If you are travelling as a single person or a couple hotels sure. As a family the hotel experience is really bad or out of reach price wise. I'm just about to go on a vacation and we looked into hotels vs airbnb quite extensively. We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms. For the same as OK looking motel we can stay in a nice house with parking and a good size kitchen.

I don't want to like AirBnb and similar, but every time we've tried to go back to hotel or traditional B&B the experience has been poor and expensive. I guess the alternative is to not travel at all... we don't very often and we're only visiting a city in the same (small) country and also seeing friends so it's not like I feel we're massively touristy people paying to travel half way around the world then skimping on the accommodation.

>We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't have kids. But, from my experience travelling with my parents when I was a kid... you really don't "need" three rooms.

That maybe the expectations you have now, but using AirBnb is pushing the externalities of those expectations onto the community you are visiting.

> We've got a teenager and 2 younger kids so we need 3 rooms.

What? I've stayed 6 deep in a single room with two beds. Mom, dad, and us four siblings. And there's more than a decade between the kids. Three hotel rooms would have been an unimaginable luxury.

I'm firmly in the camp of piling the family into one room. There's no better way to bond.

Cool. You travel your way and the other poster can do it his way. Everyone has their own level of comfort that they would like to accept on vacation.

But tourism is a luxury, and people renting out apartments on airbnb is making that apartment unafordable for long-term rental for locals, who actually have to live there. Sure, you might like the cheaper option of an unregulated hotel, but the locals would prefer you to just go to a normal hotel, since that's what the hotels were built for. At some point, even the local governments will have to bend over for the will off the 'masses' (compared to a few individuals profiteering from this), because people who have nowhere to live are in the group of people who have "nothing to lose anymore", and as a politician, you don't want a critical mass of those.

Bluntly put, access to affordable housing trumps affordable vacationing. If your problem is where to take your family for holidays, you are already out of touch with people struggling to find homes.

There’s nothing wrong with what you propose but it doesn’t offer a get-rich scheme, which is what really fuels short-term rental growth. It’s the new house flipping.