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Dropped pin Near 5145 Antone Rd, Mariposa, CA 95338 https://goo.gl/maps/oeVqaChM9cRnNXKd6

Some hotels are good/bad. Some Airbnbs are good/bad. Tremendous insight.

Did you even read the article? The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.

I'd add the nuance that you can end up with a pretty crappy experience at a 3+ star chain hotel for whatever reason. Usually though it's something that doesn't matter all that much at the end of the day like a room with minimal natural light.

But generally speaking midrange business hotels are utterly unexciting--which is to say they're predictable which is what I'm looking for from my hotel in general when I travel. I'm probably not there for the hotel experience.

There is a budget hotel chain in the UK (premierInn) where if you complain you get a free breakfast and if you make your complaint official you will get a full refund. They have remained profitable for many years despite the obvious incentive for people to make unwarranted complaints.

This, I think, is the critical difference. If I get a hotel room, enter it, and discover anything is out of joint, I can walk downstairs and ask the manager for a refund, or at least a different room. If the same thing happens with an Airbnb, and the host has no interest in helping, you are basically out of luck.

If your hotel reservation is not refundable - you are out of your luck. You can potentially get refund from credit card company, as I once did, but the same is available for AirBnb - never tried though, was no need.

> Some hotels are good/bad. Some Airbnbs are good/bad. Tremendous insight.

I do not know how you’ve managed to extract that insight from my post. The experience I’ve described with AirBnb is not possible with any hotel, Hyatt included.

> The point is, staying at the Hyatt in a major city isn't a crapshoot.

Take a look at Hyatt San Francisco, for example. See that the ground floor is occupied by some public areas exclusively? So I should either leave my bike in the place where it can be stolen, or to put it into my room via an elevator. Now it’s starting from $285, and $295 give you are a cottage in San Francisco on AirBnb: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6523507?check_in=2022-11-29&che...

So to be more precise:

- hotels, I can survive then, no prob. I can even survive Hyatt SF with my bicycle.

- AirBnbs give me pleasure. Get up, open the door to the garden, birds chirping, the creek floating, my favorite turnovers in the stove ready in 20 minutes, my laptop connected to Ethernet, my bicycle ready nearby - I can just jump on it and ride… Which of you “nicely regulated” hotels can give me all that?

To be fair, I’ve managed to get some pleasure from a hotel too. Now and then. A different pleasures though. And all of these hotels were in Japan.