It’s really a nice option when traveling with a large family. If you’re spread across four or five hotel rooms, you really spend much less time together than in a large house with a big common space.

Plus most AirBnBs are just dedicated rental properties. It’s pretty rare that you’re actually in anyone’s house anymore.

I was always skeptical but once I started travelling with kids it became clear to me the giant holes in the hotel business model that AirBnB has disrupted.

Want to find a place with a separate room / bed for your teenage daughter? A hotel's answer is to book a second hotel room, or you might luck out with multiroom hotels but good luck even searching for them. AirBnB makes it easy to search their inventory for that. Want a kitchen? Always a fun time searching hotel inventory for that. Oh, and about that teenage daughter many hotels consider anybody over the age of 12 an adult, so now you are required put in "3 adults" into your search and their search system returns 0 results. Etc.

Many hotels, to me, resemble offices (in the UK cities at least). They're in buildings with glass fronts, no opening windows, because they want to offer A/C but want to save money^H^H^H^H^H^H^ "the planet". With A/C I get a sore throat, with it off, I suffocate.

In my searches I reckon 95% of hotels don't have windows that open. I maintain a list of small hotels in cities that do have windows that open.

I also reckon post-COVID they will continue with reduced housekeeping (on-demand/ever few day). So you also have to tidy up after yourself.

And I've found hotels tend to have skeleton staff (pre COVID). Often nobody at the bar, nobody at the front desk, all the staff doing multiple jobs. They're stingy with toiletries, towels, pillows ("oh you can ask at the desk").

So if there are few staff, I clean up after myself, I can't breathe, ... I'd rather stay in an actual house designed for human habitation.

I prefer Airbnbs over hotels because it's more fun, and it's nice to have all the amenities in a home. Proper kitchens with pantries, washing machines, backyards or balconies, etc.

Even if you're a team traveling to a conference or convention, grabbing a whole house is a great way to have a social 'home away from home'.

Have you tried it? Prices have shot up, but back in the day, you could get a whole small house with a kitchen, laundry room, and multiple bedrooms, nicely appointed and clean for less than a three or four star hotel room.

It was a pretty great value proposition. Still some bargains to be had, but much less so now.

So you would never stay in a beach house, lake house, or mountain lodge? Also in urban environments, the locations of private houses are sometimes much better: near parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, etc.

Theres a bunch of reasons. If you have a group of people or a family the experience of having a place of your own in a real neighborhood is way better than being in a vanilla hotel.

Very often is not someone's house but a property that has been bought, renovated and furnished specifically to be rented on Airbnb.

After doing airbnbs I since have usually decided to stay in hotels when I travel because I just like the reliability in having things provided as well as other things like location, services, etc. Airbnb is always a hit or miss honestly, despite the cheaper price.

It's less true now than it was a few years ago, but it's often a cheaper option.

Hotels are the sanitized way to visit a place, which is fine for a lot of folks.

But when I visit a new city, I want to live as the locals, which means not in the tourist district, and not with fresh towels every afternoon and a dip in the hotel pool.

There’s really no other way to get an experience like a private pool away from home, for example. The surroundings can often be much more peaceful too, e.g. a house may be in a quiet street and not in the middle of downtown.

I enjoy it when traveling alone, I usually look for hosts that are more open to interacting with their guests. Have met loads of interesting people through the app, some I still talk to occasionally.

Me and my family have used Airbnb a bunch of times in various countries, and every time has been a great experience. Biggest issues with hotels are lack of space, privacy and noise.

I should note that we've never rented just a room from Airbnb, but the whole apartment/house/villa, and the ones we have rented are actual rental properties, e.g. the owners rent them out during a whole holiday season.

One of the big bonuses of Airbnb is market segmentation - those same houses, apartments or villas on Airbnb are very often advertised with higher rates elsewhere!

There are some extremely nice places available on AirBnb, far nicer than most hotels I've been to.