251–260 of 405 posts
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The condescension and lack of humanity that some people here have is baffling.
And you know every single person on this site likes to use their FAANG salaries to see the word, so the hate for tourists is oddly self-referential.
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>I’m not that surprised, once a good double-digit number are cheating, cheating becomes the only viable way to remain competitive. Is that not always the case with these American marketplace apps? Now that the property owners have to follow the rules, they have the same burden as the real hotels, but none of the economy of scale. Same with all the places where they make Uber drivers be actual taxi drivers in actual t…
Honestly that is all I wanted from them. Taxi service with a well designed universal phone app with map routing and payment. I guess the established players figured out they didn't need a thing like that but it looks like they were proven wrong.
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Air travel was great in the early days.
Air travel is still great if you fly first class, which if I remember correctly, is exactly as expensive as air travel was in the good old days.
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Fortunately these people had their chance to learn new ways to earning wages during the pandemic :)
The condescension and lack of humanity that some people here have is baffling.
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Even as an expat who has been traveling and living abroad for years, I'd have to admit it's true that tourism doesn't necessarily remain a beneficial thing as tourist numbers get larger. I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the cos…
> 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 e…
The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like.
Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals.
Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local".
> 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.
As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.
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The only thing that "ride-sharing" companies proved was that they can do it cheaper by (a) bleeding capital and (b) evading regulator enforcement/taxes.
Note that it wasn’t just cheaper, but also better quality.
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Years ago when Airbnb was picking up steam and I was in college I got a gig building a tool to automate cross-referencing Airbnb listings with housing records so the city could request the optional tourism tax. What we found surprised all of them. A handful of people were listing sometimes over a dozen properties and avoiding the larger, but not optional, hotel tax. The 80% figure doesn’t surprise me much now just kn…
> how a few individuals can flood the short-term rental market in an area. And, if it's like some cities (Dublin, Galway), they do this at the expense of the long-term rental market.
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> There is a housing crisis in the Netherlands Is there any western city where there isn't a housing crisis?
Perhaps there's something deeply wrong with western housing systems? I don't want to sound too radical, but this seems to be inextricably connected to capitalism. We won't ever solve it without structural changes. What Amsterdam is doing is a decent start at least.
AirBnB and everything around it has mutated into something big and ugly since where it began. Seems like we need good old couch surfing forums back.
Now I am 100% out of the sphere of technology, but isn't skirting regulation to make money exactly how AirBnB got started?
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GroenLinks has always been the most outspoken against Airbnb. Complaints are probably heaviest in West and not South. But it doesn't matter where, the green left is the most dominant party under upper middle class, together with D66. And indeed I wrote it in a way that complaining people led to the fight against Airbnb but I think there are many more reasons. GroenLinks ideology is definitely not caused by that to be…
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I said GroenLinks was dominant under upper white middle class. Which it is since it's the biggest party in the council at the moment and was by far the most popular in White upper class neighborhoods like west and ijburg last local elections. And is by far, with it's dominant leader, the most dominant voice in the current council; to call them left is not a stretch, it's in their name.
D66 likes to join coalitions and then mostly leans in the direction of the dominant party, the house restrictions policy for sure can be described as anti capitalistic since they limit the free use of your capital (,house). For instance needing a permit to live with more then 3 adults in your own house is a new law they passed last year. Or only allowing buyers that will live in the houses.
I don't agree or disagree with all policies; but it's definitely not a stretch for me to classify them as left.