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Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb is definitely not the analogy of Uber. It's extremely expensive service - prices of dirty rooms with old furniture are higher than in 4-stars apart-hotels. In city I live (Saint Petersburg) price for room in Airbnb is 8-9 times higher than on local sites. And I tried to find room in Rome, Prague, Barcelona - every time Airbnb was more expensive than good hotels.

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That's not been my experience at all, and I've booked dozens of places through Airbnb over the years. Also, one big advantage for me as a vegetarian is that I can get a fully equipped kitchen, so instead of hunting for the one restaurant that has more than one salad to offer, I can shop in local markets and cook myself - I enjoy it and it saves me money too. Even good apartment hotels often just have two sad pans and three plates.

It's not good apart-hotels. In every apart hotel we tried, there was equipped kitchen and we often make food there. And we don't even need to be vegetarians to do it.

>... every time Airbnb was more expensive than good hotels.

Really? I thought the whole point of airbnb was to get accommodation for less.

I don't understand it either. But it is kinda true.

After trying to rent a room for my family from oversee and i got rejected every time. I found something like four times cheaper here.

And this was like an hour away from a big city where I looked...

I don't understand it either.

But maybe that's where we are heading everywhere.

Appeal only to the rich. One customer a month is better than four or five.

The whole point of AirBnB is to make more money for landlords and for AirBnB. The service has economic value in itself, so it's not a surprise prices are more likely to trend upwards than downwards, especially if there's high demand.

"We have too many tourists" should be a good place to be, not a bad one. Trying to stop the flood is less constructive than trying to work out positive ways to manage it.

Have you ever traveled to somewhere that is "really touristy". Patong beach in Thailand, Magaluf in Mallorca are two that come to mind (as I have ended up in both in the last year). I am sure they were far nicer places before the tourism.

Tourism brings in money so from an economic perspective its a no brainier, but there is more to quality of life than economics.

I hoped for same. Maybe it's because I'm not looking for hostel-like rooms, but in BCN I saw even room in the boat (Airbnb) for $900 per week. It's just one of examples.

This June our family (4 persons) spent 3 weeks in Barcelona apart-hotels (4 stars) with prices $1200-$1400 per week. It was less expensive than Airbnb.

I also vacationed in Barcelona this June and stayed in two different Airbnb rooms at $40 and $55 per night (including all fees). Both were private rooms, although bathroom was shared in both cases (I don't think I've been in an airbnb that had its own private bath). Granted, as a solo traveller I'm likely looking at different listings than you are, but the options on Airbnb were quite good, even during a major festival weekend (Primavera Sound).

1. Shared bath is absolutely unacceptable for family.

2. $55 * 4 * 7 = $1540 for week, with shared bath. We were in hotels with private baths (2 separate private bathrooms) for $1200.

Thank you for proving my point :)

As I said, if I were looking for an airbnb for a family, I would be looking at different listings, e.g. complete apartments, in which case you would have your own bathroom. I'd image the per-person prices to be better than for a solo traveller in this case as well, as has been my experience in other areas. Weekly rates on Airbnb tend to be better than nightly as well (I didn't stay long enough).

The point being, whether Airbnb in Barcelona is competitive with hotels depends on your needs, but at least in my case, it was, while providing better than hostel-like accommodations.

No, I doubt most people find this to be true. I generally find clean private apartments in good areas, cheaper than hotels, sometimes cheaper than hostels too. Used to be more availability of single rooms for even cheaper too. Seems like prices have gone up over the last couple of years, but certainly not a surfeit of low quality expensive places.

If you want to call me a liar, I can find apart-hotel in Barcelona for you (4 stars, good reviews on Booking), and comparable set of rooms on Airbnb. And after that you will bring apologizes. Deal?

Please don't escalate like this. People can (and do, and need to) disagree without calling each other a liar. One main purpose of discussion here is to share different experiences.

Answer "I disagree" is one thing, answer "you are wrong" - is fine also. Answer "it's not true" - is calling opponent a liar. It's offensive and I see nothing wrong in my try to defend myself.

Only thing I regret is typo in previous comment in this branch.

You appear to have missed the key word in what I posted, which is "escalate". For example:

> Answer "it's not true" - is calling opponent a liar.

That's literally what it's not doing. Equating these two things is escalating, i.e. substituting one utterance for a more provocative one and replying to that instead.

You may feel that the train of logic inevitably takes you there down a one-way deductive track. But there are many opportunities to get off that train, and good manners and civility demand that we do. If we don't, all disagreement ends in conflict, which is tedious (for everyone else) and destructive.

I wonder if there may be a crossed cultural channel here, because the gap between "you are wrong" and "it's not true" strikes me as tiny—not the chasm that you describe—and if anything, "you are wrong" sounds slightly less polite since it's more personal. This is the kind of thing that people with different cultural and language backgrounds routinely hear differently, and the presence of many different backgrounds on HN is one reason why we all need to be charitable in our interpretations.

p.s. I've fixed the typo for you.

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