airbnb, C or D?

just letting u know darraghmac, if there's a disaster u CANNOT stay at my place

it's a gamble to be sure, but hotels (cheap ones anyway) are too.

(I would NEVER stay at one where the host was around)

well, same as that, so yr place was academical I guess

this is still libertarian techy faux utopian bullshit and airbnb's smug, plentiful subway ads are just insulting.

viva la regulatory state

lol

bet if eve saw a hot shit apt for cheap on it you'd find yourselves yrself overruled p sharpish

i see yr point adam, but any city where most hotel rooms are $300+/night deserves what it gets.

right. i don't object to the idea of alternative lodging-for-pay arrangements (subject of course to a modicum of consumer, health and safety regulation) but airbnb poses two immediate challenges:

1. the presence of an airbnb often results in a lowered quality of life for neighboring domiciles due to nightly bro-down bachelor party bacchanals. this is a major drag in a perceived party-oriented city like new orleans and surely also a drag in high-density nyc.

2. the inevitable influx of capital into the "sharing economy" means you have speculators subverting the techie utopia (or not i guess) by renting (or purchasing in cheaper locales) domiciles specifically for the purpose of airbnbing them out, thus decreasing housing stock for the hardworking normal folk of wherever and becoming another driver of ever-increasing urban rents.

eg in new orleans, the house next door to mine was purchased by a wealthy lady (heiress of the founding family of a longstanding chain of suburban/roadside fast casual restaurants) who for whatever fuckin reason airbnb'd it out all the time. and while i was never caused any material harm per se it was an annoyance of the kind that i would not mind seeing regulated out of existence.

i see your point but it's reaallly fucking nice to have cheap alternatives to hotels when traveling, and to have the luxury of kitchen facilities too. spending a week in a different city gets extraordinarily expensive if you are staying in a hotel and have to eat out at restaurants 3x a day. especially if you have kids. and i think your point about bachelor parties is kind of bullshit. i doubt that the percentage of bachelor airbnb trips are anything more than insubstantial.

also re: speculators purchasing places purely for airbnbing them out, do you have data on that? seems like most places (for now maybe) are actually people's lived-in homes, even if it's a second home

high density is what's a drag in NYC.

also residents who expect churchlike silence after 10pm

So the city has gotten too quiet, and too crowded?

The only time I've airbnb'd was for a bachelor party, so

my airbnb "data" is purely anecdotal but almost every airbnb rental in my former neighborhood in new orleans, bywater, which is the "hip" area, was unoccupied aside from short-term airbnb renters. that is to say, i have literally never encountered an airbnb in new orleans that functions as advertised (renting a spare room or whatever).

as far as churchlike silence, there is a difference between normal street/social noise and new groups of assholes whooping it up several times a week 10 feet from one's bedroom window; pretending there is not is purely willful obstinance.

My only airbnb experience was nice enough and pretty cheap, but I found out in retrospect that it was basically a hotel operated by someone who'd had his hotelier's license revoked.

on the four blocks of my old street, stretching from the mississippi river to st claude avenue (demarcating the bywater and less-desirable st claude neighborhoods), there were _at least_ 10 apartments or houses operating as airbnbs without permanent residents.

I use homeaway rather than airbnb and have had nothing but good times, in france & spain & italy & the uk. but I think homeaway is maybe more for oldsters? it's just a way for me to rent a flat rather than a hotel, along the lines of marcos' post above. friends have used airbnb to rent a room in another person's flat for a couple nights which seems very weird, like people just coming in and out. but these friends are mostly germans and are thus naturally weird. but I dunno: in the 90s in italy I would just go from town to town, go to a bar and ask if anyone had a room to rent, and the bartender would be like "yeah my sister's family has an extra room, 80000 lira for the night" and we'd share their bathroom and everything, so I guess it's not that different.

i see your point but it's reaallly fucking nice to have cheap alternatives to hotels when traveling, and to have the luxury of kitchen facilities too. spending a week in a different city gets extraordinarily expensive if you are staying in a hotel and have to eat out at restaurants 3x a day.

otm - I am all for renter-outers paying tax etc but the service provided by an airbnb flat is just different from what you get at a hotel. Check-in and -out can be a bit unpredictable but if I'm staying in one place for a few days (or more) I'll generally go with an airbnb.

place fantastic btw

A floating wooden house upon a raft

https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/4162480

I will let you know how it is

airbnb listings have reached apotheosis:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4182729

Are "strict" cancellation policies more or less than the norm? It just seems kind of fucked up that if I book a place four months in advance and cancel a week later I lose half my money.

Tried to book something for NYE weekend in Philly and was surprised at how fucking expensive everything is once you include all the stupid fees, like pretty much nothing of a normal level of comfort came to less than $200 and change per night. Granted I'm talking entire apartments, not rooms, and granted it was sort of last minute and a holiday weekend. But the "cleaning fee" and "service fee" bullshit really add up, plus the folks who charge like $20-50 extra per night for "extra guests" are out of their fucking minds.

whaaaaat look in West Philly dude

yeah I think part of the problem is just last-minute NYE, plus that I need an apt that can fit my whole family. Slim pickins. But totally separately, I just hate the fees, so the total is always way more than the rate that shows on the list/map.

yeah it is pretty shitty for them not to include the fees on the map

are you taking your family to mummers parade, Hurting?

That was the plan (I have friends in the parade) but I think it's not going to happen. Too logistically complicated/too few reasonable stay options, and the couple we were going to go with may also be backing out. I think next year I wanna do it, book early and find a place really close to the parade route.

A Private room in public space.

https://a2.muscache.com/im/pictures/092b533b-414e-414c-92d1-2e7bd1cc6471.jpg

https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/11429217

tempted? not as sylvan as your usual haunts but

Sylvan is a great word, and this place definitely isn't it. The advantages of being in the open air here would surely be destroyed by being able to hear a) cars, b) music that is in cars, its enough to send you to the bottom of the canal.

so has anybody hosted? considering it right now as a way of making money from the basement apartment without have to deal with Ontario's brutal landlord/tenant board.

I haven't but a friend who lives in the same building as my wife and I does. she has a studio apartment and when she's out of town or cat-sitting at a friend's place when theyre out of town she airbnb's her place and makes $100 a night. works out p well for her.

I have a friend in Nashville who's moving to the country and turning his home into a dedicated airbnb. I assume he expects to cover the mortgage and then some.

if you do it, i will price it next time i come to TO, TT! :)

(TT already rethinking this)

ha! you stay for free at Casa Dysa, my friend!

right now – we're 99% doing this, but we're having trouble figuring out insurance. since air bnb covers the unit and we'd need our own home insurance for the rest of the house. we're not sure how it would work if, for example, Morbs started a fire in the basement and burned the entire house down.

"no hot takes allowed to be posted by guests"

I stayed in an airbnb in Sharrow the other day in a family house and I went into the kitchen on the second day and the guy that was in there I recognized but I couldn't tell where from and its still bugging me

it might just have been that he had been on the bus earlier the same day

We're using Airbnb for accommodation every trip now. We've had great experiences in Barcelona, London and Co. Donegal, Ireland so far, with Fife and North Yorkshire coming up before the end of the year. Our experience thus far is that it's so much cheaper than hotels and can offer better conditions than hostels in the big cities if you take a bit of time to search and check listing/reviews/photos carefully and is much cheaper than standard b&b offerings in rural areas, which are often pretty expensive. Classic.

Use it in NYC, Madrid, Seville and next month Lisbon. Classic.

I have yet to use it. It never works out better economically than a hotel room for my family with two small kids since there's always an extra charge for more people, even a baby. Granted I'm usually comparing whole apartments to hotels so there could be a certain comfort factor. Sooner or later we will probably try one.

Also a lot of them have terrible cancellation policies, another problem when you have small kids.

I feel like it's had its day, but maybe that's premature. It used to actually be people's houses or apartments, now in big cities it just seems to be some type of scalper. It's also not as cheap as it was. For NYC it seems totally dead now, and really iffy. I've reverted to just getting a hotel - there's a privacy and formality about hotels that staying in someone's apartment doesn't have.

It can be great if you stay in the apartment while the host is there - I travelled around Europe and used it a lot, and in Marseille I stayed with a couple and we all got on great, went out late each night, met all their friends etc. Afterwards they said I could come and stay for free in future. I hadn't considered the potential benefits of sharing a place versus being on your own - I guess there are still some actual homes on it but I definitely stopped using it sometime in the last year or so because every apartment seemed like essentially a rented apartment run by a professional, which I could just book via booking.com and a much easier interface, better user reviews, etc.

Been travelling through Central and South America for a few months and airbnb has been amazing, both for meeting people and for the massive advantage of paying in full online with no crazy exchange rates or 20% taxes on top of the room rates (eg in Chile). Saved us loads of money

I feel like it's had its day, but maybe that's premature. It used to actually be people's houses or apartments, now in big cities it just seems to be some type of scalper.

This has not been my experience recently at all, though I have noticed lots more traditional BnBs and hotels are using it as a marketing tool now.

Renting your flat on airbnb while on holiday is pretty classic, I went to Ireland a couple of weeks back and it paid for the entire trip, flights included.

it's been a little while since i've used it, but i've had a number of great experiences 2011-2014 (vrbo too, though i remember vrbo having a shittier UI than airbnb) throughout the US. i rented old, beautiful houses for same cost or and often way less than a hotel. i've used it w/ and w/o my kids along.

my new place of work won't let me use it for conference travel though, which is a bummer.

the best airbnbs imo are people who are renting out their own homes or maybe a second home that they still often use themselves. i had a good experience in the really cool hyde park neighborhood in austin in 2013 renting from this cool older hippie lady who had an awesome little arts & crafts house but it took a while to find it, like 5-6 other houses in that neighborhood were all owned by the same dude who never lived in these places and just airbnb'd them out and they were all decorated in this shitty generic contemporary style with no character. probably more and mroe places are gonna be that way