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In most places, AirBnB is way better than hotels now if you're staying somewhere > 3 days, and for > 7 days I wouldn't even consider looking at a hotel. There is some personal preference here, e.g. I actually like cooking, so staying in hotels for extended periods is a bummer for me even if they're nice hotels. AirBnBs also tend to be cheaper than hotels unless you're really scraping bottom of the barrel hotels, e.g. I can almost always get a pretty nice AirBnB for the same price that I would spend at a Hilton, and it ends up being cheaper since I can cook some dinners at home for the price of groceries instead of spending money dining out. I don't really use AirBnB because it's usually cheaper than hotels for similar comfort for what I consider comfortable, it's just a side bonus I noticed. I've stayed in about 100 AirBnBs across the world and have never even a single time had a bad experience, but I do a fair amount of vetting and it takes probably 10x longer research time to book an AirBnB than it does to book a hotel or hostel. AirBnB doesn't work so well in rural areas and small towns in developing countries, and the good ones can book out really far in advance, especially in high season travels, and the other downside is there is a lot more variability, e.g. if the owner is checking you in, then that check-in time window is more important than for a hotel. Alternatively if it's a keybox checkin, it's easier than most hotels. Most AirBnBs are also now "instant book", there's rarely vetting done by the owner anymore, at least for "book entire home/apartment" bookings. For booking shard flats then they're usually vetting people, as you might imagine. This changed a few years ago after that issue blew up about people with black people in their profile picture getting rejected at like three times the rate of non-black people or whatever, and AirBnB started pushing much more for instant book confirmation. I had one place reject me after confirmation, a couple days before I was supposed to go there, which was super annoying but apparently a water pipe had broken and flooded the apartment, so I guess that could have happened to a small hotel or whatever too. AirBnB also solves your laundry problem, since they very frequently have washer/dryers since they need to clean the sheets and towels there for the next guest. This is especially true if you book "private" AirBnBs (rather than large company-managed ones). IME the vast majority of AirBnBs in Europe have been private AirBnBs, even though I almost exclusively book "whole home/apartment" rather than shared flat. E: There are other similar websites besides AirBnB, e.g. vrbo.com seems to work better in some places in France, but usually vrbo listings are older and managed by less up-to-date people. VRBO was cool in like 2010 but it's been largely supplanted by AirBnB. VRBO is kind of like if you go to a restaurant that advertises its MySpace page. They probably still exist but it's dated. There's also some super upscale equivalent of AirBnB (by a different company) that I can't recall the name of offhand, but if you want super sick places for like $1000/night then there's an option for that too which is outside of AirBnB's general target which is mid-range, although AirBnB does have some ultra swanky places on it too. Saladman fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 08:11
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Shibawanko posted:related: i don't get bed and breakfasts. old people seem to love going to someone else's house and getting served breakfast at some set time by a stranger, talking to them etc. why the hell would you want that instead of just a hotel? maybe it's because old people tend to be lonely or something and want the interaction I think it depends on whether you're looking for in vacations. If you're going for R&R, if you're going for specific museums and sites, or if you're going to just generally check out the atmosphere of somewhere. If I go somewhere purely for R&R, then a 5* resort hotel can be super nice if I plan on spending the whole day at the hotel beach or whatever. Doubly true in places where a hotel beach is private and a public beach is full of people who go by constantly trying to sell you stuff. If I'm going to some rural countryside place in the middle of nowhere or to a poorer country (like GDP per capita < $5000/yr), then I like B&Bs because then you can have breakfast with a stranger from the area who likely speaks English pretty well. I say especially in poorer countries since there ~98% of strangers who talk to you unprompted are scammers, and anyone you meet otherwise is typically pre-arranged for a specific reason and will tend to follow a specific line of conversation (e.g. to show you around ruins or whatever), and in a hostel you'll only meet other people on vacation. Small B&Bs also give you a good real impression of what the local middle/upper-middle-class actually lives like in what is generally a fairly authentic situation. Some of my best interactions with people with travelling have been B&B and AirBnB hosts, including a handful of people I kept in contact with and even a couple I have met since elsewhere. Personally I don't stay in an Ibis or Mercure or whatever unless it is for business travel (if you can remember when that existed), or if I was doing a roadtrip and just stopping for one night on the way out.
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Aug 13, 2021 11:26
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mobby_6kl posted:Most hosts will speak English, certainly in Iceland and Prague, so I wouldn't worry about that. Not a big fan of AirBnB in general though because it feels like you're sleeping in some stranger's home, which you often are, but YMMV. Once guy complained I didn't water his plants properly and in another place I ended up scrubbing the whole kitchen Have you used much AirBnB recently? Your issues with it sound like what was common back in like 2012 when it came out, but I encounter never anymore, and when I look for AirBnBs I very strongly look for houses that are actually lived in by someone (e.g. as a holiday home they only use part of the year), as these tend to have things like full spices in the kitchen, wash powder, better appliances and cookware, more attention to detail, and as a bonus they're not contributing to any local issues that might be caused by housing speculators buying properties to rent out on AirBnB since they're generally someone's holiday homes that would otherwise sit empty if AirBnB didn't exist. Some of the best and most memorable places I've stayed ever have been such place -- I've been to some pretty incredible AirBnBs that way outrival any 5* hotel in terms of memories generated. Thanatosian posted:So, how do you find a good AirBnB in a country where you don't speak the language? This won't be a concern for me in Japan (I've got a friend along who does), but I'm looking at going to probably Prague in 2023 (definitely Reykjavik + somewhere else in Europe, probably somewhere where I don't speak the language). I'd feel really nervous about getting hosed over if there's something wrong; it'd be hard to book a new place to stay. You have to plan way longer in advance to get a good AirBnB. You can search for things like "Rare Gem" (or "Rare Find" or whatever; I forget, it's a symbol of a diamond), search for "Superhosts" and etc. There's rating inflation as with anywhere else -- a 4.95 place is going to be amazing, a 4.6 place OK, and a 3.5 place catastrophically bad, out of a rating of 1-5. AirBnB definitely isn't for everyone's travel preferences though. It requires a lot more planning, you can't really do short stays (many places have 3 day minimums, sometimes 7 day in high season, and even if they don't, the service fee and cleaning fee make a 1 or 2 day stay usually economically nonsensical), you sometimes have to adhere to a schedule to pick up the keys (although "pick up a key from a lockbox whenever" has become wayyy more common post-COVID), if you don't like cooking that makes it a lot less appealing price-wise, and if you don't like staying in strangers homes then you'll generally just book the generic "a business purchased this property to rent out" type place.
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Aug 14, 2021 21:36
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