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As a relatively early adopter of Airbnb, in 2012, I feel exactly the same way. Before my wife and I had kids, we'd rent a room in a host-occupied house, actually having breakfast and conversation with the host, and it was incredibly charming for a fraction of the price of a real B&B or hotel room. After having kids, about 2015, we started using the option to rent a whole house or apartment because it gave us more space than a hotel room (the key being a separate room for our kids to nap or go to bed before us) for maybe the same price. Then in the summer of 2019 we planned a cross-country road trip with a bunch of Airbnb reservations along the way, and it was a nightmare. About 2/3 of the way through the trip, after three or four bad (and very impersonal) experiences in a row (misleading descriptions, dirty but with lots of cleaning instructions, unable to gain access upon arrival, etc.), I contacted Airbnb and told them I was a loyal customer who just needed a break. After some argument, they gave me a credit that mostly refunded the cost of my two remaining reservations, but still we haven't used Airbnb since then. The idea of a whole-house rental for my family is still nice, but the costs have soared while quality has declined, so two-room or three-room suites at big chain hotels are looking pretty good again.

> "AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some guru's financial advice"

Pretty much this. Most Airbnbs nowadays feel like someone trying to operate a flophouse, but with 4-star hotel pricing. Value for money is just so incredibly poor, that plus the inconsistency and uncomfortably high probability of blowing up your hard-earned vacation time, it would take a lot for me to use it again.

I do like the format of renting whole houses, or at least places sized for families with space to hang out and gather. It's unfortunate that traditional hotels haven't generally stepped in to offer something like this.

I desperately want a "Vacation Homes by Hilton" offering, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least not broadly.

The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.

[edit] I have some pretty strong suspicions that this business model will be structurally limited to low-end lodging and extreme high-end lodging. Realistically the kind of service hotels provide (and that customers expect), at hotel prices, is only possible through economies of scale. Housekeeping is vastly cheaper because you have a single crew that services hundreds of rooms rather than commuting across the city to serve a smattering of far-flung properties. Likewise maintenance and customer service is vastly cheaper because the costs are spread across many rooms.

Without exploiting economies of scale AirBnbs simply won't be able to compete in this middle tier (which is where most hotel stays are at). It's only possible to make the math work for either very-low-rent flophouse-type places where services and maintenance is poor, or very high-end vacation properties where the lack of economies of scale is sustainable.

> I desperately want a "Vacation Homes by Hilton" offering, but it doesn't seem to exist, at least not broadly.

> The closest thing seems to be the rise of apartment-hotels, which I'm a huge fan of. Nice kitchens, big living room for people to gather, etc.

There's Hilton Grand Vacations properties, which are kind of like this. I really like staying in them when I'm in Las Vegas for business, because they don't contain casinos, aren't designed to encourage you to leave the room like casino hotels, and generally provide nice spaces to work and gather your team if you want to work together on a project. They're much more family-friendly in general than a typical business hotel as well. The only downside is that they have a separate status system from other Hilton properties, so your Hilton status doesn't incur any benefits and you don't get stay credits towards status.

> In recent years, the majority of AirBnBs I've stayed at feel like someone's side business that they started for "passive income" after reading some self-help books online.

Airbnb encourages this, as it increases inventory for them and lets property owners engage in a race to the bottom on prices. Which as it turns out, affects the quality of the service!

Honestly somehow prices have just gone to a race to the top versus the bottom. If every time you march prices up it takes a week longer relative to the rest of the market to book that room, and you and the rest of the airbnb property owners don't necessarily mind waiting an extra week if it means you just hiked up prices, then prices are just going to keep going up and up so long as people keep coming. And they will keep coming, because as you are losing out your middle class tourists, you are gaining wealthy tourists, who are funding more luxury development and snowballing the effect until they are priced out for even more wealthy people.

I once showed up at an AirBnB condo and it had NO curtains, even though another building looked right into the bedroom. That also meant no curtains on the shower. I called AirBnB to complain and was told, well, did you see the pictures? And sure enough, the pics didn't show evidence of curtains. So no refund.

I now avoid AirBnB as much as possible, and when it's the only choice the amount of research I have to do is rage inducing. This is why brands exist, so you trust that every Marriott you stay at will have towels and curtains and all those other things, even if you don't see them in the pics. Meanwhile, the AirBnB brand is looking more and more like a lemon market for short-term rentals.

I can also trust Marriott properties to be reasonably clean, have working door locks, no cameras in the room, and the ability to change your room if the one they offered was bad. They seem to dish out OK room upgrades for free when the hotel isn’t booked out too. I was just at a Marriott property and the room AC didn’t work. One call later and the AC worked when I got back to the room. Mind blowing things that Airbnb doesn’t offer.

This is very similar to the scaling problem with Etsy. What started out as a way for creative people to make money from their quirky local crafts is now a marketplace filled with duplicative factory-made junk you can often also find on eBay or Amazon.

Lately Airbnb has tried to combat this obvious degradation in quality by highlighting high-end stays at unique properties that can cost absurd amounts of money (screengrab: https://imgur.com/nDu8tpL), so it looks cool but they know actual demand is low.

Airbnb is suffering from a tragedy of the commons. The higher quality units are subsidizing the reputation of the lower quality units, since they are all bundled together on a single platform (Airbnb).

Hotel chains solve this problem by punishing individual hotels for customer complaints (via fines).

Pretty sure every service like this goes that route. I rent a car on Turo, mainly because I don't need but it's upside down for now. It seems like there's many who run it as a side business, with a fleet of cars. This month Turo actually started issuing guidance on punishments for those who receive parking complaints, having too many cars parked at one house.