Did sites like VRBO for vacation and large house rentals exist for AirBnb? I didn't really book those at that point. While I agree airbnb should probably be replaced by hotels (like in the past) was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn't for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a leech landlord - which is part of why we're in such a bad situation now with the housing market.
So like, limit the number of listings that one person and/or company can have (and for those with more than one listing, vet those more stringently)? This has always been a very "duh" solution; but they need to be forced to adopt the policy, as they dgaf since they are making monayyyy from it.
But then what's to stop one bad owner from just making 15 different accounts for their 15 different properties?
And from the users perspective, there's reasons to prefer that all the properties under the same owner are tied to the same account. If bad reviews are happening it's easier to see the pattern if all the properties on the account have bad reviews.
Not that I don't generally agree with you, I just think that it's a complicated enough issue that just limiting the number of listings per person won't totally solve.
Require a govt ID (and run that ID through a db to make sure it's legit) for each host. Cross reference with who is the legal owner's name on all properties; if company, base on the owner of company (avoids 'I'll just make 5 companies' workaround). Even more basic stuff like 'if more than 1 account is using the same bank account, flag for review'. This stuff isn't hard, it's just not in use currently.
You can get two hotel rooms if you have more people than fit into one room. You can rent bigger rooms from hotels too.
When I was a kid in like... the 90s, we stayed in this hotel room that was like... 2 stories tall and had like.... a living room and stuff. And it wasn't even a touristy city. I don't know what that kind of hotel room is called, but it was pretty sweet.
I'm surprised more hotels haven't realized that some folks want that larger rental experience and haven't opened up more larger hotel rooms with kitchens and stuff. Perhaps it's not as profitable. Or maybe hotels don't want to hire someone to properly clean something like that, and hotels don't get to force you to pay them to clean it after having you clean it yourself like Airbnbs do.
Yeah, I've seen those but not ideal. We have a group that gets together at least yearly with about a dozen people. Beds are needed but general living space that can accommodate all of that as well. I've never seen that kind of thing in a hotel.
a bit earlier than that, back when i was a kid.. when we needed more space for more people for whatever was going on, it was always multiple rooms (adjoining, usually) at the holiday inn (in our town. only one with an indoor pool at the time) or at embassy suites (when we were in the cities).
Generally was a localized market thing.l as far as I am aware.
Things like cottage towns or ski resorts would have local companies that managed places in that area, taking a cut, but also doing things like ensuring lack of unit damage between tenants, cleaning, going after Olympians after they spin up a $400 phone bill to their BF in France while staying in a unit to train. (She apologized profusely and immediately paid the bill.)