It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they possibly can. They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews.
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
But it's also Airbnb themselves. It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited, this is something many people including myself have experienced. Any doubts, spend some time on the Airbnb subreddit, which is run by hosts, and check out both their attitudes and their advice about how to remove bad reviews.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
Hopefully those properties will come back on the market at a reasonable price so that we can offset some of the housing inequity that airbnb is directly responsible for.
Yeah, I almost never consider an Airbnb nowadays for these extra costs. Hotels do this too (with city tax for example), but that is just a few extra dollars a night, and not almost as high as the cost per night.
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
>It's well known that negative reviews are scrubbed and even edited
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
While I broadly agree with what you've written here, I think that:
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
> App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
You have nailed this. I have been pondering about such anonymous marketplaces and I came to similar conclusion as yours.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.
Amazon customers have the benefit of free returns, pretty much no questions asked within 30 days. I want to buy some commodity like an AC adapter or an SD card, I'll buy 3 or 4 different options and usually at least 1 of them will be OK, then I'll return the rest. If I only need 1 item and have multiple that work fine, I'll give positive reviews to the ones I return, which I feel is the least I can do for the seller.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I don't understand how a restaurant being bad at their job, having bad food (a subjective assessment) and charging a high amount is a "scam". That just sounds like a bad restaurant.
This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
It changed when it turned into a big VC thing. All of the “Uber for X” models are fundamentally evil at scale. The founders vision is irrelevant to the investors need for return.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
> If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
What AirBnB missed was to include hotels in its listings, which would have allowed them to over a complete experience for travelers in general. booking.com started with hotels and included more AirBnB style listings.
What I don't get is ... where is the government in all this? As the article points out: the owners of the property clearly violate a lot of laws. So I hear violating the law gets you into "trouble with the law".
basically, author expects calibrated minimal services, good support, and a minimal standard of quality. This is what you call a classic hotel/lodge. I fully agree with you, and those living close to these miserable BnB businesses surely would agree as well. This "model" is rotting city centers and popular places. AirBnB will never care about that poor lady. AirBnB will know how to make her anger disappear into the zero-star reviews statistics - it is much more important to keep a large density of cheap appts in the center of Lisbon.
I don’t know why I’ve had such a different experience to others, but in both cases where I complained to Airbnb when a host was unable or unwilling to offer a resolution, Airbnb made things right for me - in one case even covering the parking ticket I’d ended up with from the host’s crappy instructions, in the other, the listing was removed as the issues were too egregious to number.
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
Absolutely. The exception is when you're a large family, or even a not so large one. Most hotels have no good/affordable solution for parties larger than 2.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
You make a great point about the (de)evolution of marketplaces.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
> They don't care if they're banned or reported. They'll just make a new fake account. Low ratings? No problem, just pay for some fake reviews.
Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
Ever since the worker shortage started, the quality of traditional hotels has gone down the hole. I have traveled far more this year than any other year in my life and my anecdotal experience shows that below 4 star the quality has just nosedives so much so that you don't know what you are getting until you show up and end up feeling lucky or totally screwed. And I am referring to hotels in America(Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit) and Europe/UK(Amsterdam, Dublin, London).
I spent vacations in California this year, and noticed the same: housekeeping is every 5 days instead of everyday, hotel bars/restaurants are either closed or turned into fast foods (menu consists only of burgers, sandwiches and salads), amenities like gyms are closed. And all that for prices that are significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Makes me think that there's a market for a 3rd party website for reviews for AirBnB hosts (and probably guests).
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
It's fundamentally a problem of trust. Hotels and big brands work because you can trust them. Why do you trust them? Because they have skin in the game. If their products suck their brand suffers and that's what they want to avoid the most. If Apple releases crappy products they can't just create a new "BtwNotApple" brand. They can sell overpriced products because you're paying for trust/brand.
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
Reviews of the hosts are already informally available in the reviews of the rooms and apartments. It's the number-one thing I look for when booking: the reviews should be raving about not only the place, but also the host. If this is not happening, or the reviews are mainly short and neutral, I don't book.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
> But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
It's also exacerbated by a lot of people looking for a bargain however slight.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
> After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform.
>After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform.
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
I’m an early adopter of things like this and I’ve been using Airbnb since about Day 1. There was so much promise early. One of my best AirBnB memories was staying at a startup hotel in SF through AirBnB, the hosts had purchased a Victorian house to turn into a boutique hotel, seemed young and optimistic, and it was a fun, quirky experience. There was still construction and things happening, apparently we were one of the first few people to ever stay there under its new ownership.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
If I'm traveling on business I mostly just want predictability. I might want somewhere I can leave my bag after I check out. I want to be able to get in at midnight if my flight is delayed.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
Accountability, responsibility and minimum standards. Hotels provide these, Airbnb does not. Hotels are direct service providers; Airbnb is a middle-man which does not assume responsibility nor enforces minimum standards effectively.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
My family went to an Airbnb (basically they were selling themselves as sort of resort) and when my wife saw she had to cook, etc... She was really mad. The listing didn't say it. Long history short, never again. We're going to resorts and hotels ever since. The extra money is not that much since Airbnb basically ramping up their prices.
The last two times we traveled, we looked at Airbnb versus hotels. The Airbnb's were all ~$150 for a bedroom in a shared space with shared bathroom/kitchen/living room, or ~1000-~1500 for a house or one floor of a two-story house. The hotel was $325 and $275 for a suite style in both cities.
To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
This stuff is incredibly common in short term rental market. You are scraping the bottom of the barrel on landlord scruples.
There was a recent fire in a summer vacation town popular with NYers.
The town requires summer short term rental landlords to get a permit & inspection.
The landlord did not get one.
The landlord also had sketchy kitchen wiring that was probably some sort of DIY and not up to code.
The landlord had removed batteries and hardwiring from 3 smoke detectors.
These are the kind of things the inspector would have found immediately.
A family visiting from out of state lost 2 of their 3 children in this fire.
Apps like AirBnB create the facade of officialness on what are instead very sketchy markets. Family probably thought they were doing the right thing going through an app and the landlord must be verified and more "legit". Being from out of state they wouldn't know the intricacies of local town permit&inspection requirements and how to check if the landlord has one, etc.
Likewise in my condo in NYC, we had one particular owner who was trying to use their unit as an Airbnb. Regardless of the local laws which were tightening up at the time, our condo expressly forbid short term rentals, and had language around minimum length of stay and lease approval requirements. It only stopped when we started fining them $1000 per incident.
Stuff like this matters because you buy a condo to live in it and don't expect the unit on the other side of your bedroom wall to essentially be a hotel room with new neighbors every 3 days, staying up all hours (vacation, yay), dragging suitcases in&out at odd hours multiple times per week.. forever.
The building itself takes on a lot more wear & tear, and they put a burden on staff as they think the building porter&doorman are there for them like a hotel concierge and front desk.
I'm on the board of the Norwegian equivalent of a condo association, and I wish we could fine an owner every time we got complaints from other residents! Unfortunately the laws still have loopholes that make it very hard for us to hold him accountable as long as he claims to actually be living there. --In Norway you have to have a primary residence registered, and you're allowed to rent out spare rooms in your primary residence, even on short-term sites. We'd basically have to spend a lot of money to have a 3rd party come knocking on the door every night for several months to prove whether or not he's really living there so that we can take proper action.
Why does it have to be a third party? Can't it just be someone on the board who lives in the building?
Couldn't you just throw some security cams up at the entrances and just track coming and going and total stay time? You'd only have to review footage after a reasonable suspicion.
That is horrible. Let's just call it what it is: Airbnb are professional liars who use disgusting legal tactics like forced arbitration to sweep things under the carpet--all to make quarterly numbers.
> our condo expressly forbid short term rentals, and had language around minimum length of stay and lease approval requirements. It only stopped when we started fining them $1000 per incident.
At least this part sounds like the system working correctly?
The problem is all of these platforms that basically automate & scale illegality.
The platforms act like its not their responsibility to verify compliance and hide behind terms of use & arbitration.
Consumers assume that everything is on the up&up because they are going through big public company intermediary.
For example, as sketchy as real estate brokers are (very) .. they generally aren't going to put you into a literally illegal apartment. There is personable responsibility and concern about liability.
Why is it that all these SV firms can use amazing AI/ML to target ads, and sell us stuff but its impossible to use similar for following laws. Look at Ubers efforts to circumvent local regulators, its the same flavor.
If only there was some regulation for such services that would require some sort of standard. You know some sort of licensing by the state. /s
This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
It seems to work better with Lyft et al., probably because there's a larger supply of "normal people who are interested in driving", better economics around renting the asset (vehicle), and the driver (aka host) having to be physically present in the vehicle.
The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get.
Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
Artificially lowering prices? You mean basic supply and demand?
The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant.
AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly.
False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP).
More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook.
Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
The issue is that the service that you as a digital nomad enjoy turns the life of permanent residents into misery. Unregulated, private short term rentals are a blight upon cities. Is this a price worth paying for the convenience of vacationers/nomads?
There's nothing wrong with AirBnb in principle, but I strongly suspect if they were properly regulated and actually carried out the necessary checks, provided an adequate level of guarantees and service, suddenly their business model would be much less viable.
In effect, AirBnb externalizes the cost of their business to local residents and authorities, but they harvest the profits. They are not the only industry operating under such framework of course.
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
AirBnBs tend to employ people as well (cleaning, maintenannce, administration).
With many hotels the money is actually flowing out of the local community as the business is owned by a big multi-national. It's not really so cut and dried in favour of hotels.
Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb.
Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable.
It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
Yeah the damp / mold smell is a no-go for me. I rented a place in a popular east coast resort town for the family, and the first thing that hit me was the damp and moldy smell of an existing or recent moisture problem. Not an AirBnB, but some hosts/rental places just don't care about guest comfort.
It cast a pall over the whole stay. It was hard for me to be comfortable, I could not imagine a long-term stay. The kids didn't mind though, and luckily we weren't worse off for it.
> Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
Since it's the responsability of the municipality it's impossible for me personally to tell, but I've been all over the country and the green (or grey, depending on location) containers are ubiquitous (or drop points with underground deposits, sure). If specific neighborhoods of Lisbon do it differently I'm afraid I wouldn't know. It's not impossible.
The glory days of Airbnb are over. It's been flooded with dodgy hosts, and the customer support has failed to keep up. Hotels have improved their service and the prices aren't that different any more.
If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
Disagree on the > cost component - the stated nightly rates may be lower than AirBNB, but with all costs AirBNB is generally uncompetive
You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
I've used Airbnb ~30 times in multiple countries and have never had issues.
Some places have been dirtier than I expected (nothing horrible though), some were much smaller than the pictures suggested, but the for the vast majority of cases it has been a good experience. When the experience wasn't good, I rated and commented accordingly, so the host got their rating lowered and maybe did something about it. I also met some of the owners, which was a nice experience.
For work I had to travel for 1, 2, 3 weeks at a time and it wouldn't have made sense in economic terms to get a hotel, so I'm glad airbnb existed.
New hosts might be an issue, but hosts with good reputation are, in my experience, not a problem.
I can see the problem where whole neighborhoods get used for airbnb, driving costs up for residents. I imagine that's a tiny minority of cities...where jt makes sense to enforce laws to avoid this. For the rest of the cities? In my opinion airbnb is a net benefit: if creates a product that didn't exist before and allows buyers and sellers to benefit from this transaction. For me at least (and the people I know which is, admittedly, a non random sample) it has been a good experience. I'm sure in most places it's riskier than hotels. Yes, there's a trade-off.
Same. I also find that for the same price range Airbnbs tend to be much more homey and clean with newer remodels. the majority of hotels I’ve stayed at as an adult have left me thinking “wow I’m paying 200$ for THIS?!” Due to limited space or lots of scuff marks and stains from daily wear and often being decades old. Airbnbs tend to be kept “Pinterest fresh” and have a kitchen and living room that are a game changer for comfort. Also they help you actually see a neighborhood with local culture instead of just a downtown or a business district.
Yep. Had an Airbnb setup this week in Atlanta, looked good, responsive host.
We arrived, looked clean and decorated well enough, but had 4 glade plugins for a 500sqft place… seemed excessive like their might be a bad smell hidden.
Sat down on a chaise which collapsed because of a leg attached by gum. Found a cockroach under said chaise. Reported it and the owner said it was treated the other day, so it should be fine.
Sat down on the couch, which also collapsed, one leg was missing and was held up by a coffee mug. The bed frame had cinder blocks and children’s notebooks supporting it, (stubbed my toe on the cinder block). Bathroom fixtures were loose, sink basins were not properly seated to their countertops, inviting mold.
In the morning I found 3 more cockroaches roaming around the otherwise clean looking kitchen.
I named one of them Gregor.
Airbnb gave us a refund for the nights unspent and we’ve spent the rest of the time at a brand name hotel. More expensive, but more options for recourse if things go south.
If not for the cockroaches it would have been bearable, but the combination of issues left too many doubts as to the safety of the place. My wife and I could not find rest there.
Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place, but the quality control truly is a gamble. These days, I increasingly prefer the consistency of a hotel bed.
I will say this, the thermostat was better at the Airbnb than the hotel. No auto feature in the hotel.
> Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place
I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel.
The promise of AirBnB used to be you could get a spare room / apartment in a place where the locals actually lived, rather than the hotel & convention center district that's 2 blocks from the airport
How many stars had that apartment? How many stars you gave in your review?
What makes Airbnb not reliable is not cockroaches, but no negative reviews. I prefer Booking, because my reviews even negative are not removed like on Airbnb.
When I alerted AirBNB about a safety issue, they responded that they had completed their investigation (which apparently did not involve talking to me) and said the hosts were "elite" and basically took their side.
The last one I went to we walked in and contacted support as they didn’t have the accommodations they promised, and it took AirBnB support four days to get back to us. We waited several hours for a response before just booking a hotel.
Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.
Nothing written here makes me feel unsafe about taking my daughter and wife to an Air BNB. Just what on earth is this non-sequitur, "ergo company unsafe" [10 billion upvotes]. There is nothing here even explaining how this is any worse than hotels. Yes, sleeping in some random person's house is inherently less safe than hotels (slightly) but we already knew that. So then what actual tangible point am I missing here? What do you even expect the company to do about it? This entire post and its context just seems like a Simpsons episode where Homer yells at the mayor and demands that it stop raining. I haven't have and don't plan to ever use Air BNB, by the way.
Readit News
The same is true for Amazon and other marketplace business. It's overrun by Amazon FBA sellers selling cheap low-quality white-labeled Alibaba products. It's almost impossible to find real brands or high-quality products these days, unless you specifically know what to search for.
How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe. If I do use Airbnb, I do a lot of research on the host and reviews and assume the place I'm getting is 80% worse than what the pictures show.
Other examples: App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Sucks much more when it's your vacation rental.
Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
I used to love Airbnb and used it multiple times per year - since Day 1. Now because of fake positive reviews (where negative aspects of a home, like noise, are censored), combined with crazy fees, I'm also like you going back to hotels.
You have to love the fees, which I think are sinking the system. 130 a night for the place, you want to stay there three nights. You're asked to pay 250 in Airbnb fees and 225 in cleaning fees. You should check in after 2 pm and you better check out before 11, and anything out of the ordinary leads to an uncomfortable email exchange sometimes with no reply. It's not cancellable, either.
Many people bought properties around the world to specifically Airbnb out. Will the tide finally turn? Is the business model unsustainable?
Ah yes, and then you read in the notes that you also have to do the laundry and wash the dishes.
They can slap vacation ads on it and now they have a stable source of income!
I think the original spirit of someone renting out extra space they have is long gone. It's either a big company renting out what could have been rental units in the first place, or someone renting their place but you have to almost beg them to be flexible with timing, amenities, etc. I would feel much more comfortable complaining to a hotel if the beds are dirty, as opposed to an Airbnb host.
If this is true, then I see no other blame than Airbnb themselves. If you make a platform allowing reviews in such a way that the "seller" can edit the reviews "users" make, then that's never going to become anything other than scammy. Even allowing a review to be scrubbed/removed by the seller is bad. There should be a mechanism to work with the platform to handle fake/false reviews, but the seller should never be able to do that on their own.
> Airbnb needs hosts for its revenue. Clients are the product.
is not a useful way to think about this. AirBnb lives in a sort of weird parasitic-symbiotic relationship with both its hosts and the "guests". They are not trying to sell "guests" to anyone (they may do data collection and sale, but I think this not the cornerstone of their business model): what they rely on is an abundant supply of matching properties (not hosts!) and "guests". The hosts as people are irrelevant. If they lose "guests", less revenue. If they lose properties/listings, less revenue.
> Is the business model unsustainable?
The original AirBnb model (people renting spare rooms in their own homes, or maybe a casita on their property) was sustainable, but growth-limited. I don't know about the current one.
Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriving tourists.
Everybody is a clueless tourist in the sea of Amazon products, applications in the App store or literally on Airbnb. They only need to sell once to a very small percentage of Amazon customers to be very successful, even if they never come back for obvious reasons.
In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.
Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.
With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.
The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Well, clearly it doesn't.
They create jobs, they don't distort property markets in the same way as AirBnB, and you get breakfast!
The consumer is naturally disadvantaged: They can’t assess until they arrive, they must reserve in advance, and packing up and going elsewhere is often not an easy option.
Though I’ll add that even regulated hotels can be a hit or miss experience.
But when traveling as a couple, or alone as this lady is, there's no reason not to choose a hotel. Much better experience overall, and nowadays usually cheaper as well.
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Really? I don't know that this was ever guaranteed, and post-COVID it's definitely not. The ones I've seen are paltry compared to 10 years ago.
You got to be kidding?
Last time I’ve used AirBnb it was a 1 bedroom half of the house, shady, private area with a creek, private yes - but in a walking distance to the downtown. I had a full kitchen, an office place to put my computer and monitor in and a personal, fast Internet connection. I even had a shed to put my bicycle in without a need to drag it into the house. The host configured the lock to be the last digits of my phone number - extremely convenient without a need to carry a piece of paper even to enter.
All that for a hundred dollars a day - same as nearby hotels where you get a crappy little room smelling of disinfectant, just a microwave and a small fridge, and my bike - last time I took my bike to a hotel it was stolen…
> and you get breakfast!
Ok, now I see that you’ve got me.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.
I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.
Put regulations on the Market Places to tighten up their process for accepting new sellers, and direct punishment of the Market Places themselves for selling bad products. These Market Places have no skin in the game when it comes to the stuff they sell, they need a reason to care. If they care, these problems start to sort themselves out.
For example, instead of just fining the AirBNB host for an illegal rental, they should also fine AirBNB say $50k per rental. Something high enough that they do their own verification of product. Or fine Amazon a similar amount every time they send out a fake SD card.
1. The incentives of the platform
2. The incentives of the individual
For 1, a big part of the problem is the growth-at-all-costs mindset coming from VC incentives. In this case, having more hosts and deleting bad reviews directly helps the platform because it increases the market size and short-term profitability. You could argue that it hurts in the long-term when quality drops to unacceptable levels, but most companies don't care about that. Founders have already exited and executives have gotten paid. Also, by not growing quickly you're vulnerable to competitors that do grow more quickly. The only solution that comes to mind is to not have for-profit entities where founders/VC get rich behind these kind of platforms. It needs to be fully community-driven.
For 2, I think it's about skin in the game and trust. In many industries you can't go out and scam people without facing serious consequences. On these online platform you can, but you don't face real consequences. It's just another ban. Regulation with serious fines or jail time is one solution. Another solution is a (hypothetical) world where online identity is connected across services and tied to your real identity. Imagine getting a bad review on Airbnb actually has real-life consequences because it's tied to your identity. Perhaps that's what you get with the CCP, where people's online accounts for many services are associated with their government identities. I'm not saying these are desirable solutions, but they certainly would deter hosts from trying to game the system.
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Sorry, just a quick check - are you saying that rhetorically or do you mean it? Because as far as I know AirBNB relies on getting a genuine address in the system to work, and that is difficult to fake.
- Large friends and family network, rotate through other peoples homes
- Own a series of apartment buildings, rotate through addresses
- Unoccupied buildings with accessible mail drops (pick up mail from outside)
Similar tricks exist for non-residential address requirements.
Never underestimate the creativity of scammers.
But a new host might not get any guests if they don't have a review on this site, and if the guests avoid them, then no one will review them. An idea would be for a host to pay a refundable deposit, and the website could indicate them as so, "We have no reviews for this host, but they have guaranteed with $money that their listing is legitimate/accurate.". After the first review comes, they can get the deposit refunded. But aha, this doesn't protect against fake reviews by friends and accomplices of a dodgy host...
In these semi-anonymous marketplaces you fundamentally don't have trust. There is no skin in the game for sellers since their identity and brand is not sticky. If you get banned or do something against the ToS it's not a big deal. Regulation is a possibility, e.g. make people go to jail, but I doubt that could work on this scale. Or it would make innovation impossible. You need a fundamentally different incentive model.
I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.
But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.
The new host needs to price their listing substantially below competitors, to the point where some poor bloke is willing to take a risk, in order to build up a review base.
Historically, B&Bs (in the sense of a small inn as opposed to a spare room) were not really cheaper than more traditional hotels and most of the entire houses listed on VRBO weren't wither (although they might have been better choices for a family or group).
I suspect a lot of people who have consistently bad experiences on AirBnB (and Amazon for that matter) also consistently pick the lowest price even if it's a bargain that seems too good to be true.
One of the benefits of chain hotels is consistency. The experience is almost always going to be somewhere from very good to good to mediocre depending on the brand (which correlates with price). They'll rarely be exquisite but that's fine most of the time. I'm rarely traveling for the hotel experience.
See "We become what we behold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273640 and https://ncase.me/trust/ from the first comment. A high trust society, or marketplace, is an opportunity for the defectors to extract value. Unless they can be punished somehow ...
That AND at some point the platform stops subsidizing the service with investment cash - so inevitably the prices rise.
>How to deal with it? Personally I've started going back to hotels to be safe.
I think it will reach some steady state, where there is a niche for traditional hotels and "P2P" rental marketplaces.
So I’ve been using Airbnb regularly, travel regularly, and in the last 2ish years have moved all my work travel to Marriott. For scale, checking my Marriott app right now, I’ve stayed 77 nights in Marriotts this year so far. This used to be all Airbnb stays, but as you mention the hosts have become so unpredictable and listings do not match up to the experience that it’s more hassle and actively hostile to stay in Airbnb in a new city to get to know some quirky neighborhood on a work trip. And the usual complaint of basically a chore list to do at the end combined with huge cleaning fees on top of the chore list.
Currently my only Airbnb exception is that my partner and I have two airbnbs that we know to be good in resort towns and when we’re going there we book those Airbnbs if available, because they have known good experiences and good hosts. Otherwise we don’t even look at other options, particularly because we use those during vacations where we want to relax, and instead just book Four Seasons or whatever nice hotel is there because the experience will be good and consistent.
I really yearn for the early Airbnb days though when listings were more accurate and high quality and one could explore a new neighborhood (perhaps one without traditional hotels one might never stay in without Airbnb).
As an aside, I started using UberEats since literal Day 1 when they were driving circles around the city with a fixed menu, you selected your meal, one of them would drop it off to you within minutes. It was amazing. But now of course the hordes have descended and it’s 90% ghost kitchens serving slop in my city.
Sure I like less sanitized experiences and I'll roll the dice a bit more on vacation--and it usually works out. But for routine business travel I'll do without the variables.
These are the reasons I have also long since returned to use of hotels.
The problem you've described applies to a lot of stuff, from hiring to finding a reliable mechanic. I've started relying more on word-of-mouth, whenever possible. Let someone else waste their money trying out new products/services.
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To me, it's worth it to get consistent quality, guaranteed privacy, no questions about safety, and again, consistency in quality.
Edit: If you weren't on that trip then please accept my apologies.
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There was a recent fire in a summer vacation town popular with NYers. The town requires summer short term rental landlords to get a permit & inspection. The landlord did not get one. The landlord also had sketchy kitchen wiring that was probably some sort of DIY and not up to code. The landlord had removed batteries and hardwiring from 3 smoke detectors. These are the kind of things the inspector would have found immediately.
A family visiting from out of state lost 2 of their 3 children in this fire.
Apps like AirBnB create the facade of officialness on what are instead very sketchy markets. Family probably thought they were doing the right thing going through an app and the landlord must be verified and more "legit". Being from out of state they wouldn't know the intricacies of local town permit&inspection requirements and how to check if the landlord has one, etc.
Likewise in my condo in NYC, we had one particular owner who was trying to use their unit as an Airbnb. Regardless of the local laws which were tightening up at the time, our condo expressly forbid short term rentals, and had language around minimum length of stay and lease approval requirements. It only stopped when we started fining them $1000 per incident.
Stuff like this matters because you buy a condo to live in it and don't expect the unit on the other side of your bedroom wall to essentially be a hotel room with new neighbors every 3 days, staying up all hours (vacation, yay), dragging suitcases in&out at odd hours multiple times per week.. forever.
The building itself takes on a lot more wear & tear, and they put a burden on staff as they think the building porter&doorman are there for them like a hotel concierge and front desk.
Couldn't you just throw some security cams up at the entrances and just track coming and going and total stay time? You'd only have to review footage after a reasonable suspicion.
At least this part sounds like the system working correctly?
The platforms act like its not their responsibility to verify compliance and hide behind terms of use & arbitration. Consumers assume that everything is on the up&up because they are going through big public company intermediary.
For example, as sketchy as real estate brokers are (very) .. they generally aren't going to put you into a literally illegal apartment. There is personable responsibility and concern about liability.
Why is it that all these SV firms can use amazing AI/ML to target ads, and sell us stuff but its impossible to use similar for following laws. Look at Ubers efforts to circumvent local regulators, its the same flavor.
This is what you get when you skirt laws, artificially lowering prices to kill competition and exploit workers. Stop complaining, it's your own doing for supporting this type of economy. Only because maybe some of those existing laws were cumbersome or outdated doesn't mean you just go around all of them.
The scaled AirBnB model was always questionable... at some point, you've literally signed up everyone normal with a quality rental. But you still need to increase supply, which means taking what new hosts/properties you can get.
Did AirBnB ever fool with the McDonald's model? I.e. own the property/land, but provide financing to hosts who want to manage and work it? The economics on that might work out in certain areas, if they were smart about it. And it would directly target the "increase quality supply directly" problem.
The regulations aren't guests responsibility the hosts and airbnb should be compliant.
AirBnB and competitors are very important despite their flaws. Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
As a digital nomad, I've had my share of bad accommodation (and really really good ones as well). Usually I just write them off and leave early, or identify stuff within the first day, that's very important. If you think you're going to be unhappy with the product you have to back out quickly.
False information or problems at the start of the accommodation, like broken items, are a deal breaker. This has been quite rare, and it might be the hundreds and hundreds of nights of stays but the two times I've had to contact AirBnB support it's gone in my favour (that's not to minimise the experience of the OP).
More often the bad experiences with AirBnBs are more subtle. Items that are just not comfortable or kitchens that don't really have what you need to cook.
Of the 65 hosts I've stayed with, 2 were bad enough to leave (as mentioned), and probably 2-3 more were the suffer through variety. That's not a bad percentage really.
There's nothing wrong with AirBnb in principle, but I strongly suspect if they were properly regulated and actually carried out the necessary checks, provided an adequate level of guarantees and service, suddenly their business model would be much less viable.
In effect, AirBnb externalizes the cost of their business to local residents and authorities, but they harvest the profits. They are not the only industry operating under such framework of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33286238
> Standard rentals are too inflexible for long term (month long) travellers and the hotel industry is either too expensive or not designed for long term stays.
Most of the major hotel brands have chains intended for long term stays. My wife, son and I stayed at one for five months a few years ago when we moved out of our apartment and decided to get a house built at the last minute. We didn’t want to pay month to month rates.
I’ve already booked rooms from November 1st through the end of next October in about 30 different hotels - mostly Hyatt Places, Home2Suites and Homewood suites. We are staying in hotels for 265 days between that time and our own vacation property/investment property the rest of the year.
We are taking real “vacations” for a few days in more expensive places using points we accrue. I made it my goal to keep our lodging expenses for the year the same as the all in cost of our current mortgage+utilities.
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With many hotels the money is actually flowing out of the local community as the business is owned by a big multi-national. It's not really so cut and dried in favour of hotels.
Lisbon has a horrible housing crisis. Locals are barely (or not at all, in many cases) able to afford living there anymore, and airbnb has been there making the problem worse every step of the way. I hope the author gets plenty of evidence and reports this place to the authorities, then stops using airbnb.
Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it, where residents are expected to leave their trash. Lisbon does have a bit of a trash overload problem ongoing (more recent than the housing crisis), but there should always be a dumpster nearby where people can drop off trash for collection, leaving it right next to the container if the container is full. For this one single issue I imagine there was a miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Sometimes (speaking from personal experience), especially in a place so obviously neglected and unused, the toilet discharge issue can be as simple as grit or rust inside the tank preventing the part that drops to block off the water flow from moving, but it can be mechanically pushed down (or even washed to get rid of the grit permanently). Not to excuse the owner; just a possible way to make the author's stay a little less miserable.
It seems very hazardous to live in a place as damp as the author reported, damp enough that it attracted slugs and the water vapor likely got in the electrical system, causing a short circuit . Must be a real dump if it got this damp with the drought going on before this week. There are probably a lot of hazardous mold spores. They should have set up a dehumidifying solution immediately (three weeks ago); I would depart right away if possible.
It cast a pall over the whole stay. It was hard for me to be comfortable, I could not imagine a long-term stay. The kids didn't mind though, and luckily we weren't worse off for it.
Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.
If I'm after a more self contained holiday rental type of experience, I tend to look for places that have their own websites and independent reviews. They are, admittedly, a bit more expensive than what you'd find on Airbnb, but I find that if they've put the effort into building a website and social media, then they tend to be a decent quality.
You rent a cabin through a local company somewhere in Tahoe and it'll be ~400 a night, flat. AirBNB's include cleaning fees, AirBNBs unlisted cut, and the need to clean up after yourself. Absolutely ridiculous.
Some places have been dirtier than I expected (nothing horrible though), some were much smaller than the pictures suggested, but the for the vast majority of cases it has been a good experience. When the experience wasn't good, I rated and commented accordingly, so the host got their rating lowered and maybe did something about it. I also met some of the owners, which was a nice experience.
For work I had to travel for 1, 2, 3 weeks at a time and it wouldn't have made sense in economic terms to get a hotel, so I'm glad airbnb existed.
New hosts might be an issue, but hosts with good reputation are, in my experience, not a problem.
I can see the problem where whole neighborhoods get used for airbnb, driving costs up for residents. I imagine that's a tiny minority of cities...where jt makes sense to enforce laws to avoid this. For the rest of the cities? In my opinion airbnb is a net benefit: if creates a product that didn't exist before and allows buyers and sellers to benefit from this transaction. For me at least (and the people I know which is, admittedly, a non random sample) it has been a good experience. I'm sure in most places it's riskier than hotels. Yes, there's a trade-off.
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We arrived, looked clean and decorated well enough, but had 4 glade plugins for a 500sqft place… seemed excessive like their might be a bad smell hidden.
Sat down on a chaise which collapsed because of a leg attached by gum. Found a cockroach under said chaise. Reported it and the owner said it was treated the other day, so it should be fine.
Sat down on the couch, which also collapsed, one leg was missing and was held up by a coffee mug. The bed frame had cinder blocks and children’s notebooks supporting it, (stubbed my toe on the cinder block). Bathroom fixtures were loose, sink basins were not properly seated to their countertops, inviting mold.
In the morning I found 3 more cockroaches roaming around the otherwise clean looking kitchen.
I named one of them Gregor. Airbnb gave us a refund for the nights unspent and we’ve spent the rest of the time at a brand name hotel. More expensive, but more options for recourse if things go south.
If not for the cockroaches it would have been bearable, but the combination of issues left too many doubts as to the safety of the place. My wife and I could not find rest there.
Airbnbs can be nice and give you a real sense of being a resident of a place, but the quality control truly is a gamble. These days, I increasingly prefer the consistency of a hotel bed.
I will say this, the thermostat was better at the Airbnb than the hotel. No auto feature in the hotel.
I really don't get this. If you're vacationing there's no way you'll feel anywhere near a "sense of being a resident". It's vacations, you're a tourist, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't get what about the "experience" of a regular Airbnb is better than staying at a decent hotel.
Of course this does not apply to exotic Airbnbs.
The promise of AirBnB used to be you could get a spare room / apartment in a place where the locals actually lived, rather than the hotel & convention center district that's 2 blocks from the airport
Some other residents will have broken plumbing, bad smells and cockroaches. You are living as they are?
Not everyday you come across random Kafka references!
Airbnb hides the review score, only giving an average.
AirBNB is not safe.
https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-faces-thousands-sexua...
https://feeneylawfirm.com/airbnb-spends-millions-to-keep-sex...
I was shocked how bad their support was.
Forced arbitration is an evil practice that must end. This is an example of why. There are behaviors companies allow and even encourage that affect their population of customers as a whole (e.g., with increased risk to personal safety), and not just specific victims.