Some hosts are threatening to strike, while others are plotting ways around Airbnb’s new restrictions. Guests, meanwhile, are celebrating.
AIRBNB HOSTS ARE melting down over a new policy banning them from making guests complete tasks that “would typically be performed by a cleaner,” like “stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, or washing and putting away dishes.”
The change, which applies to all bookings made on or after November 20, quickly sparked outrage after it was announced in an email to Airbnb hosts on Wednesday. Many began fuming online about losing the right to make their guests clean up after themselves.
“As hosts, we have a responsibility to protect our investments, our homes, and, in many cases, our personal living spaces,” one person wrote in Airbnb’s official forum for hosts. “The problem is that Airbnb increasingly expects hosts to accept the risks while limiting our ability to protect ourselves.”
Strike? Against whom, yourself? You’re the boss.
This must be murica, hereabouts no guest will do any cleaning.They’re technically independent contractors with some of their own capital. What makes them different than an Uber driver or a truck owner-operator is the amount of capital required to do their job is a lot higher and they generally don’t need to do as much labor.
As hosts, we have a responsibility to protect our investments
Yes, you get it! It’s not my job to take care of your house dumbasses!!
They tried to run hotels without running hotels and are surprised maintenance and cleanup is on them, not guests? Wow, I am shocked
Exactly. Finally some sane choices by Airbnb.
But I wonder what’s the real reason, because no company is so nice towards final customers. Maybe Airbnb saw a decrease on booking on their platform because people are rightly fed up with that bullshit and they just prefer hotels.
It’s because bookings are down. Even Marriott offers full house rentals, that operate the exact same as their hotels, minus the free breakfast (And sometimes light dinner that some hotels offer).
I wish to hope for that, but my mind says there must be some shit they are trying to cover up
What the fuck do hotels do?!?! Fuck landlords of all types. Entitled twats. Fuck right off. Glad I never use these. Just do a fucking hotel. An actual business. Not these craigslist-ass half-assed supplementing someone else’s overpriced mortgage and bad financial decisions.
Hotels, motels, boarding houses, albergues, inns, resorts, serviced apartments, and actual freaking B&B…
All of those are good for the economy to varying degrees; the smaller the business and the less corporate they are. Airbnb is just corporate leeching without any benefits.
Exactly. If you’re going to pretend to be a hotel, then you have to act like a hotel.
in many cases, our personal living spaces,
Maybe don’t let strangers stay in your home then? That’s what hotels are for dummy.
Wasn’t it supposed to be that way at first? Renting an extra room in your house
Yes, in the same way that Uber pretended that their service was a way to find people to carpool with and not a taxi service
I remember lyft being branded as that more than uber
yeah, i think you’re correct
Originally it was just for people visiting conventions to have a place to put their air mattress, which is where the Air in Airbnb comes from.
so initially it was just couchsurfing/hospitality but worse (no culture sharing aspect + it costs money)?
Damn, after reading your comment I thought airBnB came after the enshittification of couch surfing but no, they co-existed and society chose the one with money instead of culture sharing + local volunteer vetting + free accomodation.
We suck :p
so initially it was just couchsurfing/hospitality but worse (no culture sharing aspect + it costs money)?
Founders went to a tech convention and didn’t feel like paying full price for a hotel if all they were gonna do was sleep there and spend the whole day at the con so they made a platform where people looking for exactly that could find places to literally put their air mattress (you had to supply your own mattress) during conventions and it kinda snowballed from there into “oh shit we can make money off this”.
As hosts, we have a responsibility to protect our investments
That’s not at all what the word “host” means.
It sounds more like “landlord”.
Naw more like “parasite”
You two just said the same thing.
Yeah, thats what they said.
It’s like landlord small man complex.
Landlords are far more productive and beneficial pieces of complete trash than the utter parasites that are AirBNB hosts could ever wish to achieve.
There’s plenty of value in the base idea, I think. People deserve real vacations and there’s no reason hotel chains and cabin rental agencies should be the only games in town.
The problem starts when you start running your cabin rental agency through AirBnB and pretending guests should pay the same rates while doing all the housekeeping.
I definitely don’t agree that an entitled luxury service seller can be as bad as someone driving up the cost of necessities while providing nothing at all
Yeah, the premise is solid in principle, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for how quickly or thoroughly people would go all in.
Ultimately, all rentals charge far in excess of the mortgage or base rate for the space just at cost. Which is fine. But then it became almost trivially easy to rent substandard spaces for more than they were worth, which didn’t solve any problems, but rather inflated the cost of housing since rates might be so high, a space can sit empty 40% of the time.
Housing isn’t as flexible a good as ubers and drivers.
Well, yeah, if the systems and incentives for the owner class weren’t absolute shit and literally the only considerations economically and socially that anyone gave a fuck about then things could operate without being the absolute worst version of what they are for every part of life as a whole.
That’s not what happened, though.
You’re right, there should be some kind of service for people to rent out unused rooms in their house for people to use short-term. Something that shuts out people who buy a whole ass house or groups of houses.
They are called “Bed and Breakfasts” or “Boarding houses”.
I’m not trying to be shitty here. Bed and Breakfasts existed alongside boarding houses for a good long time before AirBnB.
The problem is AirBnB generally doesn’t have these listings anymore. The incentives made it into a “Buy a home cheap, rent on AirBnB for exorbitant prices”.
Maybe in the sense of parasitology?
“striking” would imply they were performing any work in the first place lmao
What’s the problem? Hosts can still charge cleaning fees but they can’t force guests to do chores.
Yeah, but they were doing both.
Now they can’t have a cake and eat it too.
Exactly. If the hosts were able to both make guests clean up after themselves and charge a cleaning fee then the cleaning fee was just a money grab.
I rented an airbnb, my one and only time, where the host had an insane list of chores. For context: This was during the pandemic and it was me and my two best friends who just wanted to get out of NYC for the night to get some fresh air. I cooked at home and packed dinner, so we didn’t use the kitchen. We didn’t drink. We had a quiet movie night, enjoyed the trees and each others company and then went to sleep.
The next morning, I personally wiped the counters, wiped the fridge, took out the trash, stripped the beds, refluffed the couch, swept the fireplace… the works. I literally woke up 2 hours early to get all this cleaning done. They had a cleaning fee on top of all these chores, which I felt was odd, but it was a new experience for me so I went with it. I am big on rules and respect so i sincerely cleaned to the best of my ability.
After I posted a positive review of their home, they put up a review of me within seconds claiming I trashed the place. They were vying for an additional charge for me leaving the place messy. They said their cleaning lady called to complain about how I trashed the house. I messaged asking what they were talking about, absolutely confused, and they gave me a list of how I trashed their house.
- There were crumbs on the counter. I know I wiped it, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe i missed something.
- They said one of the blankets was a little damp. After asking the other girls, I think my friend briefly sat on the bed after she took a shower. I had stripped the bed so this was a blanket in the hamper they were complaining about that should have been going to be washed. I didn’t notice anything damp when I stripped her bed, but we were trying to rationalize the complaint while we were all talking about it after.
- The back of one of the couches had a smudge on it. It was allegedly charcoal from the fireplace. I didn’t see a smudge, it was just me and two girls and none of us touched the back of the couch. I don’t know where this came from. You can’t see the back of the couch in any of the photos I took, and I can’t 100% guarantee nothing happened but none of us had any reason to touch the back of the couch and I was the only one to sweep the fireplace (which was full of ash from the previous people but it was on their ‘house rules’ to leave it clean and I was worried we’d be charged so I swept it)
They hosts wanted to charge me a $500 additional cleaning fee for the “trashed” house. I had after pictures of the condition i left it in and nothing came of it, so I think Airbnb said they didn’t have a case, but I never used airbnb again.
It cost more than a hotel would have in the area. Such a scam.
Yeah, shitty people are going to be shitty. I’ve had good experiences, but have only booked weird quirky airbnbs. Unless you have a reason to need an Airbnb, like wanting a kitchen or special experience or something, you should definitely get a hotel.
That’s a terrible experience. I’ve never stayed at one and never had a desire though I can see the appeal for some. When I travel I want to be taken care of. Not go through this.
All AirBnBs do is buy up affordable housing and convert it into passive income. It’s one of the main reasons we have this major housing crisis today
Just chech your city. Even if the data is inflated it is still shocking.
Unfortunately my city, along with the major city I live near, are not options available on that site. :(
isnt that the coporate landlords/rich landlords doing that, they are the problem. a nearby house airbnbs, but i dont know if they still do it, but the occupants own(the son has a fancy car gifted to him by the dad) asthon martin sports car.
It’s both. Airbnb have ruined the core of major tourist towns due to everything being a short term rental. Locals and workers get pushed out. It’s a big problem in places like Venice, veil, lake Tahoe, etc…
“disruption” really is a synonym for damaging the industries.
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A different self-described host declared that going forward, the kitchens in their rentals will be “stripped down to only bare essentials.”
You think your Airbnb kitchen is currently well equipped?! 😂
I actually travel with a mini sharpener to make Airbnb knives usable.
I’m not going to do anything at an Airbnb that I wouldn’t do at an actual bend and breakfast or normal hotel room.
These owners are making money off of me. I’m not doing their damn chores for them. “Protecting your investments“ does not include taking out the fucking trash and stripping the bed.
Bend and breakfast? With blackjack and hookers? Take my money!
oops…. 😅
Fuck these parasites, I’ll continue to not use Airbnb.
They won’t strike. $10,000 says they don’t strike.
They need airbnb to pay for their overpriced mortgages, so a strike means selling off their assets.
so a strike means selling off their assets.
thousands of new houses hitting the market at once, driving down prices for people who are desperate to own a home for themselves?
oh dear, the horror. Please don’t let that happen /s
Oh don’t you worry, billionaire hedge funds will snap those up first for rentals
Theyre actually also relatively (by their own standards) strapped for cash these days.
Yeah, this will happen, but the smarter ones will wait it out another year or two ish, for prices to crash further, before they switch from ‘survive downturn’ to ‘exploit market bottom’.
Hrm. Either that or negotiate private sales at something like a 30% to 50% lower price, but for cash, and also in a way that somehow doesn’t get publically recorded… some kind of shell company / legal fiction shenanigans.
They’ll want to be confident in future property tax hike and climate disaster / insurance rate hike projections before they do that though, and that just will take some time.
Totally agree. This is like the people who threatened to leave New York if they changed the property tax on second homes. It’s a bluff.
I mean, I suppose they could create their own website, with black jack and dish washing fees.
But good luck convincing users to go to the actively user hostile (even more hostile) version of Airbnb.
Independent contractors threatening to strike will never not be extremely, raucously hilarious.
If you know such an idiot, please laugh as hard as you can, right in their face.
EDIT:
Enjoy being foreclosed on, you collosally arrogant, absolute wastes of human life. Your pain is the rest of society healing, and you deserve all of it.
Woof lol, just layers deeper than mere “independent contractors”, too, the strike threat is unbelievably funny.
These are people who are years downstream of even other downstream folks (the plastic-facade YouTuber hustlesphere influencer types who eventually
<???>enough popularity to move these folks into actionable FOMO lol).A “strike” 🤡
Them saying “I was squandering my inheritance, but then I wasn’t and it was so easy, I was so smart!, and now they made it harder, so I’ll have to suffer through just squandering it again and I’m mad that they did this to me!”
I had considered more fully explaining the entire onion of irony of this being a massive self report on the many ways in which these people are contemptible evil failures, but I settled on just directly insulting them.
But yes, yeah, what you say is true. The levels of delusional self caused shittiness, the different ways that … threatening a ‘strike’, in this situation, reveals both how stupid and how evil one is…
Its comical. Like, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ levels of irony.
“Landlord strikes” lol Never will be UN-hilarious.
cry baby cry
