airbnb, C or D?

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.

I use homeaway rather than airbnb and have had nothing but good times, in france & spain & italy & the uk. but I think homeaway is maybe more for oldsters? it's just a way for me to rent a flat rather than a hotel, along the lines of marcos' post above. friends have used airbnb to rent a room in another person's flat for a couple nights which seems very weird, like people just coming in and out. but these friends are mostly germans and are thus naturally weird. but I dunno: in the 90s in italy I would just go from town to town, go to a bar and ask if anyone had a room to rent, and the bartender would be like "yeah my sister's family has an extra room, 80000 lira for the night" and we'd share their bathroom and everything, so I guess it's not that different.

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.

otm - I am all for renter-outers paying tax etc but the service provided by an airbnb flat is just different from what you get at a hotel. Check-in and -out can be a bit unpredictable but if I'm staying in one place for a few days (or more) I'll generally go with an airbnb.

place fantastic btw

A floating wooden house upon a raft

https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/4162480

I will let you know how it is

airbnb listings have reached apotheosis:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4182729

Are "strict" cancellation policies more or less than the norm? It just seems kind of fucked up that if I book a place four months in advance and cancel a week later I lose half my money.

Tried to book something for NYE weekend in Philly and was surprised at how fucking expensive everything is once you include all the stupid fees, like pretty much nothing of a normal level of comfort came to less than $200 and change per night. Granted I'm talking entire apartments, not rooms, and granted it was sort of last minute and a holiday weekend. But the "cleaning fee" and "service fee" bullshit really add up, plus the folks who charge like $20-50 extra per night for "extra guests" are out of their fucking minds.

whaaaaat look in West Philly dude

yeah I think part of the problem is just last-minute NYE, plus that I need an apt that can fit my whole family. Slim pickins. But totally separately, I just hate the fees, so the total is always way more than the rate that shows on the list/map.

yeah it is pretty shitty for them not to include the fees on the map

are you taking your family to mummers parade, Hurting?

That was the plan (I have friends in the parade) but I think it's not going to happen. Too logistically complicated/too few reasonable stay options, and the couple we were going to go with may also be backing out. I think next year I wanna do it, book early and find a place really close to the parade route.

A Private room in public space.

https://a2.muscache.com/im/pictures/092b533b-414e-414c-92d1-2e7bd1cc6471.jpg

https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/11429217

tempted? not as sylvan as your usual haunts but

Sylvan is a great word, and this place definitely isn't it. The advantages of being in the open air here would surely be destroyed by being able to hear a) cars, b) music that is in cars, its enough to send you to the bottom of the canal.

so has anybody hosted? considering it right now as a way of making money from the basement apartment without have to deal with Ontario's brutal landlord/tenant board.

I haven't but a friend who lives in the same building as my wife and I does. she has a studio apartment and when she's out of town or cat-sitting at a friend's place when theyre out of town she airbnb's her place and makes $100 a night. works out p well for her.

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.