airbnb, C or D?

Classic based on my Chicago trip last year.

Had a good exp in DC, one-bedroom more than big enough for lil ol' me. She left beers in the fridge I didn't even have time to drink.

I'm down with this whole idea but I don't like the idea of turning up in a strange city and the house owner suddenly being absent for some reason. I'm assuming there's some protection for instances of this happening but at least with a hotel there's a sense of security.

i don't like the thought of the house owner being anywhere near me tbh

classic - we stayed in a converted garage two blocks from santa monica beach for way way way less than a hotel in the same area. owner lived in the main house but left us alone, place wasn't fancy but had a full kitchen, a large-ish bedroom and living room area that could be partitioned by a heavy curtain, and owner allowed us to bring our dog for no extra fee.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/airbnb-user-loves-how-easy-website-makes-it-to-eja,35949/

I'm keen to try this but really really don't want to have to even see/socialize/talk to owners

I have friends who host and they are fully into the taking their guests around and showing them the city, hanging out etc and i'm just like nooooooooooooo thank you

you can look for the hands-off situations, i never met my host.

accidentally airbnb'd in a hippie cult sex drug compound recently

I didn't get much sleep due to didgeridoo

uh oh I'm having to recount the entire affair, please

uh that's offputting

it's a really funny story but was a huge inconvenience at the time, I'll prob post abt it on 77 at some point

it was prob worse than what a stereotypical bad sketch comedy bit on airbnb would be

sorry to speak all cryptically, just wanted to say that I have had great experiences w/ airbnb but I now know that it's possible to accidentally book a hippie cult sex drug compound

Used it again this weekend to book a place in Austin. Great experience, as always.

please tell story on 77 xp

there's at least one airbnb place on every block near my house, in a city with a hugely depleted stock of rental properties and already-skyrocketing rents and ten million billion hotel rooms. i find this problematic.

I just booked a big farmhouse in NH for a week. The rate is so cheap I'm wondering if there might be a (n unpleasant) surprise awaiting our arrival. THe owner seems super chill and didn't have any problem with the fact that our party will include 8+ kids. should i be concerned?

I'm keen to try this but really really don't want to have to even see/socialize/talk to owners

I have never socialised (or even had the opportunity to socialise) with a host. Sometimes you meet them at check-in/out, sometimes you don't see them at all.

the whole airbnb thing just seems like a big ugly mess just waiting to happen... like an ideal scenario for unsavory people to take advantage of others.

that's what they said about christianity, maaaan

........

yep, proceed with caution, as always.

Problem with Airbnb is that people can be unwilling to write bad reviews or point out bad parts of a trip if they've gotten to know the owner

I know that when you review you can tell the owner stuff in private

But who knows if the owners ever actually act on it

would stay

lol

http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-worst-airbnb-in-the-universe-22-beds-in-one-apartm-1630029953

Lol @ this pearl clutching

I love the idea in principle. In practice, I used it once and it was a total disaster since it turned out host's definition of "nonsmoking" meant something more like "I'm not personally a smoker but obviously when you have people over, they smoke, what did you expect, and when I say I'm not a smoker, I mean I don't smoke every day, but usually when I smoke I smoke on the porch, OK, not every single time" and we ended up in a foreign country with no place to stay because the place reeked.

Another friend got to his airBnB only to find that the host wouldn't accept his service dog so he too was in a strange city and SOL. Hotels, under ADA, are required to admit service animals; airBnB rentals are not.

So it's a funny thing -- I would probably try this again at some point, because I love the idea of staying in a house with a kitchen instead of a hotel room, but in practice I've really come up against the fact that there's some actual value to regulation and knowing exactly what you're getting!

he didn't think of mentioning he had a service dog?

you'd rather be homeless than smell cigarettes?

trying this for the first time sat night btw hi

sorry that's coming across harsh but both of those seem like strangeness to me, is all

just letting u know darraghmac, if there's a disaster u CANNOT stay at my place

it's a gamble to be sure, but hotels (cheap ones anyway) are too.

(I would NEVER stay at one where the host was around)

well, same as that, so yr place was academical I guess

this is still libertarian techy faux utopian bullshit and airbnb's smug, plentiful subway ads are just insulting.

viva la regulatory state

lol

bet if eve saw a hot shit apt for cheap on it you'd find yourselves yrself overruled p sharpish

i see yr point adam, but any city where most hotel rooms are $300+/night deserves what it gets.

right. i don't object to the idea of alternative lodging-for-pay arrangements (subject of course to a modicum of consumer, health and safety regulation) but airbnb poses two immediate challenges:

1. the presence of an airbnb often results in a lowered quality of life for neighboring domiciles due to nightly bro-down bachelor party bacchanals. this is a major drag in a perceived party-oriented city like new orleans and surely also a drag in high-density nyc.

2. the inevitable influx of capital into the "sharing economy" means you have speculators subverting the techie utopia (or not i guess) by renting (or purchasing in cheaper locales) domiciles specifically for the purpose of airbnbing them out, thus decreasing housing stock for the hardworking normal folk of wherever and becoming another driver of ever-increasing urban rents.

eg in new orleans, the house next door to mine was purchased by a wealthy lady (heiress of the founding family of a longstanding chain of suburban/roadside fast casual restaurants) who for whatever fuckin reason airbnb'd it out all the time. and while i was never caused any material harm per se it was an annoyance of the kind that i would not mind seeing regulated out of existence.

i see your point but it's reaallly fucking nice to have cheap alternatives to hotels when traveling, and to have the luxury of kitchen facilities too. spending a week in a different city gets extraordinarily expensive if you are staying in a hotel and have to eat out at restaurants 3x a day. especially if you have kids. and i think your point about bachelor parties is kind of bullshit. i doubt that the percentage of bachelor airbnb trips are anything more than insubstantial.

also re: speculators purchasing places purely for airbnbing them out, do you have data on that? seems like most places (for now maybe) are actually people's lived-in homes, even if it's a second home

high density is what's a drag in NYC.

also residents who expect churchlike silence after 10pm

So the city has gotten too quiet, and too crowded?

The only time I've airbnb'd was for a bachelor party, so

my airbnb "data" is purely anecdotal but almost every airbnb rental in my former neighborhood in new orleans, bywater, which is the "hip" area, was unoccupied aside from short-term airbnb renters. that is to say, i have literally never encountered an airbnb in new orleans that functions as advertised (renting a spare room or whatever).

as far as churchlike silence, there is a difference between normal street/social noise and new groups of assholes whooping it up several times a week 10 feet from one's bedroom window; pretending there is not is purely willful obstinance.

My only airbnb experience was nice enough and pretty cheap, but I found out in retrospect that it was basically a hotel operated by someone who'd had his hotelier's license revoked.

on the four blocks of my old street, stretching from the mississippi river to st claude avenue (demarcating the bywater and less-desirable st claude neighborhoods), there were _at least_ 10 apartments or houses operating as airbnbs without permanent residents.

and yes, I'm still mad!

Why would it be bookable on either side if it's going to be undergoing major renovations? Why are major renovations scheduled months in advance for exactly the time you booked? Make her cancel.

Its not a good look that its bookable, though thats theoretical as its not bookable without her accepting - and as there are no bookings either side I can't tell if she's turning down all other bookings or just no one is interested (also just noticed the dates after our stay are 2.5x more but the dates before are about 15% more)

I had a weird one I tried to book last year and the guy said we're not currently taking bookings and rejected it, I looked afterwards and the calendar remained competely open but also completely empty. The most recent review was from 2016

yeah like I've said above, AirBNBs can be (or at least, used to be) more affordable than hotels and be preferable in other ways (like not having to share a space with 500 other people), but some of the logistical nightmares that come up are very unique to AirBNB only and it's put me off of ever using it.

we used one in January where my friend booked it and he was told he'd get instructions on parking, as this was a crowded area, and those instructions never arrived (to be fair, my friend should have asked earlier in the day when he noticed this, but he forgot). he tried texting the guy late in the evening, but as expected, didn't get a response.

when we got into the house, the house had a sign that said you could park anywhere that said Guest parking or didn't have a number, so he moved his car to an unmarked spot. the next day, we saw the neighbor passive aggressively double parked him in, and he knocked on their door and they yelled at him for 'taking their space', even though it was an open space per the instruction given on the sign in the house.

the host gave my friend a semi-negative review for sending him messages late at night demanding him to answer (even though he texted, not called, and wasn't 'demanding' anything), never mind the fact that he never provided the instructions via AirBNB and the sign had bad instructions on it.

it feels like the whole platform is "advantage: hosts"

I don't think its necessarily that way, guests can cancel way more easily without penalty (ironically we were considering canceling this one anyway as plans might be changing), hosts have to jump through this hoop of asking us to do it (and what happens if we don't I'm not sure - we definitely wouldn't be doing if we were inside the no cancellation window of a month)

We've almost always had great Airbnb experiences, generally better than hotels, tbh. Though I know lots of places and communities are now pushing back against Airbnb, which makes us feel guilty for using them.

i mean the circumstances are kinda different though? as a guest, you're going to a strange city out of town and you need a place to stay, and nothing is scarier than getting into town and finding your lodging cancelled. it's easier for a host to fill a vacancy than for people who just got into town and suddenly have no lodging. esp if they're not permanently living in the house and have helpers doing the things like bedsheets/etc.

one of the reasons i quit using airbnb is that i much prefer the hard distinction btw customer & service provider at hotels. hotels arent perfect but they dont have this weird artificial social dynamic where youre paying them a lot of money but also sort of made to feel like theyre doing you a favor, never had a hotel manager message me like "hey can you do us a solid, it would save us an unnecessary fee if you did such-and-such". not my job as a customer to make it easier for anyone to make more money on their real estate investment.

Lol yea the chores are the real bullshit. I'll do chores if my stay is free

Like throwing shit away, ok, even in a hotel I do that, I don't expect people to clean up after me. But I ain't doing laundry

It's not called passive income for nothing!

Another issue is that Air B & B's take buildings out of the long term rental stream. There was in article in my local paper a few years back about it and a "host" admitted they could make more money doing the AB&B thing than renting it out as actual housing.

Yeah, that's the backlash I've increasingly seen. On the other hand, Airbnb serves some specific needs that hotels really can't fill, namely hosting big family gatherings. Getting a couple of hotel rooms just for the four of us adds up, but throwing in another family or grandparents or however many total people and it makes more sense to get a whole house with a kitchen and a pool and lots of space, for significantly less than the hotel equivalent. Is there an alternative to Airbnb that can offer that? (Aside from VRBO, which is more or less the same thing.)

She cancelled us. I kind of regret not canceling myself now, our period is blocked out and she can't rebook it and I was curious to see if she actually got any bookings for that period. Though she doesnt have any bookings for any other period so I guess I can if anyone ever books it. It seems unlikely as only 4 reviews so far presumably at the price we paid, and if she's not getting bookings at that price getting them at 2.5x the price seems impossible.

None of this really makes any sense, I don't think it was a cash grab, and she can't rebook those dates now anyway so its a guaranteed loss

If there were more apartment hotels available everywhere I’d probably never book airbnbs. I like having a separate bedroom from the kids and a kitchen. I like the option of being able to eat a light meal at our place instead of greasy restaurant food every meal. But that combined with the predictability and professionalism of a hotel, maybe also a swimming pool, is always going to be better than the who knows what you get with a private house owner.

Never even think about one if traveling alone.

Really? The type of hotels you mention seem to be everywhere now: Residence Inns, Springhill suites, etc.

A lot of those places either don't have multiple bedrooms or have very limited availability ime. It's usually a studio apt type deal.

limited availability for the multi-bedroom suites I mean

Sometimes you can find a 1BR room with a fold-out sofa for the kids, which is not bad.

I'm gonna be up in Madison to see King Crimson this November, and even though it's only two hours away, we decided to stay overnight. My buddy requested his own room, because he says he snores like a train. Two rooms at a hotel would cost afaict over twice as much as one airbnb with two bedrooms.

C: Having a kitchen, not seeing 1000 other people when you walk through the lobby in your sweatpants to get something from the car, privacy, separate bedrooms.
D: Predatory, reduces already low housing availability, encourages non-residence property hoarding from bad actors, is both nefarious in intent and also used even more nefariously by parties who know they're acting outside the supposed intentions of "making your extra room available for a small fee" model.

I thought we didn't have AirBnB in Madison, but I guess it's just heavily regulated (you need to apply for a license, they inspect the property, the owner needs to remain on site when renting it out so no investment properties that are only AirBnBs).

Maybe it's technically outside the city? dunno.

there are definitely a lot of "SuperHosts" who have like 20+ properties in a city around here.