This is basically how I rent and I've also had great experiences.

I have rented a "non-Whole place" and I would say that was a pretty bad experience. Our room was supposed to be the only Airbnb, but two nights in, they rented out a room with a frosted glass separator next to us as "420 friendly" and the couple that moved in proceeded to have quite loud sex. We gave them pretty scathing reviews, which I am not wont to do.

Ha, that may beat my weird one. I was with an ex, and we rented a room in a home across from Golden Gate park. We cleared with the resident that we would be back around 2am, and that it would be fine.

At 2am, they got mad at us for making so much noise. THEN at 6am, they start blasting some ethnic music as they proceeded to fry food for hours and party. Turns out they were VERY Jewish and were celebrating the Sabbath being over. Surreal.

Exactly, I think sharing homes with the whole population is very problematic as on average you’ll get a lot of people who aren’t really into Airbnb as a concept and don’t really care.

Getting home at 2am happens, if you don’t like it don’t rent rooms for money. In my head I edited out the expletives from that sentence :-|

And how did you review the room?

Poorly, but Airbnb's website has poor support for historical reviews so I can't actually see what I wrote. This was 4 years ago or so.

I likely would have been kinder if it weren't advertised as "whole condominium".

I’m not sure, now that I can afford a nicer place I usually book a hotel due to my previous experience. Maybe I should increase my price ranges and try again, but the key problem just means I really cannot be bothered. If they had places around town to get the keys from I’d be much more likely to use it again.

Having said that places usually are over £90 per night but this is very place dependant.

I've rented about 20 whole places. 50% had issues. 50% were good. Prices were almost always is the $120-$150 a night range. Examples of bad: claiming to have reserved parking but not having parking. Claiming to be one place but being another. Claiming to have usable internet but not. Claiming to have a bed but just having a cot. etc...

At this point I'd mostly choose hotels over AirBnB because generally a hotel will try to fix an issue but AirBnb never will. Their position is effectively "sucks to be you, you shouldn't have chosen that listing".

They policy is basically "unless it's life threatening shutup!" and the worst part is either you suck it up or you're out a day of your vacation travel etc as you try to scramble to find another place. It's not fun.

Most of the time when I travel, it's the city etc. that's the experience I'm looking for, not the accommodation. I have no doubt there are, even many, AirBnBs out there that are quite nice. But I'll usually go for predictability, as well as other amenities, like being able to leave my luggage for the day after I check out.

I find I get a much more real sense of the city living in one of its (non-hotel zoned) neighborhoods in a real house.

The issue is that when you do this via AirBnB you're actively participating in driving out the people who actually need to live there and who make up the city and give it part of its character.

And driving up the price of rent for those living there too...

I've had many bad experiences with airbnb. Also some really great (esp in the beginning), but usually those were huge places.

AirBNB is often more expensive, is a hassle with getting a key some times (other side of the city wtf), NO support in case electricity fails, some had dirty laundry. etc etc.

I have stayed at "conventional" B&B's that I've noticed apparently also list on AirBnB and they've been fine. I think a general point whether we're talking renting a room/apartment, ordering online FBA, etc. is that a lot of people bargain hunt. While that often works out, there's also a reason for the saying that if something looks too good to be true, there's a good chance you're going to get burned.