Airbnb Feels Like Staying with a Cheap, Uptight Friend – then Paying for the Privilege – The Guardian

Airbnb Feels Like Staying with a Cheap, Uptight Friend – then Paying for the Privilege

Once, it seemed an economical and adventurous alternative to a hotel. But I doubt I’ll be using it again

Some people call it “wasting time on Twitter”. I call it “qualitative research”. Having engaged in a lot of qualitative research recently, I’ve discovered the following: everyone is sick of Airbnb. In its early years, Airbnb was a more economical and adventurous alternative to a hotel. Nowadays, it costs a small fortune to rent a shack on Airbnb and, when you get there, you are forced to abide by a long list of rules and buy your own toilet paper. It’s become a bit like staying with your cheapest, most uptight friend – and paying them for the privilege.

I’m not the only person to have made this observation. Every few weeks a tweet dunking on Airbnb seems to go viral. The latest example comes courtesy of a writer called Jeremy Gordon, who got more than 100,000 likes for tweeting the following: “Decided to stay in a Holiday Inn instead of an Airbnb for an overnight trip and strongly feel, one hour after check-in, that there has never been a more luxurious experience in all of human history.”

Let me be clear that I’m not being sponsored by big hotel when I say this (if big hotel would like to sponsor me then please get in contact!), but I’m not sure I’ll ever stay in an Airbnb again. To be fair, this is partly because Airbnbs are now obscenely priced and I can’t afford to. Sometimes I look at Airbnbs for fun and then, when I find one that seems reasonable, I realise it’s actually a tent. Someone has put a bed in a tent in a field and is renting it out for more than $100 a night.

The last time I stayed at an Airbnb was in 2021, before childcare ate all my disposable income. We had a new baby and wanted a relaxing few weeks away from the city, so we booked a riverside cottage in the Catskill mountains. As it turns out, “relaxing” and “three-month-old baby” don’t really mix. Being greeted with a long list of rules when we arrived didn’t help matters. Some of these rules were reasonable, some were not. Do not put drinks on the coffee table! I’m sorry, what? It’s a coffee table. The clue is in the name. You put coffee on it. If you have furniture that you don’t want people to put drinks on, then don’t rent out your place on Airbnb for a ridiculous amount of money. 

Click here to read complete article at The Guardian.