by casenmgreen | 2025-05-14 08:50:32+00:00
I'm a digital nomad.

One luggage, no permanent home, been fifteen years.

I used to use AirBnB all the time.

They gradually become more and more, well, "large company".

I used to still look at AirBnB (until very recently, when one of the founders joined DOGE), but I saw that their fee continually rose over time, and became like 10% or 15%, and there's in many places (Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London...) no meaningful listings (which is due to State bans).

I was in Paris last couple of months. There was nothing viable on AirBnB, unless you wanted to pay several thousand a month. There was a set of listings which I concluded was a scam, the same very dodgy letting agency, who had lots of apartments, all with no ratings, but very bad reviews on-line elsewhere. I think they were continually deleting and remaking their lets on AirBnB, to get rid of negative reviews.

AirBnB itself (and here we see "large company") became unreliable as a service, in that I never knew, when I came to us it, if log-in would still work.

I recall the first time log-in failed for no obvious reason, and the and the only option was "email support and we'll contact you in a few days" - and I was looking to move in about two weeks time, and had of course no reason to have confidence in the boilerplate estimate of "few days".

After that, I put up my own HTTPS proxy, which I now use whenever I use AirBnB, to avoid AirBnB when I log in suspending my account, which I then have to have support fix, which of course means the account cannot be used until support get back to me, and assuming they actually do unblock the account, and given how variable support is, this is not a given.

I also recall one episode about ten years ago where I had to phone support. It was a three hour long screaming nightmare of hell and madness, which was eventually resolved by dint of the new process AirBnB had imposed on users (something about ID and account photos, IIRC) actually not working properly, so in the end it turned out Support (some poor Indian woman working from home) and I were able to circumvent the problem.

I've also been reading people write about AirBnB blocking their valid negative reviews on spurious grounds. That undermines all reviews on all properties; you're looking at reviews wondering if there were valid bad reviews you're not seeing because AirBnB has been blocking them.

To summarize, fees are now rather high, when it comes to Support my response is Jesus please God anything but Support, I had to backdoor my own HTTPS traffic to use the service, I'm now uncertain about the veracity of reviews, and no viable apartments in quite a lot of locations.

So, for me, AirBnB was great, but now it's really not.

Then, recently, one of the founders (his role now is only on the board) came out as pro-MAGA and joined DOGE, and that was the end of AirBnB for me.

The one and critical thing AirBnB got right was building into their platform the expectation owners would offer discounts for stays over a week, or over a month.

I don't see this on other platforms, and it makes pricing on other platforms crazy. If I come and stay for three months, I expect a discount for giving full occupancy over that time. If you don't offer that, you're off the menu.