>While I'm ranting, why do they let basements or single floors of a shared house count as an 'entire place'? It's really weird to turn up and see you're actually in a basement in the owners house with their kids stomping around upstairs.

Agreed, this is very annoying. Basement apartments shouldn't show up under "entire place". They may be called basement apartments, but it's just a basement with a family upstairs and almost always constant, barely muffled noise. Some listings won't even disclose this until the very bottom of the description, or sometimes not at all, and then I have to dig through reviews to see if anyone has remarked that it's actually a basement.

I've stayed in a lot of Airbnbs, and every basement apartment has been awful in a lot of different ways. Some are even more expensive than full apartments despite same area and similar quality and size. But if you're on a tight budget, the cheapest option between a hostel and hotel room or apartment probably is a basement apartment, so I suppose they're not entirely useless.

> While I'm ranting, why do they let basements or single floors of a shared house count as an 'entire place'? It's really weird to turn up and see you're actually in a basement in the owners house with their kids stomping around upstairs.

Would you describe a room in a hotel as an "entire place" or a "shared space"?

Hotels are different from apartments and homes. Everything in a hotel, is by default, 'entire place'. Apartments and homes can be 'shared' or 'entire place', with the latter meaning you have the whole place to yourself. If the lister is an apartment owner, it means you have the whole apartment. A basement is not an 'entire place', unless the lister is just and only just the basement owner, which in most jurisdictions is a technicality that would not pass.

Airbnb markets it as you have access to the entire property as in an entire house. If you’re traveling with a family this is ideal but really hard to filter out if they let all sorts of apartments show up as an entire house. I believe they have or had a filter for apartments but honestly their search is really hard to get exactly what you’re looking for. The other thing you see is “entire home” actually being a bungalow in someone’s backyard.

A hotel is like renting an entire apartment in a purpose-built building. A floor in a house is usually a retrofit with none of the soundproofing a typical hotel has.