> Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.
As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends.
AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc).
It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.