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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

This is why I still largely prefer name brand hotels. Stuff can still go wrong but having a manager to speak to backed by the rep of a major brand that needs to protect its image helps. Airbnb you’d think would be the same but there have been countless of articles like this and all seems well in their rep land anyway

And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway. Airbnb and name brand hotel often isn’t that far apart

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>>And bizarrely pricing has largely converged anyway.

If you are single with no kids and usually eat out, then yes. But is this still true if you are traveling with your family ? Just the ability to cook breakfast in an AirBnB seems like a huge money saver. It's likely why some AirBnB hosts claim that properties with more bedrooms have a much lower vacancy rate than smaller properties.

Good point. It does scale differently I suppose

You don't get space in a hotel unless you're a zillionaire. An AirBNB apartment offers a kitchen with a fridge and stove and a separate bedroom and living room area. A hotel offers a small fridge filled with the hotel's overpriced items and no room for ours on purpose, no stove, and a generic little desk with laminated cards on it and mirrors in front as the table-for-it-all.

Screw hotels unless the company pays (if it ever does). That's the appeal of AirBNB - unfortunately. They've offloaded customer service but they have the upper hand due to the superior real estate over the hotels with their tiny rooms - did I mention the lack of soundproofing between rooms.

Rapes, robberies, burglaries and lots of other bad things happen at Hotel chains too. They just have a structured management and PR department to do a better job of keeping it under wraps.

It's a matter of frequency, opportunity, and deterrence. Do you have statistics to compare, or are you just making conjecture?

It's fairly straightforward to go after Airbnb: put some teeth behind the regulations with respect to enforcement and impose really painful financial penalties. Also criminal ones: it's pretty clear that the executives and senior management are flouting the laws and regulations--punish them for it.

The problem is that there are no statistics whatsoever in this thread.

In my experience, boutique hotel chains are much more likely to overcharge you. With AirBnB, you pay ahead of time and the host does not have access to your financial info. Totally different situation with a hotel, where I've had to resort to legal threats to get deposits returned after waiting over a year. AirBnB has downsides on some risk in having the unit not be as described, but it is much safer than hotels when it comes to payment, overcharges, undocumented charges, refunds, etc.

I like hotel chains as well,’but beware that they may not be as clean as we’d like to believe: nypost.com/2020/06/29/high-end-nyc-hotels-not-sanitizing-rooms-changing-sheets

i would tend to agree, but depends on scale. It's often easier and cheaper to house 10-15 people at an Airbnb than it is at a brand-name hotel.

Also airbnb usually includes a kitchen. Eating out everynight gets both old and expensive.

>that needs to protect its image helps.

You mean they spend millions of dollars to make nightmare PR go away?

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