I opt for hotels as much as I possibly can, but when travelling with a group or family, hotels are perceived as "anti-social," which I think is really the only thing keeping Airbnb alive at this stage — the social norms.
Apartment rentals on booking.com/hotels.com is, at least, a bit closer to what I want — but most are still tailored around the long-stay/corporate travellers... Airbnb does fill that niche well.
But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.
Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
Our elected leaders in charge of regulating this are often the ones directly profiting from Airbnbs and overinflated housing markets.
They often directly or through family and friends own several properties in desirable neighborhoods. So why would they?
There's a shortage of housing everywhere, there's no place for Airbnb in such an environment.
Every app that starts with the idea of renting "just a room", quickly turns into an unofficial mass market rental scheme by the users. Same how every app that starts with the idea of traveling, socializing and meeting new people, eventually gets turned into an unofficial dating and hookup app by its users.
Every free market has a lot of asterixis and contingencies to prevent exploitations and imbalances, such as the introduction of tariffs.
It's a free market if you and me living and working in the same country are competing for the same real estate. But if much wealthier foreigners from a country where the average salary is 5x higher or private equity firms can come and easily swoop up that real estate from us, it's no longer free market, it's just economic colonialism.
The problem with the current free market is that it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer, meaning it's no longer people competing with other people for assets, but piles of money competing against other international piles of money, and the bigger piles are winning.
All this just leads to the ever increasing wealth inequality.
The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory), but works very poorly at doing the same for life necessities like housing where costs keep going up as they're treated as investment vehicles not as commodities.
The Airbnb problem highlights that free markets shouldn't be applied everywhere as there's often important considerations that go beyond just making someone some money.
> The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory)
I know that's the general belief of free markets, but in reality the size of businesses counts far more than their efficiency or quality. Arguably, we don't have free markets as that would entail people having sufficient knowledge about the products/services and that just doesn't happen as the people with the most money can easily influence people (e.g. marketing, advertising, buying news services etc).
It's not really differently in any way, I'm on the same page as you.
Capitalism is mostly driven by greed to amass more wealth, and real estate is a finite form of wealth.
Airbnb needs to be blocked all together in the EU. I lost track of how many cities pushed people out and became unaffordable to the locals, because the rentals went to Airbnbs and tourists.
Housing should be for shelter of the people who live, work and study there, not for tourists, they have registered hotels, motels, inns, etc dedicated just for that.