You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.

Holiday!

Inn!

Express!

Free!

Breakfast!

Clean!

Rooms!

A franchise is very comforting. All of those consistent, comfortable minimum standards constantly checked by employees from checklists; the excellent insurance; the ability to speak to someone in charge when something goes wrong and get a nearly instant reply... comforting. When I stay in them, I don't even have to wonder if I'm raising residential rents in the area (although I'm certainly raising commercial ones.)

You can give me an 80% product, and I won't be impressed. You can give me that same 80% product, but consistently, and I'll be your best customer. AirBNB can be great, but wow they can be very bad, and at the end of the day I'm too old for that type of shit.

Holiday Inn Express might have beds fit for a Baggins, but everything down to the fold of the sheets and the pen/notepad is the same every time, and I cansure appreciate that.

Last AirBNB I was at told me to just not smoke all the 'courtesy items' on the shelf left by previous tenants.

Were your airbnbs at the same price point as a hotel? There can be a big difference between a 60$ and 120$ Airbnb.

I'd estimate the AirBnB post-fees was roughly 40% higher than HIE post-checkout. I chose to stay there because it was a great location, and like the idea of paying a person rather than a corp. For the record, this was a metro area, there was ample access and selection for corporate alternatives, if anything was not to my liking I'm sure I could have gone somewhere else easily.

Nice people, but just not what everyone might have in mind as far as accommodations go. Or maybe it is, who knows.

People used to buy travel books from known publishers where the author had at least gone to the restaurant or hotel at least once. I haven't bought one in decades, but maybe that is the future.

I still buy guidebooks all the time. They're not perfect but there's some reliable curation and the cost is trivial compared to other travel costs.

I've been a big fan of the Lonely Planet travel guides, and it's cheap enough to pick one up for the city - worth it even for just a couple of meals or ideas.

I don't understand how a restaurant being bad at their job, having bad food (a subjective assessment) and charging a high amount is a "scam". That just sounds like a bad restaurant.

You have nailed this. I have been pondering about such anonymous marketplaces and I came to similar conclusion as yours.

In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.

Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.

Amazon customers have the benefit of free returns, pretty much no questions asked within 30 days. I want to buy some commodity like an AC adapter or an SD card, I'll buy 3 or 4 different options and usually at least 1 of them will be OK, then I'll return the rest. If I only need 1 item and have multiple that work fine, I'll give positive reviews to the ones I return, which I feel is the least I can do for the seller.

With AirBNB and tourist traps, there are no refunds and the nature of the sale/service means you often can't find an alternative if you've decided to take the loss.