply will not wash dishes at all, period, full stop.
It's got to the point now, where if I forgot and left dishes in the sink, I will take them out and hide them somewhere, like the fridge, before the team arrives at my door. And then, hopefully I do not forget to retrieve them and properly clean them immediately.
When we had little kids we used disposable plates because we didn’t want to break the plates in the house. I don’t do Airbnb but disposable plates might be one way if you needed to stay in a short term rental.
We wash the dishes (and sheets, if there is a dryer) when we arrive, and descale the electric kettle and the coffee machine. I guess I'm crazy too.
As for short term rentals: the first time the housing market was financialized the economy crashed. People with money bought up all the pieces and are ransoming back what used to be the American dream. You pay money for a quasi-luxury experience and in reality you fund airbnbs profits and become an employee in someones REIT and are fined for the pleasure.
Not totally serious, but not totally unserious about it either.