271–280 of 375 posts
Hostels and hotels are strictly better in my opinion. I stayed in a hostel in Barcelona. A group of us went to a football game and had a great time.
All politicians have been saying that a decade at least. In Spain, home owners associations can forbid tourist apartments if they vote it. Why can’t they just do it? Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there.
> Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there. The depopulation problem of MOUNTAINOUS regions of Europe, including Spain, has little to do with jobs being available elsewhere. The depopulation in those mountainous regions is due to those regio…
Poorer regions like Extremadura and Andalusia have been neglected for centuries and now the economy is so dire we are seeing a mass migration from south Spain to other regions.
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The issue is that the "airbnb" areas drive normal citizens out which during off-seasons drains foot traffic making local shops go out of business which further complicates the problem. Not to mention that most tourists don't even sit around the local area, but rather go to the city attractions. Airbnb and resident housing areas are just not compatible, they have different needs and require different infrastructure. H…
The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, get much more expensive per additional person, and don’t have the amenities of an appartement. If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked. I’m not say…
The Toronto one was likely more expensive than an AirBnb, but in Berlin i don't remember it being that expensive.
Finding these places is a pain however, there is no universal name. Ive seen "Aparthotel" used a few times in Europe. Other times it is just "XXX Apartments" or "Residence" and you have to guess if they are for short-stay.
Sites like booking.com mix in people renting out their own property with these purpose built short stay locations which doesn't help discovery.
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The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, get much more expensive per additional person, and don’t have the amenities of an appartement. If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked. I’m not say…
> The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, Maybe they are more expensive than the displayed rate for an AirBnB, but by the time you add in the cleaning fees and other non-sense things it turns out to be more expensive. Also, when I'm in a hotel, I'm not asked to wash the sheets, wash the dishes, or any of that nonsense as well as paying the cleaning fees.
Barcelona has a population of ~1.7 million. The metro area surrounding is ~5.7 million. The metro area grew by ~100k in the past four years. They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020. The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the…
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> Where in Barcelona would you increase density? It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the…
Barcelona city proper is in a kind of geographical bowl. Look at it on a terrain map, you can see why the city is dense. It's one of the reasons I really like Barcelona, the forced density of the geography increases the amount and quality of services (especially food!) available. Sant Joan de Vilatorrada is nowhere near Barcelona city, it's 15 hours walk away.
People will do literally anything over building enough housing to make everyone happy
They want cheap housing in a popular place to live, but they don't want to change the character of where they live to support housing actually being cheap.
The best they can actually get is locking the city down so the current residents are effectively lottery winners, but no one from the outside can move there.
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Of course hotels are competing against residential housing. They take up land that could be used for residential housing instead.
Outside of downtown areas in the biggest cities in the US, it is very unlikely that a hotel is built in an area that people would want to build residential housing. Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go throug…
https://www.google.com/maps/search/barcelona+hotels/@41.3806...
One of my most distinct memories of visiting Barcelona in 2018 was going to a hip hang out spot with a few cousins who live there, turning a corner and seeing the words "TOURISTS FUCK OFF" graffiti'd in large letters along the side of the building. I remember thinking "oh they're talking about me."
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Overnight guests are typically banned, but I've never seen an Airbnb listing that says you can't have someone over for a cup of tea.
And how would they know? Oh right, hidden cameras. Nothing about airbnb is attractive to me any more.