Archive link:
https://archive.ph/LSYjQ

Something feels a bit off with Airbnb these days. Those searching for a quaint and homey place to stay now often have to brave high prices, inconsistent fees, laborious checkout demands, and untrustworthy photos and descriptions. You risk ending up, like I did in Vermont, in one of multiple cookie-cutter units listed by the same host, units that lean less “cozy ski lodge” and more “IKEA display room that has never known human touch.” Not only are customers mad, expressing their outrage across social media, but cities have also been cracking down. Earlier this month, New York City instituted a drastic new law that effectively bans most short-term rentals, resulting in the disappearance of 15,000 Airbnb listings. The company’s woes are tied to just how big it has become. Airbnb was launched in 2008, a year after beginning as three air mattresses on the floor of its founders’ living room, but it is no longer a scrappy, community-minded platform powered by the gig economy. It’s an industry in itself, full of endless hosts and large property companies that manage dozens or hundreds of listings at a time. The relentless increase in quantity has stretched the quality thin. Like any tech company, Airbnb has pursued growth. Along the way, it may have gotten more than it bargained for. The promise of Airbnb seems so simple and obvious now, but it was at first a revelation: What if you could make money off that guest room no one uses, or the empty apartment sitting over your garage? In turn, travelers could get a cheap stay with an on-call host who could provide a uniquely personalized travel experience. That’s not to say a one-night stay on a stranger’s couch was ever what dominated Airbnb; entire homes instead of shared units have made up the majority of listings since the year it was founded, an Airbnb spokesperson told me. But that Airbnb felt more casual than a hotel was always part of the draw. By 2011, an app first headquartered in the founders’ apartment had reached 1 million nights booked.

Soon, Airbnb got so big that everyone wanted in. At first, people with vacation homes in coveted areas such as Lake Tahoe and the Hudson Valley noticed Airbnb’s success and saw an opening, says Jamie Lane, a senior economist at AirDNA, a data-analytics firm that specializes in Airbnb and other short-term-rental platforms. Hosts renting out vacation homes or properties they don’t themselves inhabit means, however, that unlike in Airbnb’s original concept, the hosts aren’t one room away to give recommendations, or just around the corner if something goes wrong with check-in. Instead, the keys go in a lockbox, and the recommendations are typed up and put in a binder that sits on a kitchen table. It’s now very common for Airbnb hosts to never see or interact with their guests at all. The moment people began buying new properties for the express purpose of turning them into Airbnbs, it was clear: Airbnb had turned corporate. Since 2015, the number of Airbnb listings in the United States has jumped from roughly 150,000 to almost 1.5 million, Lane told me. There are now Airbnbs that have been precisely engineered for specific kinds of travelers. “You have properties that are fully dedicated to bachelorette parties,” says Neal Carpenter, who runs a Nashville-based rental-property-management and consulting service called The Air Butler. “It’s like, ‘Here’s the 12 chairs and the full-length mirror where all your friends can get ready together. Here’s the neon cowboy hat and the greenery wall in the living room for your Instagram posts.’” There are multiple Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, a spaceship Airbnb, and an Airbnb located inside a freestanding harbor crane.

In other words, the difference between Airbnb and hotels has become smaller and smaller. The standard Airbnb host still has an average of just 1.5 listings, Lane said, but “mega-hosts”—larger companies or wealthy individuals with 21 or more properties that throw their significantly more substantial resources behind them—now make up 30 percent of active listings. Some hotels even took a if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude in 2018, when Airbnb began allowing boutique hotels and B&Bs to list their rooms on the platform. The mere existence of a company like AirDNA is another indicator of Airbnb’s dominance—as are the Airbnb consultants who make a living helping hosts maintain their properties, and the number of online ads from these consultants about how to earn my first $100,000 on Airbnb that have followed me since I first started reporting this article.