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Comment by fourstar | Hacker News Reader

Hotels have always been superior.

Indeed. I tried to give airbnb a chance on multiple occasions, but it's always more expensive and worse than hotels. In airbnb you depend on someone to be a good person and to arrive on time, you need to arrange meeting them (which might not be easy in a foreign country), you never know how honest they are, etc. It's inter-personal communication when you don't want any, you just want to pay money and get a room. I literally see no upsides. In a hotel, you book it on any of the number of hotel websites, you walk up to the reception, you give them your ID and bank card, they give you your key and show you into your room. It's always a very predictable experience.

Airbnb's pricing structure is deceptive, too — you always see "per night" prices when searching, but when you open a page for any particular property, there's suddenly like 5 extra fees tucked on and it's sometimes double the price you expected.

Usually hotels have no kitchen you can cook something at, no desk I can work at, no sofa I can comfortably sit in, and often I can't even open the bloody window or control the temperature.

I think this is an important reason AirBnB took off: hotels are just horrible to stay at.

Almost every hotel I've ever stayed in has a desk, a sofa, and free reign over the thermostat. Are you in the US?

Granted, most don't have a kitchen outside of extended stays. But I'll take a bar, restaurant, freshening up, towels, bed changing, vacuuming, breakfast, restocking, etc all for free in exchange for losing the ability to cook, personally.

I've only stayed at an AirBnB once, staying with a friend. For the life of me, I couldn't and still can't understand why someone would prefer it over a similarly priced hotel.

Same. Been burned too many times by airbnb. Hawaii, DC, Philadelphia. People always say “that’s why you book with a superhost” or “if you don’t book in advance you pay for what you get”. I once stayed at a place in San Antonio, tx. Superhost but new property, and I literally couldn’t take a good breath in. I think it was some kind of mold, almost felt like I was in a cave. To their credit they only took one night. Next day at a motel was much better.

> most don't have a kitchen outside of extended stays

I just take out the $200 cleaning fee and 15% AirBnb fees to the local restraunts and grab a bite to eat.

Never even been to the US; just Europe.

Desks are typically very shallow in depth, not adjustable in height, and have a crappy chair. They're basically useless for getting any serious work done unless you're maybe 160cm; they mostly seem decoration rather than an actual desk. I have never seen a proper sofa in a hotel; only a (usually not very nice) single-seater fauteuil (or whatever you call that in English).

I really like the ability to provide for my own food if needed because it just gives you the freedom to eat and do whatever, no matter the time of day.

I've never been in a hotel that I liked throughout Europe; it's okay for a night, but for a week it just gets claustrophobic.

I've almost only traveled for leisure (or digital nomadism) and as such I like to sleep in, and hotel breakfasts end at like 9:30 AM, then they want to get into your room to do cleaning etc. I'd prefer to roll out of bed at 11 AM and just have some toast in my room in my pajamas.

Hotels are just too "uptight" for me.

Which hotels are you staying in that don't have desks and temperature control?

A lot of hotels only have extremely small desks - granted, the highest hotel level I ever had was four stars, but still, it's clear why: a desk and actually comfortable chair take up valuable space, meaning the hotel can't fit as many rooms as it could by providing only enough space to set down a phone charger on the desk.

In any case, most of the customers don't have the need for a desk to work on either. Business travelers work at the job site, tourists are out on the day and "digital nomads" work at the nearest Starbucks.

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