221–230 of 237 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, an au pair from overseas provides childcare in exchange for rent and food, and comes on vacations. If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.
Having an au pair puts one firmly above the middle-class. Not necessarily rich, but certainly flirting with "affluent."
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"Innocent until proven guilty"
AirBnB is not putting these people in prison they just aren’t letting them be hosts. I mean, would you be cool with letting someone charged with a violent crime work at a daycare until found guilty?
This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far…
>>And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. If you are single with no kids and usually eat out, then yes. But is this still true if you are traveling with your family ? Just the ability to cook breakfast in an AirBnB seems like a huge money saver. It's likely why some AirBnB hosts claim that properties with more bedrooms have a much lower vacancy rate than smaller properties.
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Hotels are usually easier and cheaper EXCEPT if you actually want a whole house. Traveling with kids and a babysitter requires like 3 rooms and having a kitchen is a huge plus. So for that, its really good.
I prefer Vrbo for this - unlike Airbnb it's for whole homes only (not rooms in someones house) so thats one less filter you need to select when searching. They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much h…
Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.
I've been an early user of AirBnb since they first introduced themselves on this site. And prior to that I was a couchsurfing host, and occasional guest. I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I like feeling a part of the neighborhood or city, As long as you know that you're getting those cute feelings at the expense of contributing to screwing everyone that actually lives there (who isn't a landlord) by contributing to a market that creates a situation ever more hostile and unaffordable to renters.
Converting hotels to apartment buildings would also lower costs for renters. Staying in a hotel has exactly the same effect (the hotel would not exist and might be an apartment building if there was no demand for hotels, just like airbnbs might be rented traditionally if there was no demand for airbnb)
I don't think you thought your reply through before typing it out.
Clearly Airbnb is, even with the best of intentions, harming local economies by making housing unaffordable and/or unavailable to locals and has been documented over the past decade[0]. It's only recently (last few years) that cities have even caught up to tech like Abnb so for years they were and active drain on the local economy by dodging taxes and regulations[1]. It does NOT support the local economy in the same way as hotels and its benefits don't seem to out weigh its costs to the local economy[2].
[0] https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
[1] https://curs.unc.edu/2015/03/26/a-roadmap-to-regulating-airb...
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...
I've been an early user of AirBnb since they first introduced themselves on this site. And prior to that I was a couchsurfing host, and occasional guest. I've had relatively few problems with Airbnbs. Usually the worst I'd get would be the host flaking out and cancelling the reservation days prior to my trip. CS reps were pretty good about rebooking me in similar places for the same price. If you don't know events th…
What else could have happened? If you have special needs you should send a small message to the host prior to booking to confirm it's compatible.
> If hosts could be compelled to use digital keypads and change the code after each stay, a situation like that might be avoided in the future. As someone who's family has run a couple rental properties, I can not imagine trusting a high tragic rental that doesn't use a keypad entry. You would have to be negligent and perhaps criminally/grossly negligent to rent a vacation rental without changing the locks and/or cod…
Anyone using an apartment as an Airbnb (as so many in NYC do) won't have the authority to change the lock type on their door without approval from building management.
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Not sure why you got downvotes, but this is spot on. It also happened with Uber and taxicabs!
Uber and taxicabs I see. Hotels apps and websites have probably gotten better but I'm not sure how much of that is AirBnB vs. a general trend in the industry.
Is anybody else kind of over AirBnb? I loved it for a while, but now prices have gone way up, the "cleaning fees" are exorbitant and make navigating/browsing a minefield, and I've had a few sketchy incidents (which were, admittedly, a side effect of choosing the cheapest place I could find), including one where the apartment manager came in, went through our clothes and _stole the bed_. I've found myself just using h…
One option for saving a few bucks on fees is to try to disintermediate on booking. Especially where I tend to look (Oregon coast), most properties are run by a management company that will include their name in the listing. Once I find something I like on AirBnB, I search the property name on Google and typically save 10+%.