For young, single, healthy people hotels are fine. But if you travel with a child and need to be able to eat healthy without going broke, Airbnb is the obvious choice.
It’s not a vacation if parents have to sleep in the same room with the child. What do you do, turn off the lights at 8 pm and sit there in complete silence? Never have any intimacy or even a conversation with your spouse? That sounds fun. Not.
It’s also not a vacation if whenever the child is hungry – which they tend to be at unpredictable times – you have to get dressed and trudge to a restaurant that is in no way guaranteed to have the food the child will actually eat.
And I’m not even talking about people like me who have to eat often, in small portions, and within a very limited range of possibilities. Yes, you can do room service, which brings me back to the point about going broke.
I stayed at an Airbnb in Madrid last week, and it was blissful not to have to go to restaurants at all. I was in complete control of my food supply and spent a ridiculously low amount of money cooking all of my own meals. My blood sugar remained perfect throughout the trip.
Clarissa's Blog 
When I travel with family, we stay in hotel suites (this sounds way fancier and more expensive than it is). The chain we use is Staybridge Suites. We get a two-bedroom suite. Two rooms, two baths, and a living room space with a pull-out sofa and a kitchen in between, fits the five of us no problem. Usually, these family suite chains offer free breakfast with lots of options.
My experiences with AirBnB and the like (we actually stayed with VRBO before AirBnB was the rage, but it’s the same thing) is that the owners were always extremely fussy about what they wanted done and how they wanted us to conduct, and were way too intrusive overall.
There was a guy in Phoenix who remotely (from another state) controlled the temperature of his outdoor pool and would call if we forgot to cover the pool overnight or even just stayed by the (uncovered) pool later than he had envisioned. He also wanted us to run loads of laundry before we left. I think I talked to him on the phone at least half a dozen times over our weeklong stay, 2/3 of that because of his expectations for how we should use the space and 1/3 I called because we couldn’t access things like TV channels or air-conditioning controls (you guessed it—he didn’t want us running his electricity bill by lowering the temperature in hot-as-hell Phoenix).
There was another woman in San Francisco who lived underneath the space she rented out. When we arrived, everything was dingy and dusty, she mentioned seventeen times that we needed to be quiet because she was underneath (we were not unduly loud, but we’re a family of five), and she was pissed because she envisioned I had teenagers and not little kids (I had never implied I had teenagers, why on Earth would I do that?). And again all the expectations of cleaning after ourselves, like vacuuming and such, when the place hadn’t even been cleaned before we arrived.
I’m not paying to do chores in someone else’s home. After that SF one I said never again. Hotels only.
Btw, I can testify that in Sweden, and I hear throughout the rest of the Nordics, it’s common for hotel rooms to feature a full kitchen because people like to cook for themselves.
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“common for hotel rooms to feature a full kitchen because people like to cook for themselves”
Aparthotels…. (self-contained rooms and/or suites with small furnished kitchens) seems like a no-brainer. A few times I’ve been in hotel rooms with functional kitchens but didn’t want to cook on vacation (though having the possibility is very nice).
Hotels are often too limited and too often airbnb expects you to be unpaid cleaning staff.
I’ve stayed a few times in Bucharest at the same airbnb before that term was invented and it was great. It was a converted (one room) apartment in an old building but it was fine.
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I completely second the hotel suites approach. It has worked great for us as well.
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All I can see in that scene is: Hotels are confined to business districts.
AirBnBs jack up residential housing prices, and bring constant streams of strangers into neighborhoods, where the residents don’t get a say about it and have no way to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter that you are a good virtuous customer who doesn’t host giant house parties, get into shootouts with rival gangs, use the temporary address to commit mail fraud, traffick prostitutes, deal drugs, or use your AirB to film pornos. The fact that the platforms exist, and are easy to access and have basically no safeguards against this, means that what’s convenient to you can still be a hardship to the neighborhood.
There’s no upside AFAICT because we can’t afford them anyway.
It can be terribly convenient for you, and still be a net negative for basically everybody else.
-ethyl
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“Hotels are confined to business districts.”
That’s the US, there’s not such a sharp distinction in Europe (or, I imagine in Peru). In Spabusg cities the usual pattern is stores/office on the ground floor and apartments above (with a few scattered entirely residential or office buildings but nothing like a US business district).
In some tourist heavy cities airbnb’s have made it all but impossible for younger families to find a place to live (not the only factor since Spain is mostly engineered to keep young adults at home….. forever).
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Yeah, if it’s different in other places, cool.
Where I live, the whole STVR phenomenon destroys neighborhoods, and puts working-class families in direct (and massively disadvantaged) competition with skeezy investors, for the limited supply of affordable houses.
Can’t get on board with that. It’s affecting us directly.
-ethyl
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What’s Spabusg?
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“What’s Spabusg?”
What? You don’t know Spabusg? (condescending society lady voice) How…. uncultured… don’t know Spabusg indeed!
Actually is Spain (plus some typos and unfinished editing).
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Sorry, I’m slow today. I should have figured it out.
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@xykademiqz:
You are 100% correct! Always stay in hotels, where the rules are basically the same everywhere, and if there’s a problem, you can pick up the phone and bitch about room service.
Staying in the homes of strangers whose rules are who-knows-what until too late may be cheaper, but it’s a bad choice.
Dreidel
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Many hotels stopped cleaning rooms and changing laundry since COVID. Hospitality standards have collapsed in the last few years.
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I agree, but for now, they are still not asking you to vacuum clean the floor and do laundry.
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I’ve never encountered anything like this in an Airbnb. The most people ask is taking out the trash.
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“Many hotels stopped cleaning rooms and changing laundry since COVID”
What I’ve noticed in Europe (tourist places) is that room cleaning is completely unpredictable. It used to be if you left the room by 10.00 or so and got back after 14.00 then it would have been cleaned and now, even in the same hotel the times are completely unpredictable.
In one place they’d show up at 9.00 in the morning and the next day after 16.00…. I pretty reliably leave a small tip but still, complete randomness prevails.
Also, a lot of South/Central asian men are now cleaning rooms….
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