There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.
When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.
I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.
A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.
Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.
So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.
This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.
Yeah, but on the same token you don’t want to give hotels the monopoly… There is so much price gouging if they know some big event is happening in town. Plus many areas have fuck all for hotel capacity. I do AirBNB because I don’t have $150 every time I want to go to a city. I wish we’d have capsule hotels
Are you implying that AirBNB hosts don’t do this price gouging as well?
What you describe is just another example of poor urban planning + untapped market of public transport.