Is Airbnb too broken to fix?
Is it a platform or a brand, because it can’t be both
gotcha prices, misleading listings and disappointing places
For years I’ve wanted to leave my tiny, costly Manhattan apartment. Imagine spending an increasingly huge chunk of your income on housing and not having a bedroom big enough for a bed you can walk around, or God forbid, a second bedroom, or any outdoor space, or even a bedroom closet. Or a living space that can fit a small dining table and a sofa. Or a bathroom that’s not next to your kitchen/dining area. You get the idea. Spending so much money for literally so little gets old. Over time, my rent doubled while my salary didn’t.
Then Covid attacked in March with an explosion of infection and death. New York, to this day, claims the highest death rate in North America. There are over 36,000 dead statewide, more than anywhere else in the nation. In the midst of the pandemic, with the fear of being alone and unsafe in a gilded cell in lockdown while my income tumbled, I fled. I drove to a friend’s farm in rural Massachusetts. Not long after, I amicably broke my Manhattan lease and stored a few possessions worth saving.
Over the spring and summer, while living at a series of Airbnbs near the farm, I learned how to move pullets — teenage hens — to their coop at night and weed blueberries, weed peas, weed onions, weed, weed, weed. Meanwhile, I traveled locally to explore new places to live longer term in Massachusetts, New York and Vermont. I relied on Airbnb, which recently went public, a move that benefits exactly zero of its consumers.
To put it mildly, Airbnb is terrible. It was terrible before the IPO, it’s terrible after the IPO. It’s costly, relies on misleading fees, you never know the quality of the place you’re getting until it’s too late and it’s usually disappointing, searching for places sucks up so many hours of your life it might as well take out a fistful of bills and beg strangers — with your mask on, at a polite distance — for a furnished place to rent.
Since March 2020 I’ve Airbnb’ed in:
Carlisle, Massachusetts
Acton, Massachusetts
Easthampton, Massachusetts
Hudson, New York (technically VRBO; same listing was on Airbnb)
Tarrytown, New York
Beacon, New York
Margaretville, New York
Newton, CT
Kerhonkson, NY
Yes, this is a privileged list of someone without kids and with enough work-from-home income to try new places. It’s also the life experience of a person searching for a home without a lease or mortgage while trying to stay safe.
Either way, that’s nine Airbnb short term rentals in less than a year. Barring a stay with friends in Vermont, the service has been my full time housing plan.
Airbnb is so broken I’m not sure it’s worth fixing. If the company doesn’t dramatically improve the website booking and actual hospitality experience, let’s hope some gosh darned good ol’ fashioned competition forces the point. Not that competition is a feature of late stage capitalism.
The one experience I can guarantee with Airbnb: booking will always be difficult, prices will always be misleading, and more often than not, the rentals will disappoint.
Let’s start with cost.
Gotcha pricing
After browsing for hours on a vertical map that shifts and moves with each click or filter, if you find a place you like, you soon discover on a separate tab that the listed price of, say, $190 a night for a cabin (hello, that’s a lot!) is actually $300 when you add the hidden cleaning fees, Airbnb’s cut and local fees if applicable.
Um, why not add all those costs up front? Why are you hiding prices?
I’m sure Airbnb hires brilliant, very well paid engineers doing their part to increase income inequality who can figure out a solution. Here, I’ll do it for them: Add all the extra fees per listing, divide them by the consumer’s selected rental duration in their search, post that result as the average fee in the map.
If you search for a two night stay, add in all the fees (house rate, cleaning fee, Airbnb’s cut, local fees) and divide that by two. For three nights, add it up and divide by three. If I can figure this out in Medium post read by my wonderful mom (hi mom!), a talented Ruby on Rails programmer can too.
Better yet, cancel extra fees.
What’s up with super high cleaning fees, sometimes more than $200, for what are usually small spaces in rural areas that no way cost that much to clean? Owners determine the fees as they like, there’s no logic to it other than greed. The fees better at cleaning out your wallet than hygiene. And I’m not talking about Covid-era deep cleaning hygiene theater that doesn’t prevent air-borne Covid from nearby people. Tacked on cleaning fees have always been there.
You won’t get Covid from licking doorknobs, which is also not a thing. Extra special deep cleaning is always a plus, but not related to Covid safety.
Airbnbs don’t have water, WiFi, HVAC, electric, gas or maintenance fees, so why cleaning? If you are a home owner posting your home on Airbnb, cleaning is a cost of doing business. Like, you know, in a restaurant, venue, hotel, car rental and all other the other IRL businesses.
Not for nothing, hiding these fees is a crappy surprise for a customer. It’s a cheap gotcha. Think you got a good deal? Guess again!
Why treat your users poorly? Do the Airbnb billionaires, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, have withholding issues that make them want to manipulate millions of consumers? Are all billionaires hopeless sociopaths who shouldn’t be allowed to amass vast wealth?
I prescribe brave looks in the mirror and/or psychotherapy (my mom is a therapist) and a very, very, very big wealth tax.
Last thing: even after the gotcha fees, Airbnb prices are TOO DAMN HIGH. I know, I know, it’s a free market; unregulated, monopolist socialism, er, Capitalism for the white & the wealthy is the best thing since medieval Feudalism. We should all just suck it up like a cisgender man.
But really, what’s going on here?
Why is it so expensive to stay in rather humble places with mostly ancient furnishings in far flung locations? In the Northeast, prices are super high compared to hotels or motels. Before I go on a tangent about housing inequality, the regressive unfairness of letting homeowners deduct mortgage interest payments from their taxes which screws over all renters everywhere, and tax subsidies for developers via 1031 exchanges to avoid capital gains taxes, let’s just say that Airbnb, at the very least, profits from the worse housing crisis in American history. That, my friend, is not a good business model.
But let’s say you have the cash.
Bait & Switch Places
By now you’ve waded through a shifting map of listings and biased five star reviews that tell you zilch about the place you might rent. You find all the hidden fees, locate a place you think you’d like, request to book it (why is requesting a thing, why aren’t all places either “available” or “unavailable?”) the owner approves you — within 24 hours that you will now spend worrying if you have a confirmed place or not so you can’t look elsewhere — then voila! You’re approved! Approval feels so good! Airbnb instantly charges your credit card.
Phew. That was a lot of work.
But wait, there’s more! You will now receive a barrage of multiple confusing confirmation emails instead of, you know, a single email.
You accomplish all of these steps, sometime later you show up at “your Airbnb.”
Either at first glance or as you settle in, is the home a delight or a disappointment?
You’ve used the service. You might not think it’s as bad as I do. To be fair, you probably haven’t relied on it for full time housing in a pandemic, but honestly, how many times have been in your Airbnb and thought, “this is not like the listing!”
In the nearly ten places I’ve lived in this year, maybe two were honestly depicted. The rest were way worse and it was way too late to back out.
A small apartment in Hudson, New York had a bedroom facing the sidewalk, which was weird, then it turned out to be the town’s truck route. Imagine sleeping next to a runway. Truck engines shook the entire room so I had to sleep on a day bed in a room off the hallway. There was cheap, unusable cookware and no place to sit besides a dining chair. When you factor in the fees, it cost over $220 a night to stay in a place with a bedroom I couldn’t sleep in, a kitchen I couldn’t use and no place to sit. Not a winning hospitality experience.
Just last weekend I stayed in a cute place upstate with someone I’m dating. (That’s all I’ll say on Medium, I can’t tell you everything all the time.) The cottage listed at $200 but really cost over $300. OK, fine, it’s a romantic getaway. We have the privilege, income and free time to afford it. Since it’s a global pandemic with a newly infectious variant on the loose, we planned on meals at home. Within twenty minutes of arrival we started making a Shabbat dinner.
That’s when we learned the supposedly very well-stocked kitchen didn’t have reliable heat on an icy winter night. When we opened the cutlery drawer, we found it held exactly one butter knife. Forks and spoons yes, but a single lonely blade. That is just weird.
There were two mismatched glasses and badly chipped dinner plates. It felt like someone had ransacked the place, or, you know, didn’t care about their guests. A stove burner worked until it didn’t. The overhead lighting was so bright you could have been in an OR, but with only one knife, not so great.
The bedroom had flimsy curtains like cheap lingerie for windows, looks nice but doesn’t hide much. The cabin was a few yards from two other rentals crammed onto the same small property to maximize owner profit.
These may seem like quibbles, but try having two people eat all your meals with a single butter knife in a cold room that’s glaringly bright. Then go sleep in a bedroom with no way to block morning light, all on a vacation weekend.
There are three reasons you book an Airbnb instead of a hotel room: you get a a kitchen, a comfortable work and lounging area, a good nights’ sleep. One out of three isn’t enough. (The living room was cozy.)
I gently complained about the kitchen in an email to the owner. His response?
“I haven’t really finished working on the kitchen, I shouldn’t have listed it.”
But he had, and there we were.
After he asked me to take photos to document the issue, which I didn’t do, he credited me back for one night. That was welcome and way more than necessary, but how is this a good experience? Why doesn’t Airbnb take accountability for how misleading their listings almost always are? Where are the quality standards or impartial verifications? Shouldn’t the company want people to have a good time?
To add to the fun, the owners had included rules stating we weren’t allowed to walk in the neighborhood because their neighbors are very private. Last I checked, this is America and anyone can walk down a public road. Honestly, I’m checking the news constantly to make sure this is still really America, but you get it. It was just a crazy rule and made me feel unsafe. I can’t walk down the street?
The point: Count on an Airbnb home not living up to its listing or catering to common sense needs, like having a mattress that isn’t lumpy in a room full of scavenged town dump decor. (Both were features of my Carlisle, MA rental.) Airbnb listings lack independent photos or third-party reviews, so you have no idea what the place is really like. There are lots and lots reviews by former guests, who are incentivized to only post positive comments to avoid receiving crappy reviews in return, which would makes it harder for them to book new places. It’s not impartial, and therefore, not helpful.
Airbnb even solicits private feedback from guests to the owners in a bid to keep honest feedback off the site. No bueno. Imagine if Amazon did this for their customer reviews?
Owners often won’t share photos of the building’s exterior. They avoid otuside photos so you can’t tell if you’re on a highway (like I was in Beacon), in an illegal rental neighbors might discover and report, if the place is a few yards from other cabins when you think you’ll be in the woods, or if you’re not actually in a “suite” or “studio” but in a basement under the owner’s home (you will be).
Airbnb is a lot like online dating. Dating platforms let people post photos from years ago — while any decent platform programmer could detect the timestamp metadata of a smartphone photo and restrict photos to within a few months of the current date. Easy to do, and zero platforms do this, so they are full of old photos which are uniformly adorable and svelte. And not representative of reality. Cat fishing abounds online. It’s maddeningly easy to enforce, but they’d make the listings — of people or homes — more honest and therefore, less desirable. It’s sad, but there you have it. We don’t all look like Tom Brady or live in mid century modern masterpieces.
I’m OK with this.
But I shouldn’t complain. At least in dating you don’t have to move in with the person the very first time you meet them.
That would be an interesting twist on dating. Show up at the bar with your luggage and see what happens. But I digress.
Booking is painful and takes forever
Airbnb is like the old Jewish joke about the Catskills from yesteryear, the kind of middle class resorts my grandparents used to host family gatherings.
“The food here is terrible,” one woman kvetches to her friend.
“Yeah, and in such small portions!”
Let’s play a game. We’ll count all the verbs you will need to employ to book an Airbnb home. First, search a shifting map with hidden gotcha fees, then browse individual listings, read dozes of low information reviews, compare fees, apply for a place, contact the hosts (I do this each time to request for a lower rate or ask if I need to bring cooking oil or coffee), then finally, pay, always in advance, which no hotels do. Then receive a fistful of overlapping confirmation emails.
After all this work, you will show up at a place that will most likely suck.
Are all Airbnb places terrible? No. Some owners care about their guests and offer wonderful experiences. They post dutifully clear and honest details and sometimes offer little surprises and delights, usually in the form of snacks. But too many hosts pimp out too many awful places.
The “platform” is ripe for competition or a serious upgrade, neither of which will happen in this extended moment of corporate monopolies. Is there VRBO as a competitor? Yes. It’s a direct copy and solves no consumer problems. Verizon vs AT&T doesn’t guarantee affordable yet high quality telephony. It’s just an exploitive duopoly. You need way, way more government regulation and competition for capitalism to function, which makes me wonder what our economic system is now: Oligarchic? Despotic? Medieval?
The problems with Airbnb are a lot like the problems with Facebook and Twitter. The invariably white, male (and sometimes Jewish, I’m so proud!) billionaire owners take no responsibility for the product they profit from. They say they run unregulated “platforms” for others to do as they please, when the truth is the exactly opposite.
Bear with me here. Facebook is a publisher that monetizes its journalists — you and me and our friends who write and post to the website for free. Facebook takes little to no responsibility, and suffers zero consequences, for the hate speech and deceitful advertisements it publishes every second of every day. And that’s before we get to the privacy and monetization concerns.
Airbnb has a similar lack of responsibility. We say we’re Airbnbing when we rent a stranger’s home, but when you get there, you’re not in an Airbnb brand experience, you’re in a stranger’s home who more often than not, doesn’t care about you at all. Airbnb is not a hospitality brand like, say, Marriott, which has accountability and a reputation to maintain so you get a uniform, predictable, dependable hospitality experience across their portfolio of brands. Full disclosure, while I prefer quirky boutique hotels as my former client will attest, I consulted for Marriott many years ago. They have a culture of accountability for their guests, it’s a sincere corporate value. Does Airbnb? Not a chance.
Airbnb is a closed marketplace of mainly inferior homes relying on opaque listing information and high prices to extract maximum pain on their consumers. This benefits some home owners, a handful of corporate owners and a narrow slice of public shareholders. It’s like the gig economy in reverse, which is bad both ways.
How to make it better? Fix all the stuff I mentioned.
Or just stay home if you’re lucky enough to have one.