We stayed in an AirBnB once. It was okay, I suppose, for the price but the owner was sort of a dingus about giving up with WiFi password (listed as included) and the clothes dryer didn’t work. Oh, and you had to walk around the building to the back door along a pretty treacherous sidewalk which was unlit at night.
All that aside, it honestly wasn’t terrible and I guess we did alright for the price and amount of space. Heaven knows I’ve been in worst motel rooms. Still, it didn’t endear itself to us as the ultimate hotel alternative either.
Stayed in them when either a hotel was not a viable option or for a vacation with a large group of family/friends. With a large group you can rent a very large home for much cheaper than it would be to all get separate hotel rooms, and it’s extremely convenient to have everyone coming and going from the same place.
I use AirBnB whenever I stay over in Chicago. I’ve rented both a room and the entire place through them and have not had any bad experiences. I prefer to rent the entire place though because I like the privacy it affords. On the whole, it is cheaper than a hotel room for the same number of nights I am staying.
The things I don’t like about doing AirBnB are that there is a huge variation in quality between the places you stay. Another issue I have is that if you find a place that you really like, it is usually not available the next time I’m going to be in town. So I have to find a different place. This is where staying in a hotel room is advantageous. Hotel rooms are pretty much consistent in quality. You know what you are getting every time you stay there, and the same hotel will almost always have a room for you, no matter how often you stay.
For me these are minor things. I can almost always find a house through AirBnB that will fit my requirements and availability. It takes a little more work, but the price really does make a huge difference.
In summary:
AirBnB: is less expensive, gives me more privacy, quality can vary from place to place, a particular place may not be available, you get a very unique experience
Hotel: is more expensive, a little less privacy. Quality is consistent, rooms are generally available, experience is pretty generic.
I’ve done Airbnb a couple of times, but am not really a fan. Both times I had a room with private bath, but still you have to make arrangements about when you come and spend some time chatting with the host.
I typically stay at a place for one night only (two at the most) and prefer to arrive when I like and be left alone. I choose hotels based on 24 hour receptions and typically the short stay makes much of the savings of airbnb disappear… booking a few hours before your arrive typically also isn’t possible. Cheap hotels all the way for me:).
Both times I have used airbnb I rented a full ‘suite’ with its own entrance, fully stocked kitchen, bath, and small dining area, for what it would cost to rent a nasty basic room full of beds and a giant tv through Super 8 or Motel 6. In both cases a homeowner had remodeled a place within their house to be a self-contained unit. One host was a little scattered and the place was funky and charming, the other was extremely tidy and organized and the suite was all new and color coordinated. In no case did I have to spend any time with the host except once when a guest of mine accidentally parked in their parking spot.
The sterility and sameness of hotels, the feeling of being packed into a building with a bunch of faceless strangers, plus the knowledge of the underpaid overworked supposed-to-be invisible laborers which make my comfort possible makes staying in hotels, fancy or plain, a real burden to me, so airbnb is a much appreciated invention as far as I’m concerned.
I have stayed at AirBnB and Homeaway. My one AirBnB experience wasn’t great, the host canceled a few weeks before my stay at a very busy time in that city. He was in the military and said he was coming into town to visit his daughter and needed his place. Well that’s fine and it’s his place, but I found it pretty disconcerting that I could be bumped so easily and had to scramble to find another place. Next time AirBnB wanted a copy of my driver’s license to make reservations and I wasn’t willing to do that. So between those two things on the rare occasions I want a place I find it on AirBnB and then see if I can find another way to book.
Homeaway and VRBO have worked well the 3 times or so I’ve used them.
About half the AirBnBs we’ve rented had the host next door or up the stairs. Which is convenient if you need something, and not intrusive at all.
I forgot two more rentals - Mendocino and Chambersburg PA.
We had one flaky experience. We got a room an an apartment building in downtown LA next door to our daughter, which was great since we could collect our grandson to babysit while they got ready to move. But the host told us to bring our bags through the garage, not lobby, and tell anyone who asks that we were visiting people. The place was great but there were boxes in the closets with some of the price tags still on.
A few weeks later someone called about it, asking for details. It turns out she had bought up a bunch of apartments and was renting them out in violation of the rental agreement. But that bad experience was not very bad.
We stayed in a condo at Albuquerque, NM and a few condos and houses at Hilton Head, SC and St. Simon’s Island, GA. All were fantastic experiences. Since I’d far prefer to stay in a condo with my husband and two kids vs. a small hotel room, I highly recommend VRBO.
While I like the idea in concept, I haven’t stayed at one and am still hesitant to do so. The possibility of late cancelleations by the host is a definite drawback. During the Cubs playoff run in 2016, I know a couple of people tried to let out their apartments and management here quickly quashed that.
Cooking my own meals on a vacation has no appeal to me. Now, I usually travel solo, so I’m not dealing with picky kids and obviously the economies of scale start to kick in when you’re traveling with more people. But, the idea of having to go grocery shopping and having to buy food as well as perhaps condiments and salt and pepper has no appeal when I’d rather be sightseeing.
Maybe I’ll give it a shot sometime, but I’d think I’d probably book a hotel room as a backup with a good cancellation policy. If local politics suddenly cracks down on Uber, that won’t ruin a trip. A sudden Air Bnb crackdown could cause major headaches.
My large-ish family (mother, 6 siblings, random spouses, nieces, and nephews) have been getting together about once a year for the last 20 or so years. We eventually started doing vrbo and airbnb, and they work much better for us. Cooking dinner for 14 at home is much easier than negotiating a restaurant for that big of a group. In Sedona, AZ, we had something like an 8 bedroom, 6000 sf house with 6 or so bathrooms. It was crazy huge, and worked really well for us. We had a 6 or so bedroom, with a few other sleeping options, in Quebec City right in the center of old town and near the farmer’s market. Really great location. We often have to resort to multiple properties, since our group is so big.
I’ve stayed in several VRBO / Homeaway vacation rentals. I’ve had very good experiences with all of them, as they give me a lot of what I want (peace and quiet, ability to prepare one’s own breakfast and coffee, privacy, comfort, elbow room). They can vary wildly in price, but if you use the search filters deftly, you can usually find something comparable to or lower than a hotel.
I pointed out on a recent thread on this that we’ve stayed in Kaua’i, the Big Island, The Olympic Peninsula, Bainbridge Island, Sonoma County wine country, and coastal Washington north of Seattle. Every home was very pleasant and the terms fair for what we were getting.
I wish there were a hotel that had all this in addition to room service. Home2Suites and Homewood Suites do allow you to prepare meals (and even have frozen meals for purchase at the counter), and have a free breakfast but do not have room service. If I were staying at a place for more than 2 days, having a combination of a hotel restaurant, room service, AND a kitchen with a modicum of cooking implements would be great since while I don’t particularly like to cook I do sometimes want to just fix something quick in my room.
About a year ago I got involved with a startup company out in California. We were scattered all over the globe, and decided to have a meet-and-greet week in LA. We rented a beach house through AirBnB down near Newport Beach.
The day before we were supposed to get there, the owner tried to raise our rent for the week by about a third. We almost canceled due to that, but talked her back down to the original price.
Well, about our fourth day there, we came back from breakfast to find the local Sheriff ready to evict us… accompanied by the new owner. It seems the property had been seized and auctioned off, without us knowing.
Luckily, the new owner was remarkably understanding, and let us stay the rest of the week in his new place for free.
Never myself; always standard hotels/motels. But a friend at work heavily uses Air and swears by them. In like 6 or 8 the last two years she has had nothing but good/great experiences.
We’ve done AirBnBs in Paris, Chicago, Charleston, Asheville, Atlanta, San Juan, Vieques, and New Orleans, and have stays coming up in Edinburgh and London.
So, obviously, big fan. We haven’t stayed in one yet that I wouldn’t enthusiastically return to or recommend. We do whole apartments, and I like to go with Superhosts, just because we’ve had good experiences with them in the past. In bigger cities we try to find a fun neighborhood outside the main tourist fray. We usually get a really sweet place for about the price of the shittiest of hotel rooms, and probably half the cost of a hotel room that I’d consider equivalent.
I travel to Seattle for work a couple times a month. The hotels my company prefers are not great while at the same time being quite expensive. I always Airbnb now. I found one host that bought somewhere between 5 and 10 of the same exact unil, all stacked up from the 10th to the 23rd floor of a new condo. They’re all identically furnished, quite comfy and very well equipped. About half of what the hotel room would have been.
When I travel with my boss, we always rent a house. We set up an office space in the dining room and load the fridge with beer and wine. We manage to have a pretty good time.
The best experience though was the place my wife and I rented in Barcelona. It was a gorgeous old apartment a half block from Passeig de Gràcia. It wasn’t exactly cheap to stay there for a week, but it was substantially less than any decent hotel that we looked at.
I stay at the same one each time I visit the nearby city in the Republic of Georgia. By the third visit I was part of the family and they invited me to dinner. After dinner the grandmother played piano and sang in the parlor while we had tea.