I think this is an interesting and unintended consequence of AirBnB not investing nearly on filtering their users.
AirBnB obviously was interested in getting their product used by as many people as people (growth at all costs) - but this had the effect of getting a lot of young, cost conscious people to take holidays in area that were traditionally residential. While most AirBnB renters are polite and respectful, enough of them were loud, disruptive and ignoring the local rules (for example, tourists in Venice who use AirBnB but ignore the very strict garbage disposal laws) that local residents started dreading having AirBnBs around.
AirBnB is already very strict with landlords: it needs to start being a lot stricter with its users too. They rapidly need to educate their users about how to be good citizens, and that the motto of 'the customer is always right' is completely the wrong way to think about a stay in a residential area in a foreign city. Users should think of themselves as a respectful guest, not an entitled customer.
"AirBnB is already very strict with landlords: it needs to start being a lot stricter with its users too." It's not as strict with landlords as it should be.
And while it is strict with users it actually favors landlords and by a landslide. Have you ever rented long term with AirBnB? Hosts can literally cancel the reservation for any reason( Airbnb says they punish for doing so but rarely if ever because the Host can provide any reason) If you happen to be in a city that doesn't have as many Airbnbs and you get a really good deal, you're screwed if the host decides to cancel.
Costs for Airbnb's have also gone up significantly that it's often not even worth it to rent one if you happen to be less than a group of 4 people.
The last few times I was tempted to use Airbnb for stays of around a week, I found the price to be comparable to hotels in the area. I ended up getting a hotel, because I wanted my stay to be managed by professionals.
I'm also doubtful about the management of hosts. Yesterday, an Airbnb Superhost cancelled my upcoming reservation without explanation. I booked with a hotel and saved about $25. Airbnb has been my first choice for awhile. I think it is going to be my back up choice for the near future.
Last weekend I attempted to use airbnb in Orlando. Originally the host said the door would be unlocked, but when we arrived it was locked. It was a keypad lock so we wrote the host and asked for the code. He wrote back and sent a code that didn't work. When we informed him the code didn't work his response was, really? We never heard from him again that night or since asking for a refund.
We stayed in a hotel nearby that cost about $30 more, but had free breakfast.
I will go for hotels first in the future. I never had any issues with airbnb in the past, but one night of waiting around to hear from the host (and never actually gaining entry) with a family of tired people is one too many.
I had the same issue. An Airbnb host cancelled our reservation the day before our booking was supposed to start and Airbnb didn't help us out at all. We ended up paying quite a bit more for a hotel, but after going through that I'm happy to pay more in the future for professionalism and a guaranteed bed.
Clearly not everyone wants the same thing out of AirBnb. I mostly prefer an AirBnb because it'll be a much nicer space, with a full kitchen, for a similar or lower price than a hotel.
I find the traditional double bed hotel rooms depressing now.
That is a joke because why I would use AirBnB, to have cheap accomodation with kitchen. If the price is around the same as hotel I could not care more. Hotels have to follow a lot of regulations and guest is always right in a hotel. Wi fi not working well, I got upgrade to better room, airbnb host cannot upgrade your room to one with view or else.
It’s hard to upgrade out of other guests near you slamming the door in the morning as they leave though. Or recycled air shared with a hundred other people that can make you sick.
> It’s hard to upgrade out of other guests near you slamming the door in the morning as they leave though
That's funny, that's exactly the issue I had with AirBnB "guests" in my building. Also, them bumping their wheely suitcases down the stairs at 5am for the cheap flight home.
Agree, specifically on the soundproofing aspect. Being an incredibly light sleeper, I've paid extra for luxury hotels hoping I wouldn't hear silly TVs in the rooms adjacent and slamming doors starting at 7 and repeating with housekeeping.
With Airbnb I get a separate bedroom and a fridge that isn't the size of a shoebox and strategically filled so I can't put my own store bought water into it. Just thinking about hotel culture makes me mad. And it seems global.
I found hotel pricing vs airbnb varies greatly depending on the season. In low-season often hotels are cheaper. Hotel's have large fixed expenses and are often happy just to fill rooms at any price.
Does AirBnB ensure that the landlord/owner is properly licensed to offer the property for a short term rental before listing it? Or do they just take the landlord's word for it?
"While most AirBnB renters are polite and respectful, enough of them were loud, disruptive and ignoring the local rules (for example, tourists in Venice who use AirBnB but ignore the very strict garbage disposal laws) that local residents started dreading having AirBnBs around."
A short term renter in an unlicensed business operating next door to you in your residential apartment building is necessarily going to be louder, less safe, and cause more issues than a long term neighbor. I rent a residential apartment in a residential building on a residential street. I did not rent a hotel room for a year next to other hotel rooms.
Pardon my ignorance. What is the benefit / purpose of the license besides added revenue for whatever municipality the rental is in? Is there some kind of inspection or background check process?
One obvious benefit is that the owner or lessor of the place being sublet on Airbnb is often a party to contracts with their community that forbid short-term rentals; for instance, the owners of condominiums have a responsibility shared with all the other owners of condominiums not to compromise everyone's quiet enjoyment expectations by turning their place into a hostel.
Is this a serious question? It allows an area to be in control of how many short term rentals are being made, and where they are, and how often they are available.
No, sorry. AirBnB is creating immense problems in tourist destinations, to the point where people in major cities in Greece (and other countries) are having trouble finding affordable permanent housing.
Barcelona and Rome are overrun with tourists, and it's killing the cities. AirBnB should just go away, the market worked very well before it, even if things were a bit more expensive.
I can't speak to this problem in tourist destinations or Europe generally as I don't have enough data to have an opinion, but I frequently see Airbnb blamed for high housing costs in some American cities and it strikes me as being a bunch of bullshit. Sure Airbnb doesn't help the rental problem and it is a contributor to rising rents, but the primary problem isn't Airbnb, it's lack of supply of high density apartment living options. Many US cities are composed primarily of 2-3 story houses which have been converted into dingy expensive apartments. This is utterly unacceptable from an efficiency standpoint. Many of these units need to be bulldozed and replaced with high rise apartments if cities are to become affordable again.
The situation in Greece is very different, as everything is a highrise (sadly, because we tore down a lot of beautiful centuries-old antique villas to do that). The situation used to be much better, but the start of the problem coincides suspiciously with the rise of AirBnB, and you'd expect housing prices to drop in a recession, not rise.
That's why I think it's fair to blame AirBnB for that. We'll see what happens in Tokyo, Madrid and other cities where they're severely restricting usage.
They all but banned it in Berlin (only allowed to rent guest rooms where the owner resides in the place) years ago and last time I was there (last week) it was still well awash with tourists like myself.
Yes, as well as rents. A 1BR apartment can be as low as 150€/mo or even a bit lower. It's only a few "hip" neighborhoods that are affected. Still, Athens is relatively compact and mass transit is excellent so you can easily find cheap places to live that are require less than 30 minutes of commute each way to work.
> it's lack of supply of high density apartment living options.
Devil's Advocate: I'd agree that AirBnB isn't entirely to blame, but a large company helping your town's citizen rezone their long-term residential units into short-term residential units and not telling the town isn't going to help the zoning board make correct decisions.
Japan has made a good decision to at least butt themselves into the process.
I totally agree, but it's not like this data is hidden. It would be relatively straight forward to monitor how many Airbnb units operate at any given time just by looking at the site repeatedly, and you could approximate how many rentals exist using tax data and corporate data.
Exactly. You could see how many air-bnb flats are in total in a given city on their website and a lot of citiies produce statistics on that.
For example in Vienna, the municipality claimed that 3000 air b'n'b bedrooms in a city with millions of bedrooms -roughly 1 ‰ had caused the rents to increase with tens of percent.
Sorry, but people who believe that 1 promile decrease in supply could cause tens of percent increase in prices are just dumb beyond salvation.
I can't wrap my mind around people that think that 'too many tourists' or 'too many jobs' are a problem. Those are 'problems' that most cities in the world would kill for: if we consider them problems it's because we are not nearly creative enough to take advantage of them.
As a simple example: if we have too many tourists, give a progressive daily tax that's charged to every visitor that automatically includes museum visits/etc. Use that revenue to build more housing for local residents (and if some dipshit points out that more housing ruins a neighboorhood's character, ask yourself if Paris or suburbia has more character) or to subsidize local transport infrastructure.
> I can't wrap my mind around people that think that 'too many tourists' or 'too many jobs' are a problem. Those are 'problems' that most cities in the world would kill for: if we consider them problems it's because we are not nearly creative enough to take advantage of them.
Different people want different things. Too much of a good thing isn't always still a good thing. It's not that hard to understand.
Even within the same city! 10% of the city might be tourist facing, 90% not-tourist-facing. So something that's great for that 10% and annoying for the 90% is naturally gonna get some resistance.
Not true. I've stayed in several places where an extra county-specific tax is imposed via AirBnB.
There may be some places which haven't yet arranged for AirBnB to pay the tax, but it isn't because AirBnB refuses. In fact, it may be because hotels in that area are still holding out for the possibility of banning AirBnB. When AirBnB starts paying hotel taxes, it becomes nearly impossible to remove.
In Reykjavik "too many tourists" is very much a problem. Or more specifically, the ratio of tourists to available housing.
Sure, there are solutions. There's a huge housing bubble right now (which will collapse whenever tourism dries up), for instance. Maybe if it keeps on this way some legislation will be passed to get it under control.
But both of those solutions are completely out of the hands of the people who actually can't afford to live in the city where they work.
It's a huge problem in Vancouver, as well. There's a huge housing crisis here, and there's a lot of factors involved, but real estate speculation and short-term rentals are substantial contributors.
There was a woman at a city council meeting a few years ago who lived in a building with around 10 units, and she said six of them were on AirBnB. When ever she checked, their (small) pool always had people in it she'd never seen before, and never would again. People buy places to live in and make a life in, and then half the building is party people.
For what it's worth, this has always made us extremely wary of AirBnB, and we do a lot of research for cities we visit before we rent an AirBnB somewhere. In Montreal they're regulated, so we had no problem there. In Reykjavik, we rented from a woman who was staying at her mother's place to take care of her pets while she (her mother) was out of the country, so our stay wasn't depriving anyone of housing.
Other places we go, where AirBnB isn't as well regulated, we're very particular and tend to go for hotels (e.g. Ottawa, Seattle) because we're very aware of how bad these kinds of systems can be for people.
> People buy places to live in and make a life in, and then half the building is party people
This has to be repeated. There's no point in living without some level of quality of life. Having everyone trying to raise their family, do their school work, study, or just try to sleep, in what are essentially all becoming hotels, is just not something we should strive for.
One could even argue you're going to end up in a world where success in life is tied to wealth, not because of all the reasons commonly associated with it, but just because one group can actually sleep at night and one can't.
Yep. There are solutions, but it's tough due to demand being so elastic in comparison to housing.
In cities such as Reykjavik and Vancouver, they could tax Airbnb and divert the funding to create more housing, but housing construction is a physical process that takes time. Meanwhile in the short term rents are spiking.
In Reykjavik they’ve imposed limits on how long you can let on AirBnB before you need to be licensed and for shared apartment complexes you need permission of your neighbors to run an AirBnB. The downside is that with high demand still from tourists and seemingly poor enforcement it’s still an issue. Anecdotally as a resident of downtown Reykjavik I know that a bunch of places around my house that did the AirBnB thing have stopped and returned to longer lets. Presumably because hotel capacity is reaching more of an equilibrium. Which could be a concern as there is a lot of development still not completed. On the positive side that could open a lot of spare housing capacity for local residents but at an obvious cost as the current housing bubble bursts.
>I can't wrap my mind around people that think that 'too many tourists' or 'too many jobs' are a problem.
Step outside of theoretical economic thought experiments and try living in a formerly quiet neighborhood or building suddenly experiencing an influx of loud drunk littering assholes. Residential areas are desired as residential areas for a reason. I live in NYC and sure as hell don't want to live around Times Square. There are actual people living in these cities who want a decent quality of life where they live.
Echoing many others in the this thread, in a previous apartment in a residential area of Manhattan someone down the hall starting renting their unit to Airbnb visitors. It was a nightmare, but thankfully the landlord caught wind in a few weeks and kicked the person out.
The correct way to handle those problems is to enforce noise and litter regulations. If your owner-neighbor is rowdy, it's no different than if their guests are rowdy.
AirBnB pays the fine, because they can afford to because they just made hundreds off the guests that littered and made a mess so they can chalk the fares up as the cost of doing business.
I don’t know about anything but Germany, but here you’d have to sue the owner yourself. Enjoy. Well now, since AirBnB is illegal in Berlin he might actually get fined.
That's awful. In the US we have misdemeanor noise violations that carry a fine (or jail time if you refuse to pay).
Neighbors will call the police if your party is too rowdy. They'll show up looking for underage drinkers. Usually if you are nice to the cops and promise to be quiet (and everyone they see is 21+) they'll just warn you and not write a ticket.
If the ordinances don't account for the scenario, they could (and probably should) be updated to indicate that repeat offenses at a rental could lead to a fine to the owner, so that they have a compelling interest to ensure their neighbors have a good experience
I think you're on to something here! They could ensure their neighbours have a good experience by having something like a nightwatchman, and a front desk that people could go to for assistance!
> 'too many tourists' or 'too many jobs' are a problem
Don't convolute these two things in order to influence readers. One does not necessarily imply the other. Venice would not 'kill' for more tourists and most cities in the world would probably 'kill' for a certain amount of tourism but not for couch tourism which indirectly favors real estate speculators buying housing for short-term rent and driving the locals away.
People don’t have a problem with “too many tourists” as they do with too many tourists taking up residential space. Tourism is great for the economy, but only as long as it doesn’t create negative externalities on other parts of the economy.
It’s not so much the rise in tourism that’s the problem as it is the rise in tourists staying in residentially zoned areas. Hosts are renting apartments and then illegally subleasing them for profit, artificially inflating rental prices without a corresponding increase in income. This is an especially large problem in developing countries, where due to geographical arbitrage, tourists can afford to pay way more for an apartment than a resident can.
Assuming the tourists have more money than the locals and anyone can rent their apartment out to tourists instead of long-term to locals, you pretty quickly get to a point where "AirBnB-able" housing stock is taken off the actual housing market.
This is a problem that can't be solved by building more housing, because that housing is not going to be built in the historic city centers where the tourists want to stay. (Also, it takes a while to build more housing.)
Wouldn't the real market solution be to build more hotels?
Growing takes time. Things like a surge in tourism or commercial activities can happen nearly overnight.
In the city I live in (no NYC, but still one of the densest in the US and high demand), there's currently some big construction projects, and people are complaining its not big enough. Except its on a former landfill that could not support the larger structures. Let say we fix that...but the size of the project was also scaled according to capacity of the sewer infrastructure. Sure, we can fix that TOO, but then the people building the project have to wait a year, or two, or more, and they want money now.
You have to throttle things so that all the moving parts follow each other, to avoid making it hell for everyone.
Let me flesh out a few very simple proposals: a complaint that a lot of city residents have is that tourists that arrive in a city don't spend a lot of money there because they pack their own lunches/avoid museums, etc.
How about charging a very high tax (in the form of a voucher) for hotel/AirBnB stays, but make that voucher spendable in local restaurants/museums? This would have the bonus that you'd also kill the local black market economy, as tourists would insist on being able to pay for goods using their voucher.
1. Anywhere where cruise ships are regular visitors. There are often free meals on the ship, and obviously no overnight stays in hotels.
2. Anywhere popular with young tourists (Amsterdam, Berlin etc). This might be limited to Europe, with a €20 flight (or bus) to the city, a bed in a cheap hostel, a visit to all the free things etc. This isn't new, but Couchsurfing and cheap transport have probably increased it.
Interesting! But, those types of tourists don't seem to overlap with AirBnB-type tourists, against whom the upthread complaints & proposals are directed.
So while I'm interested to hear of those cases, this "they don't spend" concern still seems out-of-place if directed against AirBnBers.
Not that it's on-topic, but both are rights, and to be more specific, both are negatively asserted rights; which are (at least in America) rights to which nobody else has the obligation to assist you with, but to which nobody in the government may interfere.
Whether or not we regard one right as more important than the other (and to be fair, we absolutely should), that doesn't change that nobody else is obligated to assist you in pursuit of your rights.
One side is going to come with pitchforks, increase racial tension, or vote in an extreme populist while the other is just not gonna come around. Also I am Canadian, it has been stated it is a human right here.
Negative assertion doesn't imply tacit vs. explicitly stated, it implies whether the government is obligated to provide you with it to ensure your right is served.
In America, for example, the right to legal counsel is positively asserted. "If you do not have a lawyer, we will provide one for you." Most other rights, including those explicitly enumerated in the constitution, are negatively asserted. We have the right to keep and bear arms, but it is encumbent on no one to aid me in that right, only the government may not interfere.
What does Canada (or your province) do to ensure that all housing prices are kept to affordability?
I live(and rent) in a city that is tourist based and less affordable because of airb&b and the like. It has a vacancy rate of under 1%. So i completely understand what you're saying. I just disagree that the market for staying somewhere worked well before airb&b.
This really depends on the family. I had 3 siblings and we traveled a lot. When we no longer all fit on the same bed, I got a folded-up blanket on the floor. Eventually my sister decided she would rather have the floor. My brothers are awful to sleep with...
They've always frowned on it. We had a regular procedure called "heads down!" in which all children or occasionally just three of us would duck down so as not to be visible in the car from the window of the motel office. When my brothers and I travel together now we still do it (mostly) as a joke.
Having stayed in a motel a lot over the last month, I'm pretty confident most parents could get 4-5 kids into most hotel rooms without management being the wiser.
This sounds like those cities do not have an educated/skilled workforce.
Sure there are spots near the Roman forum you would expect to have lots of tourists(basically inside the Aurellian walls).
But outside of that its a 20+ minute drive for a tourist to popular areas. If a 50$ airbnb is beating out a $1,000/mo rent its because people cannot afford $1000 in rent.
We host an airbnb ourselves, lots of business travelers in our area.
If people are coming to visit what humans did 2000 years ago and not visiting the humans there today, I dont think the problem is Airbnb.
I live in Barcelona where there is a big issue due to Airbnb. I moved here from the UK and I work in Data Science so I'm not like a janitor or something.
The problem is that Airbnb will charge maybe 80-120 euros a night for an apartment depending on size, location etc. And I am paying 750 euros a month.
So a landlord can make more money from a week of Airbnb than a month of normal rental.
In the three years I have been here the rents have risen probably 15% or so - it means even with promotions and pay rises you just keep up.
Ironically London also has an insane rental market so moving back wouldn't help much...
> In the three years I have been here the rents have risen probably 15% or so - it means even with promotions and pay rises you just keep up.
Well, except you also have 15% more money after paying rent as well. If you save the same percentage of your overall income then your absolute savings went up 15%. And if you assume that all your other costs are not rising as quickly (maybe fair, maybe not) then you could save a higher percentage of your income because your salary grew faster than your costs as a whole.
It's the same argument why living in SF or NYC is worth it even with the high cost of housing.
No, I mean my salary went up at most 15-20% in that time.
So it means even with promotions etc. you just break even - it feels like you are just working for your landlord.
That said, it is still better than London where the situation is just untenable and I prefer the quality of life here as well. (sadly so do all the tourists!)
You need to take down sheets, wash them, remake the bed, clean the bathroom, buy fruit/food every ~3 days, vacuum, be available for your guests.
When you have tenets, its passive income. You clean up every 6 months to 3+ years.
Airbnb pays better, but its labor. The ~300$/mo difference can easily be accounted for with that. Not to mention the cost of food(always HQ), electricity, water, heat/AC.
The items I listed are not optional, people can give you a bad review regardless what expectations you set with prices + description.
Depends on the kind of hotel. And after the market settles, hotel rates may not be as high.
A key aspect of hotel rates is that they fluctuate with demand. When you come into town for the big event, the rates may be 4 times higher than staying on a cold, boring night. A long-term stay will be much cheaper per-night than a nightly rate.
In my part of midwest USA, multiple giant hotels seem to be nearing completion: EIFS is nearly complete, windows have been in a couple of months, concrete parking lot is poured, etc. Apparently investors are expecting a lot more travelers to this thoroughly ordinary area.
Uber is a great concept, but the reality is that Uber has shown us time and time again why taxis cost what they do: regulation to protect users and our cities.
Uber, like AirBnB and a lot of other startups, are 'disrupting' industries by entering them and taking them over by ignoring regulations, insurance, and even laws to keep costs low and make a profit. In this day and age, they can grow fast enough that by the time cities see the repercussions and react to them, the companies are big enough and rich enough (and flush enough with VC money) to fight back, and are already entrenched with a loud and enthusiastic user base.
In other words, Uber is great if you ignore the various safety and insurance regulations, background checks, licensing, etc. that taxis have to comply with.
To explain: I've never been yelled at by an Uber driver. I have been cursed at by taxi drivers. Yes, more than one. They often don't like my destination and get mad at me for being in their cab.
"I've been waiting for two hours, and you're going to Chinatown!? Fuck you!" (Not far enough)
"Brooklyn?! Fuck you!" (Wants to stay in Manhattan)
One cabbie was so pissed he went 70 in a 35 zone to demonstrate how annoying my destination was.
Cabbies pretend to get lost so that the fare is longer. Uber will refund the difference. Etc. Etc.
Until the VC money runs out and the poor(er) have zero choice. Those people chose to give their money to Lyft / Uber instead of supporting their local public transit. Fast forward through Uber/Lyft's 'disruption' the local public transit shuts down due to lack of funds for maintenance, upgrades, etc. The public transportation ridership will be at an all time low, so it would be very hard to get tax payers to shoulder the burden of the costs... Seems like a sad state for the future.
Uber has a low cost because it doesn't use monopoly power to gouge consumers like cities do when issuing medallions.
So Uber's secret sauce is the fact that it breaks the law, not VC money.
The medallion laws are unjust and should be broken, other laws like insurance, driver training and vehicle safety are not. This is what makes the debate so complex and passionate, with people taking one side or the other depending on their personal incentives and political bias.
Uber loses money, so at most you could argue that it is law breaking AND VC money. And without a lot of numbers on the cost of medallions, etc in each city it operates, you're actually just asserting your belief, not making an argument.
> Uber loses money, at most you could argue that it is law breaking AND VC money.
I don't follow the logic. Many companies have negative cash flow while they invest in growth. What is "it" in your sentence? If you're saying there are only two possible factors for the relatively low ride fares, I think you're forgetting the reduction of transaction costs.
Hailing a cab on the street is frustrating. Hailing a cab by phone call even more frustrating and uncertain. Decreasing the transaction cost increases demand, which encourages supply, which lowers cost, which ... Anyway, there's a new equilibrium price.
Uber has a low cost because they are not charging you enough to cover their own costs, they are making up the difference with VC money. Any factors that make the cost of providing an Uber lower than the cost of providing a taxi are unimportant because they are not pricing based on the cost. If they had to pay for taxi medallions they could still undercut existing taxis if they wanted to.
> not charging you enough to cover their own costs
Are you an Uber employee revealing private information? If not, it seems you're making a big assumption about the proportion of their expenses that are marketing and growth versus steady-state marginal cost.
Amazon didn't make profit for a while and everyone wondered if they could. Oh, it's a low margin business, they'll never be profitable, blah, blah. Turns out they can, in fact, make a bit of money. Maybe Uber and Lyft can, too. Delta can, even though flights are a commodity business.
wow, you're really attached to this narrative you have, to be so desperately reaching for a reason to discredit the impact of VC money on their operation. I think my previous comments have already said everything relevant about the breakdown of their marketing costs vs steady state marginal costs.
You've asserted that they're ignoring cost in their pricing, but have provided no evidence for it. Uber and Lyft have claimed to be profitable in their biggest markets. Doesn't that suggest they set prices above marginal cost?
Wow. They were apparently profitable for two minutes in 2016, might be what you're referring to? I haven't provided any evidence because I assumed you had access to the same real world information as I do, but if you don't have internet I can mail you some stuff.
No, I'm referring to the US market. They have never been profitable overall but for a very brief period in 2016 they claimed that the US operation was profitable.
How about in NYC? Profitable there? I believe they announced that they were.
In any case, even if they're not currently profitable, that may be because of capital expense, not operating costs. Until they go public, it's hard to know.
I also prefer more robust public transit, but I know of no community who decided against a public transit project because Uber was meeting their needs.
A typical big-city transit system is standing-room-only and heavily subsidized (fares are way too low to cover costs). More riders would just make all their problems worse.
I wonder, though, if the original iteration of Uber (now Uber Black?), their actual commercial car/driver version of the service, is the solution.
It didn't have the hyper-growth potential of the current model, but it didn't draw most of the ethical/moral objections, while still providing at least some "disruption" to the taxi monopolies.
Yes, that's much better. We have something similar here, called Beat, which I like much more. It's just taxis, but you can see and leave reviews, you get an estimated price, you can pay by card, etc.
It's not at all strict with landlords. Requiring hotel/b&b zoning would be being strict with landlords, say, and that's what many countries and municipalities now do, but AirBnB seems to generally have little interest in helping to enforce that.
I had a host saep apartment on me to a smaller one. Then the new on clearly didn't have sheets changed or bathrooms cleaned. I flagged this to Airbnb and nothing. Very surprised as this was a bit of a shock how bad it could be. Since then I prefer hotels. The cost difference isn't that much and it's simpler to deal with occasional errors like this.
Not true in Canada, AirBnB breaks municipal and in some cases provincial laws for short term rentals. Thousands of houses are in no rent zones and AirBnB knows damn well. The tactic to combat these rentals is to use provincial & city inspectors who levy huge taxes and prohibit short-term rentals with the landlords, but they are very understaffed and generally ineffective.
AirbNB is getting away with very grey legal area here, they should he held legally accountable for facilitating illegal rentals. Right now my tax dollars are paying for the government to enforce what AirBnB sells without impunity.
On a personal note I'm thinking of pursuing this legally with AirBnB and/or my city, my street has 4 illegal AirBnB rentals on it and my city can't see to enforce their own laws. There's enough interest in my region to easily get about 30 people on board, and that's just one semi small town.
And we don't blame the users of AirBnB, they dont know the local laws, we blame the landlords and ultimately the platform.
I know in west coast tourism destinations you will practically get beat up if your renting out to airBnB illegally since it has such a negative effect on local housing prices.
Well, you've already answered my question before I made a random response.
I was going to ask "Why are there laws against people making money?", but it make sense. Residential areas are for residents, not commerce. There should be a place for folks to relax around their contemporaries without having to deal with knowing that their environment may change from day to day.
I would say, perhaps there should be a compromise. After-all, being able to rent out a room from time to time can help home owners stay in their homes longer (or even enjoy life more). Maybe there could be a 2-3 strike rule on tenants. Where, if things do go out of hand (for whatever that reason), then the homeowner cannot be part of the AirBnb renting experience.
That way, there is something to gain and something to loose. Educating tenants would be priority.
I think part of the issue is that AirBnb is probably not very good at catching a banned user making a new account.
I don't think they ask for users' IDs. Presumably anyone could sign up with a fake name and a prepaid credit card, act wild, get banned, and repeat the process.
Determining the identity of an online user can be pretty hard. AirBnB doesn't want to add verification steps that will cause attrition in the rental pipeline, so they'd rather do nothing than do a little and be seen as failing at it.
I agree with your point. I'd however like to add to this: "Users should think of themselves as a respectful guest, not an entitled customer".
Lots of landlords that rent places for a living started using AirBnB. I specially experienced this in Poland, where I often had to go to a company-owned building to pick up the keys. There they had an office, reception, etc.
It didn't feel any different from a hotel. One time we complained about an apartment, and they gave us another one that was empty.
So, my point is that the host often sets the mood. If it's a hotel-like structure that even has self check-in, with a company that uses its own website, Booking, AirBnb and whatever else is around to rent rooms, you feel like an entitled customer. If an old woman opens the door to the guest house, you feel like a guest in her house.
I guess AirBnB departed from their original vision of having people sleep in your living room on an air mattress, and it's now used by hospitality companies as another channel to get customers. When that is the case, you definitely feel like acting as a guest at a hotel, since that's what it is although booked via AirBnB.
Airbnb wouldn't want to do this though. A lot of cities are made almost entirely of condos and apartments that specifically rule out short term rentals (and have had since before Airbnb was even a thing). If people respected laws, rules, etc, they'd have nearly no product in the hottest areas. Airbnb as you know it would be a mere shadow of what it is now.
It is funny but you know there is an invention to the problem you just mentioned: It is called a "Hotel". For cost conscious people it is called a "Hostel" or a "Guest House".
The reason Airbnb is cheaper is because users are running afoul of the laws and possibly taxes.
Have you checked the Airbnb listings? Very little people are sharing their places. Most of the people are running this as a business. Many of them are not either there and delegate the key to another third-party.
It is a mess. And I'm not against it (I'm not a legal citizen of every country). But it is not fair to have registered hotel who comply with rules and pay taxes. And have Airbnb. You'll have to pick.
AirBnb creates "bad neighbours" by putting lots of tourists, some of whom behave badly, in formerly residential locations. It creates a whole new set of absentee landlords. If it were restricted to renting out places where the owner was still living it wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
This is the approach taken in London: Anyone can AirBnB their property, but only for 90 days a year, unless you have special permission. This prevents people buying up/renting flats just to let them out on AirBnB and putting pressure on the already cripplingly bad housing situation.
I wouldn't just assume that AirBnB increases property utilization.
Most the full-time airbnb places in my neighborhood seem to be vacant most the time. So I'm not sure it's a way to increase property utilization so much as it's a way for people who move out of town to cover the cost of hanging on to the property even though they're not really using it anymore, but without taking on the same legal obligations that renting the house to a full-time tenant would incur.
I'll take the high density housing as long as, within that housing, we can segregate the vacationers, who often enjoy staying up late drinking and talking loudly, from the folks who have to get up and go to work or school the next morning.
Otherwise, an increase in density might reduce airbnb's impact on rents, but at the cost of making airbnb even more annoying.
I'm generally in favour of this, but "build more tall buildings in a World Heritage Site to satisfy the temporary demand of tourists" isn't going to be popular. Japan of course is already full of high-density housing.
(Edinburgh is building housing, but lots of it is suburban low-density)
Technically correct but misleading; the thing that most people mean when they say Tokyo is "the 23 wards" (compare: the five burroughs; the canonical definition of New York which even kids growing up in Chicago learn the names of by sheer osmosis).
^^ They're the green part of this map. The non-green part of this map is, technically correct is the best kind of correct, also Tokyo (administered under Tokyo-to as opposed to any other prefecture), but it's not core Tokyo.
HN people who talk about the "density" of Tokyo are picturing skyscrapers and block housing, but it's not an accurate picture. Having spent plenty of time in both cities, Tokyo is about as dense as the outer boroughs of New York, on average.
Hm, I thought I was careful of getting the numbers for the 23 wards (I live there too ;) ), but looks like I made a mistake indeed.
With the correct numbers, Tokyo "23 wards" becomes 40 % higher than NY metropolis, and approximately the same as Brooklyn (~15000 / km2). I would still argue it is not as dense as many people think (e.g. people often don't think of Paris as super dense, even tough it is itself ~40 % higher density that Tokyo). Yes, the houses are small, but except for within the few central wards, there are not that many high rise buildings.
Build more high-density or mid-density rental housing.
In Vancouver, condo towers are coming up like weeds, but it's not reducing the cost of living for anyone. People who already have money buy those condos, they rent them out at high prices so they can pay their mortgage, people have to rent them because there's nowhere else because literally no one is building rental housing, and so rents go up.
Rents go up, so property values go up because there's so much money in them, so people build more condo towers, and the cycle repeats.
The problem is that we have hundreds or thousands of speculators who got in early and have the real-estate wealth to leverage to purchase more real estate, but they're in it to make a short-term profit. They don't have the capital to set prices for the long-term, so they have to rent things out at pretty high prices.
Meanwhile, if we had purpose-built rental, you'd be looking at one building, one landlord, one set of rents, and a business with a long-term view rather than real estate speculators who are just holding onto a condo as long as they can before they can cash it out and retire (or leverage it to buy more).
Similar in San Francisco. You can rent a single room (while you're in the house) for longer, but you can rent the entire apartment only for up to 90 days/year.
Not sure whether it's a good solution or not. Mixed feelings about it.
It could still be worth it to buy a unit purely for using it as an Airbnb in London and leave it empty 275 days a year.
Just market it as a holiday rental on dates corresponding to big London-based football matches, when people traveling might often pay hugely inflated nightly rates.
Maybe supplement during academic conferences or government events. In the right part of London and for a unit with the right amenities, you probably could still turn a net profit annually just on 90 days, and leaving it empty the rest.
Which would mean it could still negatively affect housing shortage issues and home prices, and still result in poorly behaved tourists nearby for 1/4 of the time.
In a way, that's fine. You don't need to prosecute all offenders for a law to be useful. The law gives you some way to shut down bad operators which otherwise would be difficult to stop. Compare tax law. By law, anyone profiting from illegal activity has to report it as income on their taxes. This isn't because they actually expect anyone to report it, it's because it gives another avenue for prosecution.
It's worth noting that this distinction between who technically isn't complying and who will actually get prosecuted is a big part of why people have such different feelings about GDPR. Some people are focusing on the difficulty of complying and the penalties that could be assessed; others are focusing on the unlikelihood of small, mostly-compliant, well-meaning operations being targeted.
Also worth noting, this kind of selective enforcement can absolutely be used in a harmful way or have unintended negative consequences. I'm just trying to point out why a jurisdiction might pass a law even if they don't expect anyone to abide by it.
"I have mixed feelings about the Japanese Airbnb news. On the one hand: does it seem like the optimal regulation? Probably not. On the other hand: my condo’s live-in supervisor had to update their “We will call police if we spot illegal tenants” policy with “Note: Patrick isn’t”"
(patio11 is that rare thing, a Western permanent resident of Japan, and has lots of tweets on the subject of how Japan combines legendary, genuine politeness with a system that excludes non-Japanese)
IIRC it is enforced AirBnB side, so you can't rent too many days through them without providing the documentation needed to gain an exception.
But this doesn't stop you using other services. While non have the same inertia and awareness amongst the public as AirBnB there are several so it is easy to get around the limit by using several providers who don't talk to each other.
AFAIK the limit is on AirBnB's site directly. Your account is limited until you provide documents from the council. I don't know to what extent people are forging these documents though.
Yes. Indeed there appear to be Airbnb-management companies that help you to ignore it, by inventing fake "host" personas to list your property under and changing it to a different host every now and again. Airbnb themselves don't seem to care if you do this so long as it doesn't look as if it's their responsibility.
(We have been having problems with a neighbouring flat that is being run in this way. The details are murky but it appears to be intentionally managed like this)
In this scenario is AirBnB shorthand for all short term rentals or specific to that company? Meaning could I do AirBnB for 90 days and VRBO for 90 days or are they combined?
Also similar in Berlin, though last I checked there were still quite a few whole flats available... at much higher prices. Makes me wonder if some people are just counting the fines as a cost of doing business.
>putting pressure on the already cripplingly bad housing situation.
No amount of demand suppression will ever fix a supply issue.
“We’re better off not building up housing infrastructure subsidized by short term leases and just trying to suppress any demand that changes the market clearing price”
I do wonder sometimes that after another decade or so of housing prices people will start demanding internal passports to prevent people moving to their city.
I live in London and a couple of years ago several of my neighbours had their flats on Airbnb, then my upstairs neighbour got married, moved out and had his flat on Airbnb, that was a massive burden on us as we suddenly went from one quiet neighbour from never knowing who was going to be living there to lots and lots of noise and weekend afterparties, luckily our council took action but only after my next door neighbour also complained. Then I was priced out of where I had been living for 6 years, and it drove me mental seeing all those flats near me advertised as whole flats on Airbnb and realising I’d have to move further out.
I have pledged to never stay in an Airbnb, ever and tell my friends they shouldn’t rent a whole place either.
That's an argument against gentrification in general; not AirBnB. An area progressing is a good thing, but there are pointy edges to it and local residents not keeping up with the local market is one of the thornier ones.
The same thing happened in San Francisco... in the super expensive neighborhoods... the ones already gentrified. It wasn't until the city started enforcing some of the short-term rental laws that it calmed down.
This Redditor offers one plausible cause/reason [0]:
> This may not be a popular opinion here but I totally understand the concern. There had been a huge increase in transient international visitors being introduced to residential areas that previously did not have to deal with that. Having a constant stream of strangers coming and going in your building is not something many residents feel comfortable with.
Also: > Also I just want to be sure to note to people: THESE LAWS APPLY TO ALL SHORT TERM RENTALS AND ARE NOT JUST FOR AIRBNB.
That's a valid concern. But seems to be something better handled by local ordinances and not the sort of thing a national government shoulf need to drop the hammer down on... In my opinion.
IMO, there are certain advantages to regulating things at a higher level. It's easier for AirBNB to comply with one set of rules instead of many. An individual in Japan can take advantage of a single, well-written how-to guide instead of learning his or her local laws.
That being said, where I live, I made sure the HOA explicitly forbids AirBNB-style rentals.
Well if that's the only issue, that would be obviously easy to solve.
More clearly: I don't think you should make an app like this illegal. The burden should be on the property owners, not on AirBnB. Or why not?
What other problems exist?
In some supreme court cases, justices have argued 'while I do not agree that this should be legal, it should be up to the states to legislate, not the federal government.'
The two major advantages I see for local legislation is 1) more-representative and more-direct democracy, and 2) value in allowing experimentation and competition of policy legislation...
I'm not so much making this up as I go, but these kinds of ideas are things I've read in American political history, and when I thought about it, decided I agreed with. Here, it seems to me like an obvious candidate for such line of thought... But I could be wrong, maybe you can convince me otherwise?
Every neighbourhood passing their own legislation or rules would be an absolute nightmare for Airbnb because there would be no regulatory clarity at all.
One very good thing about Japanese housing legislation is that it happens at the national level. It prevents a lot of issues you have in the United States.
There's a lot of emphasis on bad behavior from Airbnb guests, but I think that's only part of it. Another big issue is that formerly residential communities often resist the conversion of housing that used to host neighbors (and especially kids) into short term tourist rentals. The pressure, and controversy, is especially intense in areas that are largely residential but immensely popular with tourists. The French quarter of New Orleans, the left bank of Paris, many neighborhoods in San Francisco and New York, places like that.
The problem is that "spare" bedrooms (as Airbnb likes to call them) are far more lucrative used as short term tourist rentals than as a living space for kids, who cost a bundle and don't generally pay much in rent. The pitch Airbnb makes is that people have a spare bedroom lying' around and why not rent it out? But the thing is, people start to acquire properties with spare bedrooms for the purpose of having one to rent out - or entire housing units. When this proceeds apace, former communities - which in places like the French quarter are already primed to protect themselves from too much conversion into tourism stock - come to see Airbnb as an existential threat.
Even if the Airbnb guests are well behaved, this fundamental difference won't go away. Think of it this way: some people would like to trade their right to run a hotel out of their house in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't either. That means severely restricting Airbnb.
For what it's worth, as an airbnb host in a residential neighborhood in a small tourist town that attracts a lot of young people in the summer I have never had poorly behaved guests. I've had a couple that could have cleaned up after themselves a little more or ruined our towels but otherwise have not had any issues, even with noise. Airbnbs in the area absorb the extra demand for space that hotels cannot supply, and having strangers around during tourist season is far preferable to having new hotels built and dealing with the invasion of the sprawl that comes with them. We do not (yet) have the problem of investors buying real estate to rent out on Airbnb because there is not yet enough demand to support it.
I realize you're talking about large cities, but it seems everyone else in this thread is as well and forgets that Airbnb operates well outside of large cities.
> some people would like to trade their right to run a hotel out of their house in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't either.
This! And: most of us thought we already had laws to that effect.
Also, even for the best-behaved guests I would not want to have regular AirBNB-ing in my building. There are young children and old people living here, and they deserve some presumption of safety, not just quiet.
(I do stay in AirBNBs myself sometimes, and I'm a very low-impact guest, but I recognize my opinion is a bit contradictory because of that.)
> The problem is that "spare" bedrooms (as Airbnb likes to call them) are far more lucrative used as short term tourist rentals than as a living space for kids, who cost a bundle and don't generally pay much in rent. The pitch Airbnb makes is that people have a spare bedroom lying' around and why not rent it out? But the thing is, people start to acquire properties with spare bedrooms for the purpose of having one to rent out - or entire housing units. When this proceeds apace, former communities - which in places like the French quarter are already primed to protect themselves from too much conversion into tourism stock - come to see Airbnb as an existential threat.
This doesn't seem like a plausible scenario. I highly doubt that Airbnb revenue from a spare bedroom is enough to offset the cost of the spare bedroom itself. Here in SF an extra bedroom easily adds 1K or more to the cost of an apartment. Between getting a 2 bedroom apartment and spending the time and effort to run a Airbnb in it, vs. having a 1 bedroom apartment and saving a lot of money without any extra effort it's hard to see people electing the former.
Most of the Airbnbs I've stayed in were vacation homes that the owners didn't live in most of the year, or families whose kids moved out.
Good riddance. I live in rented accommodation in Japan. A couple of years ago an Airbnb was set up next door and it was a nightmare. People coming and going at all hours, large groups of drunk holiday-makers having loud parties into the night, drinking and smoking on the balcony. After multiple calls to the owner of the apartment and the police the situation was finally resolved.
I definitely think Airbnb should have the limitation that you can only rent out a place you actively live in.
It's really sad that AirBnB is used by most people as a cheap resort, and expect to have a resort-like experience at the expense of the local neighborhood who has no desire to live next to one.
Can we just have home-share for people that understand how to be good neighbors, pretty please?
Part of hotels' professionalism is knowing how to deal with "hillbillies". Hillbillies are naturally attracted to cheap things and have no idea how to conduct themselves when they aren't in their own hometown, so they are a special problem with respect to Airbnb.
One might assume from my place of birth that I am a hillbilly, but decades of travel and living in various places domestically and abroad have mostly civilized me. I do occasionally have to correct myself however.
What's frustrating with AirBnB in Japan is AirBnB lets them lie about how many bedrooms they actually have. The excuse usually given is that Japanese count rooms differently but that is 100% provably false. As someone that's lived here 12 of the last 20 years you can see it's provably false by visiting any Japanese realtor or apartment listing site where there is zero ambiguity about the difference between 1 bedroom, 1 bedroom with a living room, dining room or both, and a 2 bedroom, or a 2 bedroom with living room and/or dining room.
This is important because of privacy. If it says 2 bedrooms it should actually have 2 bedrooms. Not a one bedroom and a living room with a sofa.
The fact that AirBnb endorses this really speaks to the integrity at AirBnb which AFAICT is fairly low (have documented lots of other similar issues with them)
In Amsterdam they already set the limit of allowed rental days per year to 30. Just last month the new city council announced they will completely forbid AirBnB in certain neighbourhoods. As someone who studied and worked most of his life in Amsterdam I welcome these measures a lot.
We had an illegal AirBNB in our building in Berlin. Some guests were ill-behaved and partied all night. The person renting the flat was unavailable. You had no recourse short of calling the police. I’d be very much fine with a hotel or an old-fashioned BnB in the building where staff or a responsible person is available to take care of and discipline misbehaving guests. You can call that NIMBYism, but yeah, no unregulated hotel in my backyard.
It’s heavy handed and a hassle. And I shouldn’t have to deal with it. Simple as that. I’m also in the privileged position that I could, but for other people calling the police bears a significant risk of ending up on the receiving end of the police interaction.
So, the onus of proactively dealing with this is on the person renting the flat to guests. And AirBnB fails miserably at that.
Because the police can generally only do something at a threshold that is significantly more disruptive than your typical rowdy and obnoxious neighbor.
Not sure about that location, but around here they might not actually do anything the first time you call it in, but if it happens regularly they will talk to the landlord.
How do you figure? I'm a YIMBY and I think that AirBNB should absolutely be regulated. Regulating it properly will ease the insane price pressure at least a bit, and failing to regulate it just feeds into NIMBY arguments.
I'm a YIMBY because people need homes where there are jobs, not because I think all problems are solved by the free market. A home is a fundamental human need. A hotel isn't.
Usually nimbyism refers to residential property clashes: people who don't want more housing "in their backyard" because it blocks their view, don't want lower income housing because of worries about crime or property values, etc.
It doesn't really refer to "I don't want to live next to an unregulated hotel"
Nimby means people who want to benefit from something, like a power plant or a garbage dump or the moral comfort of tolerating poor people, but want someone else to suffer the externalities. "Of course I support homeless camps, but Not In My Back Yard"
A significant proportion of rental in Amsterdam is rent controlled. They have highly socialised housing policy. This is a huge upside benefit for renters, and treasured by renters. Its taken for granted that a long lease social housing option exists, including some inter-city mobility of your lease if you've been in the system long enough.
A significant number of AirBnB and short lets are people who have a rent controlled home, live with their partner in their partners home, and rent their rent controlled home out for market price. This is rorting the system. Its distorting the system. Its exploiting the system. Dutch tax, the Amsterdam city hall, and their neighbours all wanted this to stop.
Its not NIMBYism, its anti-social, tax-avoiding, law breaking and distorting the rental market.
Disclaimer: I lived in Amsterdam for 6 months two years ago, and lived below a rental compliance person working in the private sector, policing long-lease breakages by tenants amongst other things. Much of this opinion was formed by talking to him about the problem.
I think it's important to draw a distinction between outsiders who do not have a long-term interest in how a city or community functions and residents who do have such a long-term interest. Outsiders have, in my opinion, no legitimate claim to being considered stakeholders in government regulations. Resident, however, do.
I used several Airbnbs in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima last year. The first one we arrived in, in Tokyo had signs in the lift saying that Airbnb was not allowed to operate in the building, which was a bit of a stressful start. Nothing came from it though. The places in Kyoto and Hiroshima were fine, but it's made me weary of using Airbnb again.
They'll probably be back after registering. The new law is pretty reasonable and AirBnB is actually following it. This is how this is supposed to work.
AirBnB never had many listings in Japan in the first place; when I was visiting there I always went with the agencies that specialized in short-term apartment rentals; those were best for price/quality ratio if you spent at least month there. And you could even get typical traditional Japanese apartments that way near important cultural landmarks. And observing typical Japanese customs like trash collection of certain types on certain days at precisely designated spots made you feel quite integrated to their modern way of life.
As someone who grew up in a tourist area I support governments and communities that fight tooth and nail to not have a proliferation of tourism friendly housing (at the expense of the rental market no less) or allow other things that increase the market share of tourism relative to other local industries. When tourism is a large local industry it has tons of negative effects on the community that generally result in local government that doesn't have much reason to do a good job doing what it should do and plenty of reason to do things it shouldn't. It's bad in the short term that get made worse over generations.
edit: Yes I know I didn't provide any specific examples and that this viewpoint will be foreign to those of you who go somewhere for vacation and think it seems nice (yes, that's the point, to seem nice enough to get you to spend your money here, that doesn't mean it's actually nice or nice for the people that live there).
That's a bit of a shame. I get where they are coming from, but the place in Ueno my girlfriend and I rented out was cute and we didn't hold any wild parties, even if I did get the evil eye from some old guy in a convenience store.
How did it go for the trash ? recycling rules ? balcony usage ? Did you check/pass the kanranban ?
Genuinely, resident building are so different from hotels I wonder how smooth it is for the residents to have random oversea people passing by even only 180 days a year, even if they are polite, well educated and well intended.
Also stayed exclusively in Airbnbs when traveling in Japan.
The hosts usually explained the rules how to sort the trash, including the removal the cap on the water bottles, and showed where to put the trash (on this random trash pile next to the building). Not sure about the balcony usage, but I'd would probably use common sense and not be yelling there or using it in the middle of the night. Also I don't smoke but seems as smoking goes, the rules were pretty liberal in Japan.
I don't see these being issues, if the host explains the customs, obviously you cannot expect that everyone knows all your countries rules. On a side not its interesting how many different ways there is to sort trash.
Iirc there was a binder with rules/info including trash/recycling rules. I think it was street pickup one of the mornings, but it’s been a year. I assume you meant “kairenban” - I don’t recall there being one but it may have been in that binder. I can assure you we were quiet and did our very best to follow the rules, but as I said above, I understand your discomfort. I’m personally not a huge fan of AirBnB, but I wasn’t in charge of booking lodgings for those nights. Even so, it was a nice experience.
That's a great example that clearly demonstrates that local law can be enforced, even on companies like AirBnb. I hear lots of arguments on "You can't enforce the ban", but it's simpler than ever to just do that.
> People just respect regulations and they generally do work very well.
Except when the regulations are inappropriate or protect the incumbents instead of promoting experimentation and innovation. There's a reason Japan is lagging behind in almost everything these days compared to its neighbors in Asia.
Problem is that fast changes in Japan has been associated with bursts of civilian violence. Pushing back what needs to be done until it's untenable is NOT a good strategy.
I think you can be right under some circumstances and wrong in others.
For such a strategy to be effective, what is required is for there to be a period of social / technological stability in the rest of the world. I believe that once the direction is clear, Japan's internal coherence allows it to forge ahead. Until that time though, they cannot figure out how to proceed, so they prefer to wait for clarity.
Definitely more Waterfall than Agile. Again, Waterfall remains the best methodology for some types of project.
But all of this is a vast generalisation. Even now, there are signs of adaptation.
I'm European, and in general I like (well thought out) regulations, but in the case of the taxi industry Uber is actually not a bad guy but a huge blessing.
In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.
Uber takes all of this away. The rating system ensures drivers are polite. The estimate € (plus route tracking) ensures they don't take the scenic route, and the fact that all payment happens via the app means there is no longer 'my meter is broken/the credit card reader is broken/sorry I miscalculated its €10 more'.
And because Uber is global I can use the same app wether I am in Paris, Prague, Hanoi or Seattle.. which means I don't need to install and learn 3 different apps.
Edit: to be clear, I am aware why Uber gets such a bad rep, and as a tech company they might deserve it, but as a taxi company they are absolutely top notch.
>In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.
Made up percentages don't count as credible data, unless you can cite the objective and peer-reviewed analysis that demonstrates that over 80% of taxi drivers are "rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes," you're just trying to disguise your opinion as fact.
Which is fine, but just say what you mean - that you imagine most taxi drivers in most countries are probably rude.
This is anecdotal, but I have taken many cabs in Philly, and every single driver I've had in my entire life here has been on the phone for the entire ride. That and they don't listen to directions because they are on the phone, and the cabs are often in poor condition. I've only had one or two uber/lyft drivers ever pick up the phone while I was in their vehicle.
There's no point in denying that the majority of cab drivers were more rude and scammy 10 years ago. They were, and in some places they still are.
But in my opinion, Uber was not even close to the top reason for the improvement you see. It was mobile navigation, more organized taxi companies, including internal rating systems and more often inspections, and job insecurity. Uber definitely helped with job insecurity.
Personally I'd rather have a somewhat annoying driver that talks on hands-free the entire ride over a smiling quiet driver that can't make ends meet and his livelihood depends on a couple of ratings. There's a good compromise somewhere between the two ends but it's not like we weren't in the former end for a long time. Taxi licenses were extremely expensive, fares were extortionate and you got scammed immediately if you looked out of place.
GP probably hasn't been to 80% of the nations in which taxis may be hired, but that would more charitably be considered extrapolation from experience rather than "imagination". If you haven't experienced poor taxi service, you might consider yourself lucky.
> Made up percentages don't count as credible data, unless you can cite the objective and peer-reviewed analysis that demonstrates that over 80% of taxi drivers are "rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes," you're just trying to disguise your opinion as fact.
There is little to no such data, but we can extrapolate from two things: 1. Uber, Lyft and co. would never have grown globally at such an astronomical rate (and eaten the taxi branch its lunch) if there wasn't a large demand for a 'clean' taxi experience, and 2. Wether you are aware of it or not, taxis and their drivers are one of the most oft complained about branches of industry. Seriously, ask 100 random people who have travelled internationally about their taxi experiences, and I guarantee you a large contingent will mention the same pain points I did.
On a sidenote, I did not 'try to disguise your opinion as fact'. Its a normal figure of speech, when you (and others) experience almost nothing but bad experiences with something you present it as 70/80/90% or 3/4 or 4/5th or whatever is 'bad'. Trying to shut that down with a quasi-strawman adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, except for appearing pedantic or combative.
> Which is fine, but just say what you mean - that you imagine most taxi drivers in most countries are probably rude.
Sans the imagine, considering I've traveled most of Europe, a lot of Asia, and a little bit of North America. Add in experiences from friends who have also been to those places and/or S. America, Australia, etc., then yeah.. a pattern starts to make itself clear.
> Uber, Lyft and co. would never have grown globally at such an astronomical rate (and eaten the taxi branch its lunch) if there wasn't a large demand for a 'clean' taxi experience
In my country the main selling points of the pirate-taxis (and they have been judged that by the courts) was a fare half the price.
They do that by skimping on things that real taxis need (by law), for example customer insurance (private insurances don't cover passengers, if they paid anything to drive with you), professional level drivers licenses, multiple yearly DMV checkups, sick pay to the drivers, maximum daily driving hours, taxes etc.. ...
We know for a fact (due to the court ordering Uber to give the data to them) that the biggest Uber earner in in Denmark took home just shy of 590 thousand dkk (93k USD) in a year. A real taxi needs to have revenue like that in a quarter to have any chance to survive...
I drive 50+ trips per year (mostly in Copenhagen, but also a few in other european cities) and sans 1 (one) slightly bad experience in the 5+ years, I don't see how the Ubers are better (other than cheaper). I took around 20 uber-rides until I went back to the taxis...
I do welcome the kick in the butt, that Uber gave the taxis, as multiple new taxi concepts have risen (all real, legal taxis btw).
> 1. Uber, Lyft and co. would never have grown globally at such an astronomical rate (and eaten the taxi branch its lunch)
That’s a dangerous assertion when Uber spent a sizable chunk of its investment money on promotions to make rides available at less than cost. Selling services below cost and competitors price is a way to gain market share that does not prove that your business model is in any way superior.
> in the case of the taxi industry Uber is actually not a bad guy
Pre-Uber New York City taxi cab story time!
Rewind lots of years. I am living on 30th & Madison. One of my roommates is an immaculately-dressed Brown graduate and young executive. Every few days, he makes an odd request of me: Can I hail him a cab? Why? Cab drivers routinely ignored his hails. The probable cause? He's black.
Add to that "busted" credit card readers, refusals to drop off outside Manhattan and cell phone use. (San Francisco, Paris and Las Vegas were similar.) Note: yellow cabs have become much better since Uber.
It's easy to be top notch when you don't have to pay all the expenses you incur. By offloading all of their infrastructure costs onto their employees (that is, the cars and the phones), they can operate very cheaply. But it's not because the service is cheaper, it's because they're avoiding their bills.
What are you comparing to? In NYC, for example, these cost were always offloaded to the drivers - they had to pay to rent the car/medallion for the shift:
"The average rate a cabbie paid to take a taxi out for a 12-hour shift climbed 11 percent, to about $85, between 1990 and 1993, based on the most recent figures available from the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission."
It took some real talent on the part of Uber to get so many people to view them so negatively. I think most of us are at least a bit sympathetic to some of their early rule-breaking given how entrenched the existing cab companies were and how bad they were in many cases.
As you say, there are a lot of things to dislike about Uber as a tech company and I try not to use them. (And I don't actually use cabs/Uber/Lyft all that much in spite of doing a lot of travel.) But they've definitely made it easier for people to get around in many cities.
AirBnB's market, on the other hand, wasn't really broken even if the (legitimate) short-term rental agencies were more fragmented and less modern than they could have been.
>In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.
I have had every experience you explained with Uber. People driving me weird ways around my city to make the trip longer, rude, attempting to add a cleaning charge with no reason, or the classic "Hey if you cancel the ride and give me $10 I can get you there."
How? Uber is a current-year tech company. Like Google, there technically is a support line that technically exists, but just forget about it.
I called Uber 10 times, in Houston. Got scammed 5 times. Part of the "the driver just keeps driving and never acknowledges letting you out of the car" scam is that the app takes the same approach to "uh, I'm not in the car anymore" as it does to "uh, I would like to complain to Uber". (The way to say that the ride has ended is to cancel the trip, an operation that feels like you're trying to scam the driver, so an honest person will avoid doing that while searching for the nonexistent "the ride has ended" UI.)
4/5 scams: the driver goes past your position and then waits a mile down the road to pick you up. The moment the driver was near, Uber switches to "ok go get in the car" mode. It never switches out of it. If you cancel, rather than hike an unreasonable distance to catch the car that deliberately drove past you, then Uber charges you $5.
I don't believe you. No offense, but it's easier to learn that the Earth is flat, or that a place called 'Australia' exists, or that reality is entirely a consensus affair and that strenuous wishing can change it, than it is to learn that Uber is easy to contact. Some lies people don't bother spreading.
If you lucked out and found that your specific issue had a UI entry in the app, that's not the same thing as being able to explain a situation to a human and have that human do the (paid, drudge) work of wading through obscure interfaces to find the button that fixes a given problem.
Why do you trust it? You got into a car on an arranged deal and the driver immediately wants to back out of it--this is already a shady situation. Why do you think he'll drive you anywhere after he gets the $10? Why do you think he won't charge you for the trip on top of the $10 after alerting Uber to their own GPS records that show your phone and his car taking you to the destination you said you wanted to go to?
I would never pay for a ride in someone's car before the ride completed. Taxis don't expect that; who does this guy think he is? If he wants something up front he's out of luck. In fact I probably would reject the offer as I suggested above, but if I accepted I would immediately cancel the trip. If Uber want to charge for a cancelled trip they can bite my ass.
It is probably "privilege" as a big heavy white dude with a perpetually surly expression that I'm not alerting on "danger" in such a situation. If I were a different person I could totally imagine reporting the driver and trying to get him fired. People worry when getting in strangers' cars. Actually once in India I did get such a misdirected cab ride, but my Indian friend noticed and convinced the cab driver to stop. He chewed the driver's ass for a while, then we got another cab.
foolish and regressive. enjoy higher DUI rates, less service and less availability. for what its worth, i've been taking uber and lyft in quebec for years.
Airbnb’s statement is disingenuous. They state the rule clearly then claim surprise it’s being enforced:
> hosts are required to register their listing and display a license number on their listing page by June 15th in order to stay active on our platform...
> Unfortunately, the Japanese government issued a sudden announcement on June 1st instructing any host without a license number to cancel upcoming reservations that were booked before June 15th–even though many of these hosts are actively engaged in the registration process or awaiting their license.
The authorities would know if a flood of license approvals about to happen before the 15th. But surely there’s not, and on the 15th these units become illegal. Two weeks notice seems much more fair to travelers than waiting till the 15th and cancelling.
Rules are followed in Japan. Allowing a grace period for unlicensed rentals was really fair of them.
Airbnb gambled that the rule wouldn’t really be enforced by accepting reservations past the 15th for unlicensed units, their gamble didn’t pay off, and now they’re pretending to be surprised.
Yes that’s the aggressive stance when 80% if units are at stake, but it’s Airbnb who is inconsiderate of renters here. They accepted reservations that were bound to be cancelled.
I have just read AirBNB’s response, stating that they ARE cancelling reservations, in a rolling 10-days-out fashion.
The linked [cntraveler.com] article is wrong. So, paulsutter is right, it is disingenuous for AirBNB to have allowed those bookings knowing the law would go into effect on June 15th.
And I personally am screwed, crap.
Leaving original for posterity
[pre-Edit]:
Huh? Did you read the article?
They specifically say that existing reservations are not cancelled.
Good thing for me, too, because I have three different existing AirBNBs booked in Japan after June 15th.
In Japan, citizens will punish you if you don't respect their law (e.g.: by not using your service). One of the reasons of why Uber had a hard time in there initially.
Uber has not been successful in Japan for many reasons. 1) the public transportation system is excellent. 2) the taxis are ubiquitous in the major metro areas. 3) the taxi companies have worked together to compete against Uber Japan successfully (Japan Taxi app, etc.)
Taxis in Japan had already solved the problems that pushed me towards Uber/Lyft in the first place. Credit card readers work properly, virtually every payment method is accepted, the drivers use GPS, availability was good (for my use case), and they are polite.
It's hard to get public support of law breaking when your solution is just incrementally better than the existing system.
When I tried using Uber in Tokyo, I was only able to call a licensed taxi through the app, which was incredibly expensive. The one time I actually needed a taxi (in a tiny town in Tohoku) I had to walk around hoping to physically hail one (getting a SIM card that can make phone calls is apparently very difficult in Japan, so I didn't have one).
> New York doesn't enforce double parking, jaywalking, and other "good neighbor" and safety laws
I am not disturbed by double parkers or jaywalkers. I was disturbed by unit 4F and 7B's weekly round of "drunk Europeans screaming in the hallway at 3AM".
Interesting that the two “good neighbor” laws you picked mainly impact drivers. Perhaps the answer to your question is that almost all New Yorkers (city) are living in multiple dwelling buildings but only a smallish minority are regular drivers.
They also impact pedestrians. I've seen pedestrians almost hit due to double parking in NYC. Sometimes they are also jaywalking, but sometimes there's a crosswalk or intersection and the double parking is hurting visibility.
We're seeing municipalities push back in cities as big as Barcelona and Vancouver, to places remote and small as Haida Gwaii.
Cities are going to regulate out the concept of people buying apartments purely to wholly rent them out 100% of the time on Airbnb. This is a very significant portion of Airbnb revenue.
I have trouble seeing how Airbnb's valuation isn't going to have to be scaled back when big parts of their business are regulated out of existence.
To me it seems that AirBnB is cannibalizing its own business.
They are not interested in strong control over either users or landlords, for they need more and more users - but the laxer the rules are and the more people are using their service, the harder cities and residential areas will fight against it.
Probably an equilibrium could've been found not for the new and lawless startup culture fueled by their own hubris.
So how many of us now have a better idea on how to spend 48 hours in Chicago as a result of the article promo? And who else thinks the deep dish pizza from Malnati's looks more like a quiche? Either way, I now have Adventures in Babysitting on my watchlist.
I understand all the ramifications in certain cities where the housing prices are getting effected by airbnb, but I think in this case it is just the Hotels strong arming because they were losing business and the Olympics are coming.
I am a budget traveler and low income remote worker and I really am glad I got to slide in before airbnb got shafted. It's a shame that I now have to choose between hostels and overpriced hotels, when I prefer the AirBnB experience. I met friends my age, got to see a side of Japan outside of tourist spots, and learned what it's like to just live in a normal house here without some exchange program or school. Without AirBnB I would not have been able to visit this unique country! RIP!
I've got mixed feelings returning from Japan. My best and worst stays were both AirBnB's. The best, which is still listed, came from a host who owned the place and very thoughtfully went out of her way to share local things to do.
The worst was run by a nebulous "company" that gave us half the rooms promised, at an apartment where residents/management had put up "Foreigners cause crimes, please call the police immediately." signs. It turns out that company had double-booked units in that building using another platform and brazenly gave us another spare unit. This kind of gold rush to capitalize on Japan's tourism boom may indeed need some thoughtful regulation.
Mind sharing the link to the good one? I'm sure they're jam-packed right now if they're one of the 20% still available, but would be good to know for future reference.
A lot of people don't notice it, but Japanese apartments and houses have paper-thin walls with no insulation. People may think they're being quiet because they don't hear the person next door (since people generally live here knowing that they should avoid being noisy). But no, blasting music from your phone speakers, stomping around in your boots, throwing your bag on the floor, and sparking up a blunt is shit everyone hears. Yet try politely telling someone they're being a little loud and they get pissed because there's no way you heard their 2AM phone argument while they're drunk and blazed as fuck.
If the apartment next to me ended up being an airbnb spot here in Japan, I'd do whatever I could to either get the renter evicted or move out. I have too much experience with people having zero self-awareness when they come to Japan, and I couldn't possibly deal with having new people coming in twice a week and trying to explain that yes, you are indeed noisy as fuck, and yes, people actually don't party 24/7 in this country because some people do work.
I too slipped in before the crack down. Got a rustic place in Kyoto. It was definitely no-frills but as you say, gave you a sense of really living in Japan.
When you have a family of five, hotels add up fast (it was hard even finding a hotel room that would allow 4, forget 5).
Still, there are always ryokan. Not quite the same as "living native" but somewhere in between that and the expensive Western hotel.
Why not just comply with the laws? I have a friend who did this, but in tourist-y cities this was turning into situations where a person would rent out 10 apartments at $2k/mo and rent them on at $300 a night.
A great business, but if you live in a block with constant travellers then I guess it can get super annoying fast.
That, and the price inflation sucks. I am going to look at a former AB&B property to rent today. The ludicrous price will be discussed, if they are unwilling to negotiate, the place will likely stay empty for the summer months(AZ, in a tourist oriented corner of the valley).
Isn't that just always the case with a common tourist destination?
If I can rent out 12 months at $1,000 (= $12k), vs 150 / 200 days at $150 (= $22.5-30k) then as a property owner you have a decision to make. Short term lets are more work, but more profitable.
They'll likely not care it stays empty, because it's to be expected that on some dates and months it will not be rented out.
It is true. The beauty offer I have is I only want/need a place for June-Sept. Could be a win-win... if off-season rate can be agreed upon. Otherwise, when the boss doesn't have me staying in Hyatts & Hiltons, I am rambling when it's <100°F.
You say "entrepreneur", but I don't see anything wrong with the approach -- as long as you follow the laws.
Often the solution the the problem is that you start buying the properties rather than renting them, which means profits per unit will be (much) higher (but you will also need additional capital to support that). Or you buy an entire block with 5 or 10 apartments; then there should be no complaints.
Of course they do - they manage a place that visitors can stay in. Which is why people pay them. And you're clearly not a landlord if you think it involves no effort.
Sure, if a society thinks they cause more harm than good, by all means, ban them, but that's a different argument.
Tomato, tomato. They still have to manage renters, take care of regular maintenance (cleaning), etc. If anything they have more work than the actual landlord.
I should hope so, since I'm one. We own two apartments which we rent out, one of them on AirBnB, and handling the reservations, receiving the guests, giving them tips on how to navigate the city, constantly cleaning and replacing linen, etc, is way more time consuming than the occasional maintenance we do on the other apt, which is rented long-term.
Hm, I guess your AirBNB is pretty nice, and our building is pretty shitty - we've had to have our building's super come in at least once a month to fix this or that - pipe making awful racket, door doesn't close or latch, lock needs to be replaced, neighbors making too much noise (although sadly, that problem wasn't fixed by the super with a wrench.)
No, our building isn't that great, it's pretty old and rickety. But most AirBNB reservations are just for a few days, so during the high season we might have to come in 4-5 times a month to do all that crap I mentioned before.
But they're not a landlord. They sublease an apartment to others. They clean up after guests and put out fresh towels; they don't do the sorts of repairs and upkeep that must be done between long-term tenants.
And a short term let business requires even more effort to run. It's a lot of work, and part of the reason why (even though I think it's a great business to be in), it's not one I really want to run.
While on the whole, I definitely can see the argument that AirBnB needs more regulation, in this particular case it seems more like a classic case of "established players using the law to shut out competition" than "creating regulations to curb some of the issues created by AirBnB".
Same here! It is such a surreal experience to just nestle into the heart of a Japanese neighborhood for the first time (and actually still is, going on well over a year now).
If it wasn't for AirBnB's abundant selection of places and prices it would have been near-impossible to get those kind of experiences (and new friends and countless other random things).
> “The government knows how to segregate us properly”
The government is great place to balance competing interests, especially if it's more democratic.
> And “Everything will be cheaper by limiting people the ability to trade”
That's missing the point. The goal with regulations like these isn't to make things "cheaper," but to control negative externalities. There's more to life than the price of goods.
Unfortunately, prices are easy to quantify and that fact irresistibly draws certain kinds of people blind themselves to all non-quantitative observations and engage in the McNamara fallacy.
>The goal with regulations like these isn't to make things "cheaper," but to control negative externalities.
Seeing as the proponents -- of regulations regarding who can trade what with whom -- first cited issue is "Affordability", categorically, yes, these regulations are about making things "cheaper".
>The government is great place to balance competing interests, especially if it's more democratic.
How successful has the US government been at balancing trillion dollar bailouts for the banking/political class and endless wars of murder? Building a system where the minutia of liberty can be taken away with a stroke of a pen unless millions of dollars are spent lobbying the political class is not what I'd call a "great place to balance competing interests".
> Seeing as the proponents -- of regulations regarding who can trade what with whom -- first cited issue is "Affordability", categorically, yes, these regulations are about making things "cheaper".
> How successful has the US government been at balancing trillion dollar bailouts for the banking/political class and endless wars of murder? Building a system where the minutia of liberty can be taken away with a stroke of a pen unless millions of dollars are spent lobbying the political class is not what I'd call a "great place to balance competing interests".
It's not very promising to start a conversation by ignoring the actual circumstances under discussion, so you can get on your hobby-horse to rail against your favored straw men.
So, as a helpful reminder, we're talking about a specific set of Japanese regulations meant to help people who are annoyed because they never chose to live next to a hotel room. We're not talking about hotel costs and we're certainly not talking about US bank bailouts.
So to summarize you: rights are not inalienable but dependent on if people get annoyed.
Do you see how philosophically weak that position is? Should Muslims be deported because the US government finds them annoying and people 'never chose to live next door to them'? Rights must be grounded in something other than 'popular opinion'.
I'd rather live in a world where I simply have to buy/rent in an HOA which everyone signs a contract stating that we will abide by XYZ rules rather than one where we have to rely on the threat of murderous government.
Government's proposition to you is: Let me kill whomever I want and I'll make your life marginally better. I find it ethically unconscionable to benefit so marginally at the expense of someone else's life.
> So to summarize you: rights are not inalienable but dependent on if people get annoyed.
You're not being reasonable, but rather reading your own straw men into what I wrote.
Based on your misunderstandings, I can pretty confidently say that "rights" are a lot more complicated and multifaceted than you seem to comprehend. There are more kinds of rights relevant here than just property ownership rights and those created through contracts.
To put it another way: these Japanese regulations can be thought of as an articulation of preexisting rights that hadn't previously been codified.
I'm just going to ignore all the ridiculous hyperbole in the rest of your comment, because it's not worth a response. You seem enchanted by an over-simple toy mental model of society (with an admittedly seductive simplicity), and angry that it's not normative in a world that's too complex for it to fit.
You rested your argument on the fact that we should take away someone’s right because they got annoyed. So no, I am not being unreasonable.
I don’t need you to realize rights are inalienable but you do need to me to believe that submitting to oppression does bestow rights to me or else your framework falls apart.
> You rested your argument on the fact that we should take away someone’s right because they got annoyed. So no, I am not being unreasonable.
You are being unreasonable. You seem to be unable to imagine things except from the POV of a person who wants to rent out an apartment as an AirB&B, which may be the root of your unreason.
Anyway, this thread is dead and you seem immune to the insight that what you seem see as an "inalienable right" (turning an apartment into a dedicated AirB&B) might actually be an oppression on others. It's pointless to continue.
I'm glad you're not my neighbor, and I'm glad there's government to keep you from being too much of an inconsiderate asshole if you were.
qv the other thread on meaningless work, sometimes people find value in living in a city and neighborhood that isn't completely focused on extracting the maximum economic value at any cost.
Pacifist, anarchist, libertarian call it whatever you will; at the end of the day you are supporting a system where peaceful people will either be imprisoned or have their property stolen if you don't do what men with guns tell you to do.
AirBnB obviously was interested in getting their product used by as many people as people (growth at all costs) - but this had the effect of getting a lot of young, cost conscious people to take holidays in area that were traditionally residential. While most AirBnB renters are polite and respectful, enough of them were loud, disruptive and ignoring the local rules (for example, tourists in Venice who use AirBnB but ignore the very strict garbage disposal laws) that local residents started dreading having AirBnBs around.
AirBnB is already very strict with landlords: it needs to start being a lot stricter with its users too. They rapidly need to educate their users about how to be good citizens, and that the motto of 'the customer is always right' is completely the wrong way to think about a stay in a residential area in a foreign city. Users should think of themselves as a respectful guest, not an entitled customer.