AirBnB is already trash in many ways. The last straw for me is the hiding of the exact location “feature”. I get privacy is important, but the locations can be of night and day difference within the huge circle. For a small town I visited, it covered the whole place!
Boycot everything owned by billionaires. Fuck them and their fascist oligarchy
Yup another reason to not use Airbnb. Like others we have big group trips where we want a house. Sticking to other providers.
Are there any providers you’d like to recommend?
still true
$225 can get you a fairly decent hotel room too, with all the amenities
Many hotels now allow larger dogs too, which was the only reason I had used Airbnb previously
I honestly don’t get the appeal of AirBNB. Like, what do they offer that a hotel doesn’t? I could see a use case where you’re in the middle of nowhere.
When it was just people renting out spare bedrooms for cheaper than a hotel it was fine.
When people started making it an investment and changing it from “place to sleep” to some kind of destination whole-house/apartment rental bullshit it became the toxic thing it is now.
It also fucked up the housing market because AirBnB rentals for $250/night every weekend pay more than renters with lower wear and no renters rights, and make for a better investment than just selling the property.
It used to be much better (like when it first started). Now it’s straight trash and has been for quite some time.
The greatest advantage is a kitchen, I can save so much money by cooking most of the meals
More space, less people around. (Don’t forget, it offers full houses too, not just rooms.)
We usually have at least 6 when we go on vacation, sometimes twice that or more. I can get a nice 3 bedroom house and cook meals for everyone vs 2-5 hotel rooms which cost a lot more and I’m eating out at restaurants. Bottom line, Airbnb saves you money if you’re going with more than a couple of people.
Last time I booked a hotel suite with a kitchen and bedrooma. Still cheaper than Airbnb but with hotel amenities and housekeeping.
We’ve stayed in hotel suites many, many times. For urban trips it’s 100% the way to go. But even 5 people in a suite is usually terribly cramped. And on the beach I can get a cramped hotel suite on the water, or a 4br 3ba house two blocks away for the same price. I don’t mind walking two blocks to the beach and often we travel with other families and the extra space in a house makes it twice as nice all week long. I’m just this evening planning a beach trip for my family, my daughter’s best friend and her family, and my other daughter’s boyfriend from London at the beginning of June. Party of 9, minimum 4 bedrooms plus a sofa bed. Hotels in the area can’t touch what I can get at Airbnb and I just have to empty the bin and start the dishwasher before I go.
A lot of it also depends on how the day is going to be spent. On beach vacations I spend a lot of time on the balcony watching the water, so I’m in the room more. On trips to places like Disney I’m only in the room to sleep. So hotels are better for “just sleep” type trips and condos/houses are better for others.
so you can go on vacation to do housework?
We can barely afford to go at all. Adding restaurant food for every meal makes us cut the trip shorter or pick somewhere closer (we’re really far from any beach and my wife loves the beach but she’d rather have to do a little cooking at the beach than not be able to go.)
That said,there are things you can do to make the cleaning easier. Cook over fire outside. Eat with paper plates and disposable utensils. We usually wash tons of dishes cooking for six at home, but on our rare vacations we try to wash none or as few as possible.
Vacation rental companies exist anywhere you want to go, people wanted the same thing you do before Airbnb. And you don’t have to do the fucking dishes when you leave
Are you sure about that? Every cabin/condo I’ve stayed in my entire life has had a booklet of checkout instructions and while it differs from place to place you’re generally expected to load and start the dishwasher. That’s probably the most universal one. Stuff like stripping beds and starting laundry are more varied, but I’ve never seen instructions that are just totally cool with you leaving your dirty dishes out.
Hotels are different, of course, but still, you could get non-hotel places from tons of vacation rental companies before AirBnB.
I’ve looked at all the options I can find for decades for everywhere we go. Airbnb has been the best option I can find probably half the time for probably the last six or seven years. There are other options, but they aren’t always better options.
Choose a hotel chain and build up loyalty, then you have things Airbnb would never have, like late checkout
You’re boycotting AirBnB because the cofounder became a Musk rat.
I boycott AirBnB because like almost every startup out of silicon valley, it always sucked.
We are not the same
spoiler
Haha get it? Muskrat
Seriously though, you’re like a decade late to the party of illegal hotel chain ruining it for everybody. Out of all the stupid exploitive businesses, this should have been the easiest and straightforward to boycott, if it wasn’t already apparent the business owners aren’t some grifting scumbags.
This picture looks AI generated.
It’s extremely AI with a little Photoshop for seasoning.
what’s with the ai generated image?
What gives it away as AI? I can’t tell.
Yep. I see it now.
For me, what immediately alerted me was the rotation, position and size of the billboard. It should face the road, not the the camera. It should be smaller considering how close to the road it is. And it is way too low above the road. I don’t think you would even be allowed to have a billboard over a public road at all, let alone so low.
After that, I looked closer and don’t really see how it is supported. Looks like it is floating. Maybe the one pole on the left could be connected although it does not look that way. Even if it was connected, the billboard would have too much leverage being only supported on one side.
Zoom in and look at the persons below the billboard. Below the statement, read the text on the billboard that shows what brand the billboard it is.
There are other issues too if you look closely. The reflection in the building windows of a non-existent car, the strange merging of two separate buildings in top left corner, the malformed black car on the right side of the image, the street that merges into a building, the malformed traffic light on the left, the black car with human persons protruding through the bonnet like video game characters clipping into other objects, etc.
Edit: added some other examples
Don’t understand why people use Airbnb when vrbo exists. This should seal the deal if anyone was having a hard time picking between the two.
VRBO sucks too, just a fair amount less. Local rental agencies are the way to go, if you can’t find one where you want to go, call the chamber of commerce. There probably aren’t VRBO rentals there anyway.
phone rings
“Hey man, it’s Elon. We’re ransacking the shit out of America. You in?”
The only reason I see so many people I know renting out airbnb’s is because they absolutely have to take their dogs everywhere they go.
I just find pet friendly hotels. People had dogs a decade ago
VRBO has pet friendly stuff, though I’m not sure if it’s ethically better than airbnb.
Let’s bring back couch surfing. They can’t compete with free.
They’ve already fucked up real estate and neighborhoods all over, which was good enough reason for me. Plus their system and the way everything works now is absurd. Anyway some corporatist rich fucker working with others like him to harm people? Of course. That’s what they do.
LOL who the fuck even uses that shady site?
It’s so expensive, you might as well go to an actual hotel.
🤣
Sorry, no can do. Never used it and never intended to.
It was good when it first started out; you could just rent a bedroom in someone’s house for a few nights nice and cheap. Perfect when alone especially.
Now it’s more expensive and more hassle than a hotel. The only use these days is things like cabins or beach houses, and I wish they used something different.
There were plenty of reasons to boycott Airbnb before, namely the fact that it removes apartments from the market at a time where people have a hard time finding a place to live…
