Local yocals, might be a college reunion, or a corporate retreat, I don’t give a fuck just go home already!
I’m anAirbnb renter, love the concept we leave the place as clean as we found out,try to stay as quiet as church mice, but these are poppig up all over our small inland lake. Especially the rundown cottages that are flipped with cheap upgrades that sit on the market and never sell because they’re fucking overpriced. But some fucking Realtor goes on a bender and squeals how it would make a great Airbnb and some cash infused motherfucker buys it and puts it on AIrbnb and VRBO.
I’m in a neighborhood adjacent to downtown that’s historically working-class Hispanic. It’s rapidly gentrifying, driving out the original residents. Now the whole-house STRs are making rising prices and taxes even worse.
We had a huge problem with noisy and downright obnoxious STR renters, but the city now has that under control. My bedroom is just across the alley from one, and I never hear it. Parking is a big concern, especially since trash day is Friday. (Also, about half the block has two homes on one lot, so there are a lot of cans. Add in recycling and composting, and the short end of the block is standing room only.)
That said, I have no problem with people renting out rooms or backyard cabins. In fact, I stayed in one of the latter last weekend and it was lovely, especially having tea and granola on the porch of a morning. I think of them as the new home hostel. I trust the AirBnB ratings and superhost designation. As I understand it, most will give you as much privacy or company as you want.
That might apply to tourists, and legally it applies to residents, but honestly, I never bothered. Mostly because I didn’t stay long enough that the local police would ever bother me. Strictly speaking, I was supposed to re-register every time I returned to my home in Nanjing, even after a week in Chongqing, but realistically, I only did it annually when I had to renew my visa.
(I spent a week on a Yangtze cruise; now I wonder if the cruise company registered me as a hotel would?)
I used Airbnb in the spring to visit the Okefenokee Swamp. And it was exactly “renting out a spare bedroom in someone’s house”. Furthermore, the house was out in a rural area, on a dirt road, and owned by a woman who was in the house when I was staying there. I couldn’t help thinking that if I were a single woman, I’d feel mighty uncomfortable letting a strange man stay in my home. And she must have felt the same, because I never laid eyes on her the whole trip - she stayed in another bedroom. Never talked to her, either - we communicated strictly via text. The whole thing was rather odd.
Still, the bedroom and bathroom were comfortable, and the price economical. I gave her a good review.
AIUI if you’re staying somewhere in the country other than at your residence, such as at a hotel, you’re required to register with the cops, which the hotel takes care of for you. You do not need to re-register when you return home. If you depart the country, you have to re-register within 24 hours of arrival, unless the local police station’s household registration section is not open for some reason (not all of them are open every day of the year). If you’re coming into the country as a foreign traveler, you definitely need to register at every place you go. While traveling within the country, in your case, no doubt the cruise company took care of that for you.
But you know how things like that go in many places, including China. One time when I returned to China, I went to my local police station to register. The very nice crew there asked me why I was there when I handed them all my paperwork. I pointed to the sign (which was in Chinese and English) on the wall announcing the registration requirements for us foreigners. The supervisor laughed and took care of the registration. It now takes approximately five minutes if nobody’s in front of me in line. Oh, and once they ticked the wrong box on their computer system for when I registered once, resulting in me having to take a taxi from my school to re-register and a taxi back to school to turn the new registration form in with my passport to renew my employment visa.
Does the government really care about someone being sure to follow all the particulars of, let’s face it, an obscure regulation that really doesn’t serve much purpose? They probably don’t care very much, but maybe they think it sure is nice to have something to kick someone away when they tick the government off.
Back to the Airbnb bit: I’m still wondering how the owners are treated by the governments around the world. The things I wonder about are the zoning laws, the licensing laws, and the tax laws. I also wonder about the terms of the lease the person providing the place has with the actual lessor. It seems to me like a few things may have been skipped in getting this business up and running, but I really don’t know.
Thanks for mentioning this. I have a conference next month and the hotel is quite pricey. I’ll check Airbnb.
I’ve used Airbnb only a couple of times. Vacationing in Alaska last winter I needed rooms for the six adults in our group. With Airbnb we could all stay in the same space and still have separate bedrooms. It worked out really well.
So far I haven’t had a bad experience, while traveling. I’ve never hosted with my house, nor will I ever. A few years back the Super Bowl was less than 10 miles from my house and many locals were saying they open their homes to be an Airbnb host. The potential to make a lot of money was there, but I didn’t do it. No way.
Just returned after checking Airbnb. My conference is in Toronto and the conference hotel is 2x-3x the Airbnb price! And the available Airbnbs really look excellent.
Put another way, for someone to put up their place to host for $60-$95 a night, for me that’s a good deal but for the owner they’re not really making much money.
That’s sort of a problem, though. The owners are treating their homes like a hotel but not complying with the regulations hotels have to (which is one of the reasons hotels costs more). They turn a residential area into a non-residential one, essentially, and don’t have the same types of health and safety protections (fire drills, insurance, etc) that hotels and traditional holiday lets do. But they are cheap and often better than hotels, so obviously people are going to use them.
The law is some places is trying to catch up, I think, which is what needs to happen rather than people fighting the inevitability that people are going to do this (some cities try to ban it - Amsterdam, for example). But those legal changes will probably eventually increase the costs of Air B’n’B.
There are tons where I live and TBH there’s only one that’s sometimes a problem in terms of noise and it’s not too frequent. It is a little odd that one of my neighbours is essentially a hotel, and I’m really glad that most of the houses on my road are social housing so most of us aren’t allowed to rent out any spare room as Air B’n’B. Otherwise it could be a very different situation. It’s a really nice road with flats that have gardens in a supposedly rough and central area of London, and very close to the tube, so it’s the kind of place people like to stay - if it were all private homes I suspect we’d be overrun with Air B’nB properties TBH and then we’d have problems.
Totally. Hooker with a Penis, or Aenima. Now I can’t read it without hearing Maynard screaming it in my head. Thanks for that.
My wife and parents-in-law like to head down to Oregon once a year. I usually bow out because to me it’s a many-hours-long drive to a place that looks just like here, but I’ve gone a few times. They used to get a hotel and then drive to the beach. Then they found a house on Airbnb, it has 3 bedrooms, beautiful wood floors, a big backyard with a fire pit, and is right at the beach. It’s a lot cheaper than a hotel. They go there every year and always have a good experience, and the hosts know that they are good guests so like having them as repeat customers. It’s a win/win.
We’ve been house-hunting and just crossed one place off our list after finding out it had a reputation as an “Airbnb party house” ( a viewing was canceled due to yet another rental).
We could’ve made a low-ball offer, but then I’d be wondering who might’ve shat in the pool* or barfed down the heating vent.
Sorry about that. I don’t like it when other folks post acronyms without explanation, and I went and did it myself!
It stands for Vacation Rentals By Owners, and it’s very similar to AirBnB. In fact, there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two sites. You can often find the same rental in both places. I think VRBO leans more toward stand-alone homes in vacation-y areas, and AirBnB tends more towards apartments or rooms in business-y areas, but as I say, there’s quite a bit of overlap.
My pleasure. The last time one of my conferences was in Toronto, I found a great Airbnb condo apartment in a high-rise building just two blocks from the conference hotel. It was no more than half the conference hotel rate, and had a great Whole Foods-like store on the ground floor where I could buy great pre-made meals and grocery items. Extremely convenient and pleasant. And I had a great view, too!
