I used to love Airbnb. It was relatively cheap, and I could choose from an extensive list of locations. Staying in one meant I had the flexibility to cook if I wanted to, and having access to a full apartment made me feel more at home than a hotel.
For years, I never even considered the alternative – but a combination of rising prices, arbitrary fees, stringent rules and poor experiences means I now hardly use the website at all.
One advantage that Airbnb once enjoyed over the competition was price, but this has vanished. Research published last year by consumer website Which? compared the prices of hotel rooms and one-bedroom Airbnb stays in 50 popular holiday destinations – the hotel was the cheaper option in 38 of them. In the 30 cities it looked at, the average price of a night’s stay in a one-bedroom Airbnb was £67 more expensive than a hotel. That didn’t even include the website’s absurd service fees – for a week-long Airbnb stay I found in Seville in October, of a total cost of £409, service and cleaning fees comprised £63 and £13 respectively.
In any hotel worth its salt, the customer is always right but in my experience with Airbnb in recent years, the opposite has felt true.
Hotel guests are often invited to provide a list of requests ahead of their stay:with Airbnb, it’s not uncommon for hosts to give the orders. Customers are often told they can’t bring additional guests into the property, or that they can’t make noise after a certain time. From my experience, the closest a hotel comes to giving its guests instructions is neatly placing a Bible in a drawer.
Some hosts have been reported by guests for using hidden cameras to enforce rules;a friend of mine staying in an Airbnb in Hamburg had a decibel counter mounted to the wall to keep volume in check. If it ticked above a certain threshold, noise alarms would go off in every room of the apartment.
After this happened a second time, he received a furious message from the landlord. These measures hardly tell guests to make themselves at home. I understand the need to be considerate of neighbours, but this is not something I’ve ever had to think about in a hotel.
Airbnb guests are often expected to leave their accommodation spotless after they leave, which is especially galling given that cleaning fees are par for the course on the site –I don’t recall ever being charged such a fee by a hotel.
Airbnb tells its hosts that “the cleaning fee typically pays for the housekeeping you expect to do after hosting guests”, but surely this ought to be included in the price, as is the norm with hotels. At the very least, guests paying a cleaning fee should not be expected to do their own.
One of the last times I used Airbnb was on a trip to Berlin with some friends in 2022. For our group of five, a hotel room would likely have been too small or expensive, and a lack of kitchen would have forced us to splash out at restaurants every evening. We ended up booking a reasonably affordable if slightly pokey flat a 10-minute walk from Kreuzberg, the city’s trendiest neighbourhood.
Our Airbnb host told us we couldn’t make any noise in the flat after 10pm during our stay, and upon checking out, we were given a list of instructions – wipe down all the surfaces, take the bins out, leave the key in a deposit box a five-minute walk from the property. Any hotel issuing such demands would be out of business within weeks.
Our host gave us just one key to share between the five of us, which we proceeded to swiftly lose during the early hours of the morning on a night out at one of the city’s many clubs. Unable to reach the host either on his phone or Airbnb’s online messaging service, we were forced to pay for an emergency stay at a hostel on the other side of the city.
This would never have happened if we’d stayed at a hotel. Each of us would have been given our own keycard. And even if we’d lost them all, somebody would have been working at reception – or at the very least, on call – to let us in and ensure we weren’t forced to find alternative lodgings.
‘It’s hard to see the upside’
When it launched in 2007, Airbnb’s pitch was a cheap night’s stay in a real home in exchange for sacrificing a bit of convenience, with no staff to cater to you. Now that prices have caught up with, and even overtaken those charged by hotels, and I’m faced with the prospect of sticking to a rulebook while I’m on holiday, it’s hard to see the upside.
During a three-month trip around Central America with my partner earlier this year, I didn’t stay in a single Airbnb. Instead, we opted for a mix of hotels and private rooms in hostels, both of which were generally far more cost-effective, and not a single one of them charged us a cleaning fee. Most of them also included a free or cheap cooked breakfast, something most Airbnb guests can only dream of.
When I book a stay at a hotel, or even a hostel,I know I’ll be well looked after. My room will be cleaned, my sheets and towels will be washed and replaced, and I can rest assured that if something goes wrong it will either be fixed or I’ll be given a new room.
I don’t have to stress about arriving during a specific time window to collect keys, and I’ll likely have easy access to a bar and catering during most of my waking hours. Most of all, I can usually find a hotel that strikes the balance between comfort and affordability. None of this can consistently be said for Airbnb.
My gripes aren’t enough to push me to boycott the site entirely; in some instances, the downsides are worth dealing with. If you’re travelling in a large group, it can be more convenient to stay in one place rather than in separate hotel rooms. If you want to stay in a particular area within a city that lacks decent hotels, you’ll usually be able to find an Airbnb there. If you need access to a proper kitchen – for instance if you’re travelling with a family, and don’t want to shell out for restaurants every night – an Airbnb stay is likely to suit you better.
But as long as I’m travelling in a pair or a small group, I think I’ll stick to the well-established hotel industry – it’s had centuries to iron out its shortcomings.
