Item — HN Reader

> But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, ...

Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.

5 comments

This is really the heart of the issue with all these new "disruptive" industries. They're cheaper because they avoid a lot of the regulation, but all that regulation exists for a reason. Whether you're replacing taxis with Uber or hotels with airbnb, you're saving money by allowing room for all the problems that made the regulation necessary in the first place.

The problem here is when regulation moves beyond safety into protectionism, which I submit ALOT of regulation for both hotels and taxis is FAR FAR FAR removed from simply protecting health and safety and instead is more about preventing new entrants into the market and protecting current business models

Here in australia (sydney) we’re still paying $1 per rideshare ride as ‘compensation’ for the taxi disruption.

If that isn’t regulatory capture? I don’t know what is

Could also be compensation for a medallion system the government was forcing Taxi company’s to buy into.

Force people to spend X00,000$/car to enter a market and then let ride-shares ignore that requirement that’s going to push all these companies to bankruptcy simply because the newcomers don’t have to pay interest on these loans.

There’s always a trade off between “cost” and everything else. If you’re wealthy enough they cost doesn’t really matter to you, regulation is fine because it leads to higher quality experiences in general.

But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.

Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.

> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.

The problem is that without regulation there is little incentive for business to be honest about the quality of service you're getting. It becomes a race to the bottom as they charge premium prices for cut-rate quality. It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep and arrive late at night to a room that isn't what you expect. They just have to make their dispute process hard enough to keep customer money.

And if you day that's fraud, sure it is, but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.

IMO regulation isn't perfect, but we should aim to fix it instead of throwing it out the window entirely

> It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep

I think this is actually how most people end up deciding to take their business elsewhere: they give a company their business once, are let down, and decide to never patronize that business or chain again. This is why customer recommendations and reviews hold weight at all -- they help give signal before your first business interaction.

> but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.

I don't think almost anyone is in favor of no regulation, only the prescriptive step-by-step guideline regulations. If a hotel says "we have beds!" and then they don't have beds, that's a very different regulatory case than a hotel saying "our bed are comfortable!" and then their beds are not comfortable.

> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.

And perhaps saving money might be even more valuable to you than <what you wrote above, but every "or" being progressively replaced with an "and">!

> Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.

Yes, but that "one point on a trade off curve for everyone" works as a backstop against inevitable slide downwards. If globalization of trade and e-commerce taught us anything, reputation systems are trivially gamed, most branding exists primarily to fool people who still think it means something into spending more for less.

Even without talking about potential fraud, market competition naturally turns into race to the bottom. Regulation is what sets that bottom higher than "absolute worst possible before the market segment self-destructs".

There are many different levels of hotel rooms. But, as with many things, service worker labor has gotten more expensive relative to other things (Baumol cost disease basically). So it makes sense for hotels and other industries to automate or simply eliminate things like daily room cleanings that most customers don't actually value a lot.

Pretty sure some airbnbs don’t even clean between guests. I’ve had some iffy experiences, and because of the consistently issues, it’s why I prefer hotels now unless there’s no other option.

same here - airbnb had its day in the sun for me - its back to hotels for me whenever I can.

That's one of the reasons some people(i.e me) avoid airbnb as much as possible. It seems airbnb is not even cheaper than a hotel (in most cases)

Without knowing what sort of information sharing exists among hotels, I'd suspect that AirBnB has a much stronger reputation signal that can be relied upon, which should disincentivize and blacklist people who are trashing places or causing pest problems.

With Airbnb you're on the hook for cleaning costs..at a hotel the assumption is the hotel will clean up your mess (as long as it's not extreme or unreasonable)

Hotels are certainly charging the guests for cleaning up; it is just not broken out as a separate charge. Of course, Airbnb’s do not have the economies of scale that a hotel has and in some cases for short term rentals charge more for the cleaning than the rented space. I stay with the pros and avoid Airbnb’s for both cost and convenience reasons.