I remember the first Airbnb that I rented myself, in New York City. It was almost exactly a decade ago last month. As I returned from visiting a friend upstate, I decided to spend a night or two in the city, and found the cheapest room that I could just off of Nostrand Avenue where no yellow cab would take me home from Manhattan (fair enough). The host (“a strong business-minded lady who tolerates NO disrespect”, according to her bio) was away, so her adult daughter showed me to my cot and promptly left the building. I spent as little time as possible in the closet-sized outcrop and when I left, the host offered a short and sweet review: “Great guest would love to host her again” (lol).
Last month marked Airbnb’s 15 anniversary, which was received with little fanfare (also fair enough). For many users, the service offers little to celebrate. In Scotland, the deadline for short-term let licenses hangs heavily on the horizon, with one survey indicating that just about half of the country’s Airbnbs will remain open. In New York City, the number of short-term Airbnbs dropped by 70% between August and September after city officials introduced a similar law requiring operators to register their flats and homes. As affordable housing shortages reach crisis levels, cities like Berlin and Lisbon have done the same. And for the remaining Airbnbs around the world, hosts are quickly entering what one describes as a “race to the bottom” when it comes to hospitality: To climb to the top of search results sorted by price (lowest to highest), some hosts sink their nightly price and tack the difference on as a mandatory “cleaning fee” that accompanies the chore list that’s grown endemic across Airbnb.
When I book an Airbnb, I feel dirty. From its inception, Airbnb promised to make cities feel fresher and more vibrant: Each property came with a host to hand to show you around, to train your fresh set of eyes to see as the locals do. But across around a dozen or so trips in the years since my visit to NYC, I’ve only met one other Airbnb host with whom I’ve stayed. And still, I reluctantly return to the site occasionally because the end-to-end platform handles bookings in languages that I don’t speak and in currencies I don’t carry, and also sometimes it’s easier to fit into a work budget than a hotel anyway. This means dealing with a form of hospitality akin to a bad joke: The most guidance to explore a new city that I receive is usually a laminated card with the wifi password and a few takeaway menus. Viewed as a whole, when I stay in an Airbnb, I feel uninvited, like an interruption, even when I wander through the city in complete silence. And so I try to wash away my footprints as soon as I’ve left them, both from inside the home (it’s on the chore chart), but also from the city streets.
In an article earlier this week, Kate Lindsay pointed out that booking an Airbnb is indeed still often cheaper per person than a hotel on average, but that something has changed. As the company returns to its mission – the “rent a room” model, as Lindsay terms it – it has introduced profit-driven changes reminiscent of the ones that led Etsy sellers and Uber drivers to withhold their services as part of an organized strike. “These events are all signs of a gig economy that might just be falling apart,” Lindsay writes, “because companies that find success by framing themselves as a DIY alternative to an established industry can only grow in the same direction as the very thing they wanted to replace”.
The industry that Airbnb threatens to replace, however, is up for debate: Is it holiday-making and hotels, or is it housing? In Berlin, Airbnb forced fuel onto the fire of the nascent housing crisis by providing a platform for short-term sublets as a long-term business model that side-stepped rent control regulations. On a smaller scale, it offered a source of supplemental income to make ends meet. With Airbnb, everyone with a rental contract could be a landlord if they’d like — in Berlin, but also abroad.
In my experience, the lockbox-operated Airbnbs I visit for work seem less like hotels and more like someone’s retirement plan. An investment property with more in common to student housing than the Hilton. Even after Berlin burnt through much of its affordable housing stock and forced many Airbnbs out, the system it accelerated persists: Ask anyone looking for a place in Berlin, and they’ll tell you the market is organised around Airbnb-like short-term sublets, now made available on Facebook and Instagram instead. Here, I’m left with a question: Did Airbnb change, or did we?