Imagine every single business you interact with acting exactly like this. Imagine ticketmaster, airbnb, tipping at restaurants, pre-tax/fee price tags exported into every aspect of business.

This is what a world without regulation could be.

The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.

I'd like to think that very few serious people want a truly unregulated free market. The free market can be amazing but it requires enough regulation to let it happen. We have to try and stop monopolies from forming, and break them up quickly when they do. That's the kind of regulation we need more of, not so much the regulations that dictate specific business practices.

Of course, we don't really have that at all in the US. We have a severely compromised free market.

Except how do you then compete when places like China have the state backing everything, which is basically like the world biggest monopoly?

Is there any country that doesn't have heavy subsidies/intervention in what it considers strategically important industries?

For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.

It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).

Yeah, industrial policy historically has mostly created bad companies, which is why it fell out of favor for a while.

Even China is not foolproof at it; look at how troubled their airliner program has been.

In theory the new ideas that come from competition outweigh the efficiency/brute force of state-backed monopolies. But this depends on them not simply copying the ideas as they come.

Many things aren’t about new ideas. If you heavily subsidize raw materials, or even finished products like solar, you can own an industry. They’ve been successful at it for solar, and now own enough of the inputs that it would be difficult to not include China. They’ve generally done the same with manufacturing (including a ton of infrastructure) such that the rest of the world is now uncompetitive… especially at their scale.

The US is more productive on a per capita basis than China. We are competing just fine.

Like by a whole number factor.

Regulation is the difference between libertarianism and anarchy. People always claim to want unregulated freedom, speech is the most common example, then someone starts defaming, harassing, threatening, and sharing child porn and suddenly we get into a no true Scotsman debate about what freedom actually means. You should therefore be skeptical of anyone saying they want something completely unregulated. They are likely either lying to you or too blinded by their own biases to even understand what they are saying because almost no one wants actual anarchy.

Anarchy being the better version, with the anarchist members having to agree to such terms whereas the libertarians get to force their terms onto others by calling it property rights?

i view the need for regulations as through the lens of the seven deadly sins.

Until we can rest assured that 100% of you will treat me better than I deserve, we will have to be on the watch for pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.

That is pretty much the world that the original Star Trek was promising--an evolved human--but we are very far away from that now.

We could also look at it through the lens of Bertrand Russell's four unquenchable desires (acquisitiveness, rivalry, pride, power).

Either way, flawed humanity needs regulations backed by overwhelming power to force us to treat each other right.

Free market requires perfect information. If airbnb showed the final price, and sorted by it, the situation would improve a lot.

Forcing airbnb to display and sort by final price is the type of regulation that would help.

No. You’ve got it backward. Regulation requires perfect information to get it right. Free markets adjust to new information much quicker than governments.

Free market with ground rules works well.

Better than a “pure” free market or the Soviet-style, centrally-planned economies.

Though the ecological disaster from short-term thinking really needs to be rethought.

what was stopping hotels from already doing this?

not sure how rhetorical you're being, but...regulations ;-)

this is exactly why companies like airbnb, uber, and the other disruptors try so damn hard to not be lumped in with the exact market they are trying to disrupt. they all know that if they had to play by the same rules, there would be no disrupting. the disruption comes from them being allowed to skirt the rules and play on different playing fields. they'll all scream about corruption in the existing sytem, and some of that might very well be true, they are suggesting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. it is true that some regulations that help protect the consumer will hinder unbridled growth for the disruptor. tough!

fancy location hotels tack on often "resort fees" but the vast majority of normal ones don't. is that the result of regulations?

Sure it is. There are 130K+ places in the US that you can stay at that are professionally managed and legally zoned for short term stays. You don’t pay any undisclosed fees once you get there. You don’t have to worry about cleaning anything. There is no “checklist”. I just walk out of most hotels I stay at, click a button on an app and get my receipt.

You don’t have to worry about being rated by your host and you know the exact address before you book.

Airbnb used to be VC subsidized and cheap. Now that it's the same cost or more than a hotel room; I don't understand why someone would prefer Airbnb.

Kids, people have kids and kids nap. It’s a nightmare trying to find a hotel that has a suite with a door between the bedroom and the rest of the room. Leaving you to either book adjoining rooms or calling hotels until you find one that has that. And typically at that price point it’s cheaper to stay in an Airbnb.

Another point regarding kids is it can be a lot easier to find an AirBnB and cook their favorite or required dishes (my son had bad stomach problems early in his life and needed a very bland diet) rather than try your luck 3 times a day at a random restaurant.

There are plenty of hotels with full kitchens. Homewood Suites has a full kitchen as do many other extended stays.

Embassy Suites and Homewood Suites are two that I know about. All Embassy Suites have two room suites with a separate bedroom and most have a sleeper sofa.

Not sharing a wall I guess.

We prefer to stay in houses/cottages on vacations. Two bedrooms, kitchen, dishwasher, laundry. You can't have it in most hotels.

That’s the free market working as it should. You under your own volition choose the trade offs between hotels and AirBnbs.

With externalities thrust upon the neighbors

I agree completely. AirBnb goes out of its way to allow hosts to skirt regulations.

The government’s job even with “free market capitalism” is to regulate the market to manage both positive and negative externalities.

It's like how Uber utterly murdered the taxi industry. That kind of thing simply doesn't happen to an entrenched incumbent market player who doesn't have it coming.

As for regulations, when regulations fail to keep up with reality, well, guess who wins. If you want to tell your neighbor what she can do with her house, I guess maybe you should've outbid her when it went up for sale.

In the Phoenix area where I stayed a couple of weeks ago, I was easily able to rent an entire house for what fairly-crappy hotel rooms are going for.

People say this a lot, but I don’t know why. Airbnbs are consistently cheaper pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled, so much so that I wouldn’t have even been able to visit many cities if I needed to pay for a hotel.

Nowadays it’s common for hotels to charge “resort fees” or “location fees”. Like airbnb’s cleaning fees, these are disclosed during checkout but often don’t appear in comparison shopping sites or advertisements.

At least they are disclosed during checkout and there isn’t a checklist of things you should do to avoid paying extra when you leave.

Heh, go to restaurant, leave 25% tip, but also before you leave please rinse dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

Airbnb could easily solve the issue by standardizing a level service and expectations. They could do what Amazon does when merchants don’t follow their market place best practices and hide the “book” button under a “other booking options” link. They won’t though and they’ll continue to burn through their customers who are unhappy with the experience.

wait, you're saying that amazon is aware of shit vendors on their platform? you're continuing to say that they don't actually remove them but just hide them? you're implying that amazon is complicit in not eliminating bad actors? /s

Ticketmaster specifically lobbied, contracted and purchased their way into near monopoly. Those contracts for sure really helped to block other free-market participants from entering the ticketing game.

> The free market is not solving Ticketmaster and it is not solving AirBnB.

The whole reason Ticketmaster is able to do what they're able to do is because when one company becomes large enough, it's no longer a free market.

Or better yet, charge you the $150 cleaning fee and ask you to bring your own linens (sheets and towels). Yes we’ve stayed at a place like this only realizing after we got there “it was all in the notes”.

I stayed in LA last year for a few days and it was really sketchy. When we checked in the guy said to say we were staying with a friend if anyone asked and then kept texting my girlfriend asking us to stay extra nights.

Most Airbnbs in Los Angeles are illegal

I hope you checked for hidden cameras

I had a similar experience in NYC circa 2019. Several weeks before the scheduled stay, the host wrote that we should lie if anyone asked us about the situation. I was not okay with that and canceled the reservation. Despite the sketchiness, Airbnb refused to refund any of the prepayment.

Did you submit those text to AirBnb?

Isn't it the hosts demanding that? I'm sure most people don't expect you to clean up, or if they do don't also charge you a cleaning fee.

I've had mostly very good experiences on AirBnB, but I've definitely seen the pattern of "you have to do exactly this to put the trash out, please wash the dishes exactly like this, please strip the beds and put the sheets here" and paid a $200+ cleaning fee.

To be fair, the things those hosts asked me to do weren't anywhere near a full cleaning of the place, but I can see people who are used to doing exactly nothing when leaving a hotel being peeved that they had to do 10% of the cleaning and still pay a cleaning fee for the other 90%.

If I’m paying a cleaning fee why can’t I just pay that extra 10% and do nothing? Where’s that option?

You know what, the next time I stay at an Airbnb, I’m going to just say I didn’t clean anything but I left an extra $20 on the counter to cover the work I didn’t do. Shouldn’t be a big deal right? That should be more than enough to cover the 15 minutes of labor I was asked to do, at a rate of like $80/hr.

> Where’s that option?

At the Marriott?

No, at the Marriot whether you leave things clean or dirty, it’s the same price…

You can't go to McDonalds and pay extra for table service, or less to cook the burger yourself. But you can pay more at a proper restaurant or less at the supermarket. Even if what you're offering is "fair", we can't have every business offering every service.

You also don't pay extra at McDonald's to use the table.

Which is probably a better comparison for the chore lists and cleaning fees than table service.

I haven't really used Airbnb, but it seems pretty ridiculous that people would continue to use them if there are different, annoying to understand conditions attached to each listing.

And then in some sense, a media article criticizing them is the free market.

I don't pay table or floor cleaning fees at mcdonalds

I just don’t understand, if they’re going to clean the apartment anyway, why should I clean anything at all?

It seems like a petty power move type thing, like a way to ensure guests don’t go too crazy or something because you make them feel like they will have to clean things up.

If the cleaners are going to be there 90 minutes, they won’t have time to load and run a full dishwasher cycle and put it away. But they’ll have enough time to put it away if you started it before you left. The other choice is they do everything, but you pay them for 2.5 hours instead of 1.5 hours. I’ve never seen a list of chores that was unreasonable, even if there was a non-null list of things for me to do, it was always reasonable.

The owner can pay them. It’s not my problem. If they don’t set the cleaning fee accordingly that’s their fault. $150 cleaning should be enough.

>I just don’t understand, if they’re going to clean the apartment anyway, why should I clean anything at all?

That's the problem. I suspect many amateur hosts have scaled operations to the point that they don't clean between stays and outsource that job to consumers as a shortcut, cost saving measure.

Despicable. Let these landlords get on their hands and knees and work to maintain these airbnbs.

I don't see why I should be charged a cleaning fee at all, or do any cleaning. Maintaining a clean spot is the "hosts" responsibility

I'm pretty sure I've been charged by airbnb for a cleaning fee when I never even stayed at the place.

Edit: yep, 40 bucks in cleaning fees without ever entering the place

Most Airbnbs I have seen have a "check-out list" that involve some sort of shenanigans like this. Host rate you back as well so if you get a poor rating then you may have difficulty getting bookings in the future.

Is there not also some way for the host to have you charged an additional fee for 'leaving the property dirty' or something like that? I'm thinking something along the lines of the Uber extra cleaning fees.

The problem is that the free market isn't solving such hosts away due to information asymmetry

It definitely is, people who don’t want to deal with the bill shit stay at a hotel.

I always reference the Airbnb pitch deck [1] to prove that "success" means you'll 100% lose your values along the way ("Share connection" which was big social selling point for early Brian C.)

Paul G couldn't be prouder of any other company ever from YC and it is well understood that not only are rent seeking slumlords and dirty/dangerous places a frequent problem, airbnb actively destroys communities [2],[3].

So this is what maximum startup success looks like folks.

1. https://www.failory.com/pitch-deck/airbnb

2. https://files.epi.org/pdf/157766.pdf

3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307554257_Holiday_R...

My last airbnb reciept

https://i.imgur.com/tTsrxdF.png

Its working as intended for me. Thank god for airbnb, i 've travelled to so many places i couldn't have even dreamed of.

Outrageous fee like those you quoted happen if you rent in high demand places in peak season. Don't rent a condo in aspen in feb .

Too true. I just stayed in two different resort hotels for the first time in several years -one for business and one for pleasure- and they were both a nicer experience than several AirBnBs I’ve stayed in lately. No cleaning required and one of them cost about the same as the average AirBnB these days.

I'm just happy that AirBnb wasn't successful long enough to start to degrade service at hotels. I was expecting things to get worse for consumers across the board if left unchecked.