To me a planb is to have a few hotels, bnbs in ideal locations i can book at reasonable short notice. I know they have space and they are in my budget. I have extra cash so I don’t have to wait for a airbnb refund if they take time. I don’t use other airbnbs as a planb in case something happens with airbnb. A couple of years back we booked a lovely place in normandy, france with indoor pool for feb half term. The owner cancelled while we were on the ferry. Luckily i had a plan b we drove to a lovely chateau near mon st michel and enjoyed our stay. Airbnb did refunded me quickly but not in time to depend on it for checkin at the chateau. I booked a flat in the uk for a colleague to stay while in uk for a few weeks. The host tried to bait and switch i refused and found an alternative airbnb which as it was went ok. I had to wait for a refund because i paid for 3 weeks.

I often have a cancelable hotel reservation on hand.

Fewer and fewer hotel reservations let you cancel until 6pm day of though like they used to. More and more cancelable reservations want 24, 48, or even 72 hours these days.

and they removed the 6PM same day cancellation because they realized they became increasingly the "plan B" for a lot of Airbnbs.

Speaking from a hotel owner perspective, this is hurting the business for them.

Hotels are expensive to run, and with the booking sites pushing for cancelable bookings, hotels have to make them cancelable as well.

When you cancel a room at 5:55PM, the room stays empty pretty much 100% of the time.

Sure, but in the off-season, if you didn't book that room to begin with, most of the time, that room would still be empty.

Why not stay at the hotel and avoid the hassle all together? Is it penny pinching? Irrational ideological prejudice of helping a 'startup'?

There's a number of reasons why we choose to stay at Airbnbs instead of hotels. We save money. We break out of the cookie-cutter hotel bubble. We direct our dollars toward individuals and small businesses rather than faceless corporations. We gain access to amenities such as bicycles, beach chairs, etc.

Maybe when AirBnB was a site to share you spare room/couch this would apply. With the rise of people buying entire buildings to rent on the site, professional hosting companies that sub contract another company that eventually pays some college kid under the table to deliver the keys and yell at the cleaning crew, it's about as faceless as it gets. Just with a lot more faceless faces now...

For me, when I was doing it? A difference of >$150 a night matters a lot to a graduate student.