It's never made sense to me. We're going to charge you an upfront $200 mandatory cleaning fee (on a $150/night rental), but you are also required to leave the apartment exactly the way you found it and clean everything up. My family is done with Airbnb and back to legit hotels.
Airbnb was a very effective arbitrage of short-term rental versus hotel law and tax gaps, but in their twilight phase it seems like they’ll increasingly resemble Distributed Flophouses Inc. until it’s impossible to distinguish them from any other discount hotel in their procedures, processes, and fees.
Though, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if PayPal bought them in a couple years: the business is just another variation of flea market business model (such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, but PayPal’s tolerance for liability and bad press is much higher than Amazon’s), and capturing that worldwide reservation revenue while outsourcing all of the actual hard work of physical operations (just as eBay does) would be an appropriate diversification.
What? Hell, if I must run my towels and sheets through a wash cycle before leaving, I might as well stay with my psychopathic Uncle. At least the beer and gummies are free.
It's never made sense to me. We're going to charge you an upfront $200 mandatory cleaning fee (on a $150/night rental), but you are also required to leave the apartment exactly the way you found it and clean everything up. My family is done with Airbnb and back to legit hotels.
Airbnb was a very effective arbitrage of short-term rental versus hotel law and tax gaps, but in their twilight phase it seems like they’ll increasingly resemble Distributed Flophouses Inc. until it’s impossible to distinguish them from any other discount hotel in their procedures, processes, and fees.
Though, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if PayPal bought them in a couple years: the business is just another variation of flea market business model (such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, but PayPal’s tolerance for liability and bad press is much higher than Amazon’s), and capturing that worldwide reservation revenue while outsourcing all of the actual hard work of physical operations (just as eBay does) would be an appropriate diversification.
What? Hell, if I must run my towels and sheets through a wash cycle before leaving, I might as well stay with my psychopathic Uncle. At least the beer and gummies are free.