I'm pretty sure you already know that travelling with personal domestic staff is a vanishingly tiny niche requirement of the super-rich.

But many upper middle class people have nannies, au-pairs, etc. Upper middle class isn't very large, but they are certainly the demo for an AirBnB in a tourist destination. Average people don't really travel much.

Even if you don't have a babysitter, having a kitchen to feed your kids yourself is huge.

Maybe in the US, here in Europe I feel it's absurdly common for even the low middle class to travel around.

Similarly, many US households have access to a car. Most American vacations are road trips.

Getting a 3 bedroom vacation rental instead of a 2 bedroom and driving the au pair up in the back seat is not solely the province of the super-rich.

[For the record: I do not have an au pair, nor have I taken a babysitter on a trip.]

It's a job, sometimes you do in the family sometimes you outsource. No need to be super-rich for it.

They also tend to be peoples vacation homes and not created-for-Airbnb investments with spartan cheap furniture and crappy pillows and you can't even find a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. The quality of the listings, management, cleaning seems to be much higher

And to top it off, their Search function actually treats you like an adult - you can select SORT filters so you're not forced to wade through a bunch of crap listings because Airbnb's lead UX developer hates you and doesn't value your time.

Good thing bchesky has stopped taking photographs of the listings, otherwise his skill would just be wasted on his platform.

(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)

Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?

What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.

How often are these people brought on holiday?

Wow this blows my mind TIL

It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.

I don’t think you are..

Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?

Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???

I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.

Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.

The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.

Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.

We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.

If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.

To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.

edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.

I have had luck with booking.com, I always found airbnb to be a bit too 'trendy', whereas the apartments I've rented from booking.com have been solid, as represented rentals with a minimum of hassle and expense.

what? i make what i thought was good money but this is absurd to me

Thing is there's tons of people in their gap year who are willing to come to first world country and experience the rich life (you need to provide accomodation and food IIRC) even if it's pretty middle for us.

The number of airbnb's that I've stayed at that have awkward rooms or incomplete amenities has been increasing year over year (such as a counter that prevents a refrigerator door from fully opening due to a hasty remodel, or a kitchen with a full set of pans but no silverware). The toiletries are almost always lacking, the bed sheets are always of the lowest quality - whatever the minimum the host can do to check the box on their AirBnB profile. The photos, reviews, and amenity lists on the host's profile never tell the fully story.

This is more the norm than the exception in my recent experience.

It makes me quite furious as I've had tame reviews removed.

Uber/Lyft have been super expensive as well. I wonder if we're seeing that these company's original pricing model was unsustainable, or if something else is going on.

Airbnb tries to scare the hosts about the lack of insurance if they rent out their place directly to the guests... but I guess reading the stories about how Airbnb fights insurance claims all the way, it's not like this insurance cover is worth much after all..

I really like their direction of enabling month-long/flexible stays and considering whether I replace my lease with that so that I can move around more easily and see different places rather being stuck at the same place for 1+ years.

As long as you know that you're getting those cute feelings at the expense of contributing to screwing everyone that actually lives there (who isn't a landlord) by contributing to a market that creates a situation ever more hostile and unaffordable to renters.

I don't think you thought your reply through before typing it out.

Clearly Airbnb is, even with the best of intentions, harming local economies by making housing unaffordable and/or unavailable to locals and has been documented over the past decade[0]. It's only recently (last few years) that cities have even caught up to tech like Abnb so for years they were and active drain on the local economy by dodging taxes and regulations[1]. It does NOT support the local economy in the same way as hotels and its benefits don't seem to out weigh its costs to the local economy[2].

[0] https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...

[1] https://curs.unc.edu/2015/03/26/a-roadmap-to-regulating-airb...

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...

Many times Hotels are located in areas that are zoned commercial and not residential.

So no, hotels really are not competing with housing the way AirBnb is.

(Unless they're zoned exclusively commercial - but I don't know how common that is.)

I'll often stay in B&Bs in less urban areas, but especially for urban business travel, the hotel is not really a big part of my experience and I just want to keep things simple, maybe have a place to leave my luggage after I check out, a usually 24 hour desk, etc.

Feels like you get a more "traditional" type of vacation rental owner. More professional? More likely to outsource all the management to a professional management company? I've been scammed on AirBnB, never through any other site.

(The AirBnB scam was fortunately "only" the one where they switch you to a property in a different building because the one in the pictures is "under repairs". I didn't make too much of a stink about it because we had been traveling for a long time. But it's still fraud.)

My last rental in West Seattle was a super cute little house that I found on Zillow and I was lucky because it was owner rented, which saved us both on all those pesky lame fees.

The days of VC-backed low prices are over. Now we get to experience the joys of paying them back for their investments.

AT&T has an unlimited 4G for business plan that is only about $100/month. They accept 'consultant' as a business (I went into a store to simplify the process of setting up the account). Get a mifi (Netgear M1)... it has 2 ports for a mimo antenna. Get an omni directional antenna and the shortest cables you think you need. That should get you coverage in most places. I've taken my daily zoom calls on the tops of mountains in the middle of nowhere. There is a newer Netgear 5G mifi out now too, but I haven't looked into it yet as I'm ok on 4G and 5G coverage, especially in remote areas, isn't that great yet.

I spent 2 years on a small motorbike going all through super remote areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and living out of hotels and short term rentals. Living in a van is easy after that. =)

I doubt you can find information on the website...

2. I love a good challenge.

3. I write software that optimizes a large amount of GPU hardware.

We've taken to using AirBnB as a search and then booking directly with the provider. AirBnB's fees are exorbitant and they cost per night is marked up as well. I think we saved $600 or so with the last stay and got more favorable terms.

How do you book directly? We find that anytime we’ve tried AirBNB strips out all portions of conversations that would allow the two parties to get in contact (email addresses, phone numbers, websites, addresses)

Yep:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/48602487?check_in=2021-07-16&ch...

https://www.brett-robinson.com/search-results/?startDate=202...

>How do you book directly?

You can usually find out the building and then look to see if they have their own site.

It's like a hammer.

Useful in certain circumstances for me.