Airbnb Announces Intention to Become a Publicly-Traded Company During 2020

While certainly it’s in Airbnb’s financial interests to keep transactions on platform, I saw a great deal of cases where fraudulent hosts (with fake listings) were encouraging folks to make off platform payments. Of course the first thing most guests do in those cases is complain to Airbnb and demand their money back — as if Airbnb had taken their money. Putting some friction helps Airbnb say, “We’re sorry that happened, but that’s not our problem.”

- The quality of places we've gotten in the U.S. has in general been lower and not entirely matching the description. With a couple exceptions, the U.S. AirBnB's have definitely been...not great. But we feel pressured to leave good reviews so that the host leaves us good counter review so that other hosts will make sure to book us.

- Outside of the U.S., the experience has been almost universally great. Better on average than hotels for the same price. Bigger, better locations, better prices, and so on.

- We've definitely moved from "spare room" to "entire place" and been much happier and less awkward feeling for everybody involved. However, some of the more memorably places have been meeting people in the places we stay.

- Some of the nicest places we've stayed were flats in Europe where the owner has taken a job in some other country and rents their place out on AirBnB. There was a particularly fantastic 6 days in Vienna in a two bedroom flat with a full kitchen, clothes washer, free parking, and a fully furnished living room, a 5 minute walk from the tram and a short 15 minute ride to the city center under $65 a night...absolutely insane.

- We've definitely stayed at places where we were instructed to say "we're friends of so and so". It felt weird, but we've never had a problem and we try to be particularly quiet and respectful of the community we're staying in. Still, it needs to be worked out and I can definitely see the side of other people who live in the building not liking it.

- I'm aware that AirBnB is not helping anybody's housing costs. On the flip side it definitely seems to be revitalizing some other housing markets in interesting neighborhoods. One enterprising place we stayed in Budapest was slowly being bought, renovated and flipped a flat at a time and some locals mentioned that the neighborhood has gone from run down to revitalized with all the new foot traffic coming from a couple buildings that were going through the same strategy.

- I think Japan is the closest to regulating it correctly. They've basically said, "if you want to run an AirBnB, it's fine, but you are now a limited use hotel." Of the half dozen places we've stayed in Japan, every single one followed the new law 100% and it wasn't a huge fuss. It honestly made it more comfortable to stay in since we didn't feel like usurpers as much. Bonus, every place we stayed in was also correctly outfitted with emergency exit signs and other "hotel safety things" like fire extinguishers and so on. They can only rent out their apartments for so many days-per-year which also helps with some of the property speculation bits I think.

- We've stayed at a couple places in economically depressed communities and it was very clear that the AirBnB was a very unique economic opportunity for the owners that was bringing in much needed income that they really didn't have access to in any other way. Very memorable, positive, stays in those cases because we felt we were doing a little bit of good.

And yes, as a previous user stated, it's very easy for us developers to include the fees and taxes in the average rate display. Fees are either fixed dollar amounts or a percentage of the room charge. It's trivial to add this into the average rate per night. Our corporate overlords instruct/force us not to.

Furthermore, my advice is to avoid the major OTAs such as Expedia. First, they engage in price-fixing. Hotels are not allowed to display prices cheaper than they appear in Expedia, otherwise they are threatened with delisting. Expedia calls this their "rate parity" policy. They should be taken to court by the DOJ. Second, they take a massive percentage from hotels as commission. Use Expedia to find availability, but then go direct to the hotel. Also, because hotels know they are getting absolutely FUCKED by Expedia. They will not put inventory on Expedia during peak seasons. They know they can get max occupancy without being charged a 30% by Expedia. Ski resort hotels are a prime example, but there are several other cases. In short fuck Expedia and probably AirBnB too.

Just google "expedia price fixing" and the list goes on, here is the most recent one: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2019/05/09/29082...