Hosts have ruined Airbnb with excessive fees, high demands, and bad customer service, travel experts say

• Travelers appear to be abandoning Airbnb because of high costs, excessive fees, and poor host service.

• Airbnb was once a disruptor offering affordable stays but some say it has lost its charm.

• Travel experts say hosts' greed and lack of customer focus have tarnished Airbnb's reputation.

As the founder of a travel site, Michael Rozenblit has stayed in hundreds of Airbnbs over the past decade with his partner, Maggie.

"We love the convenience of having our own space," Rozenblit told Business Insider. "Particularly when it comes to cooking our own meals and having a bit more comfort than is found in a typical hotel room."

But Rozenblit said that after recent trips, they'd both "fallen out of love" with the platform. They've found that places to stay on Airbnb are now more expensive than hotels and that hosts aren't even providing toilet paper, trash bags, and coffee anymore.

Rozenblit said cleaning fees were also extortionate, despite hosts demanding that guests do the chores. One host previously told BI he was charging $400.

"There are almost always over-the-top cleaning requirements for checkout, often including the requirement to take out the trash and strip the beds at the minimum," Rozenblit said.

Travelers have become wise to this apparent shift. Airbnb was once hailed as a major disruptor of the vacation industry, allowing people to stay in cities all over the world in comfort and at a price tag much lower than costly hotels.

But the pendulum has swayed the other way, with some vacationers now tired of the endless fees and difficult hosts who can make their stays miserable, travel experts say.

Locals in tourist hot spots, including Barcelona and Athens, have also protested overtourism this year, taking aim at the platform's hosts buying up properties and pricing them out.

Airbnb warned investors of dwindling customer demand in an earnings call earlier this month, BI reported, and lowered its projected earnings for Q3 from $3.8 billion to between $3.67 billion and $3.73 billion.

The company's profit is also down 15% compared with this quarter last year, from a net income of $650 million to $555 million.

Airbnb's stock has since tanked, falling 14% in one day earlier this month.

The company pushed back in a statement to BI, saying that the horror stories aren't representative and that bookings are still up.

Hotels have meanwhile bounced back, with former Airbnb fanatics returning and some seeing pre-pandemic levels of occupancy, according to Statista. The industry is expected to see an annual growth rate of 3.72% until 2029, when it's anticipated to be worth $511 billion, according to Statista data.

Travel experts say hosts have a lot to answer for in Airbnb's downfall.

All about profit?

Grace Moser, who owns the women's lifestyle blog Chasing Foxes and has been a full-time traveler since 2016, said hosts had played "a huge role in Airbnb's crash."

"Airbnb essentially allows anyone to sign up to be a host, which will always prove to be problematic," she told BI. "Because when you have people flooding in year after year who are seeing it as a way for them to make quick cash, you're going to be met with bad customer service."

Moser said the majority of hosts had stopped prioritizing the guest: "It's just another income stream where they do the bare minimum and know nothing about customer relations."

"There's no training, only feedback to the host after the fact," she said. "If that customer either leaves a positive or ambiguous review, or none at all, they probably won't improve for the next person."

Jessica Dante, a travel expert and the founder of Love and London, told BI it was the personal connection that guests and hosts would make that made Airbnb such a success in the early days when it launched in 2008.

"Most listings were with hosts that would be staying in the property with the guest or who were leaving for a few days and renting their place for a bit of extra income," Dante said. "Hosts would leave binders filled with local recommendations, be there to help with anything that guests needed, and you'd hear stories of guests and hosts that became great friends after a stay."

She said that these days, the majority of hosts were staff or property owners who were "solely focused on maximizing revenue."

"They charge cleaning fees while asking for chores to be completed, they aren't readily available where there's a problem, and they see guests as just a number," Dante said. "The personal connection has been lost."

Nightmare hosts

Stories about bad Airbnbs frequently hit the headlines, in part because wronged guests can go viral on TikTok with their experiences.

In January, one traveler said the trailer she rented was so cold she could see her breath. Another described his "Airbnb from hell" as "the most pathetic excuse for a house" he'd ever stayed in, with the toilet not attached to the wall and a bed in the garage.

Last year, a woman booked a New Orleans Airbnb for Taylor Swift's Eras tour this fall, but she said the host later tried to triple the price when they realized they could charge a premium.

Other horror stories include a guest saying their host dumped all their belongings, including their passport, into the street after mixing up the checkout date and a woman saying her host didn't refund her booking when she had to cancel it after learning her mom was dying.

Duncan Greenfield-Turk, the chief travel designer at Global Travel Moments, told BI that hosts had "without a doubt" played a big part in Airbnb's unpopularity.

He said inconsistent quality and service had led to growing dissatisfaction and a lack of trust in the platform.

"Unlike hotels, which generally adhere to industry standards, Airbnb experiences can vary widely from one property to the next," Greenfield-Turk said. "While some hosts provide excellent service, others have been accused of being greedy or neglectful, focusing on maximizing profits at the expense of guest satisfaction."

Greenfield-Turk said stories of hosts setting unreasonable rules, cutting corners, and being unresponsive when issues arise were becoming more common.

"These negative experiences contribute to a tarnished reputation for the platform as a whole, making the reliability of traditional hotels more appealing," he said.

In a statement to BI after publication, an Airbnb representative said the stories in this article were "cherry-picked" and anecdotal.

"The number of nights booked on Airbnb continues to grow each quarter, as does the number of listings around the globe," the rep said.

"While the vast majority of Airbnb stays are positive, just like others in the hospitality industry — including hotels — we are not infallible and work quickly to address issues when they arise and have taken action to ensure we have high-quality stays on our platform, including the removal of over 200,000 listings that failed to meet our guests' expectations."

Hotels are bouncing back

When Airbnb was new, it offered authentic, community-driven travel experiences, Greenfield-Turk said. But, he said, it had become full of full-time, profit-driven businesses, meaning the original charm had gone.

Airbnb's loss is the hotel industry's gain. Hotels are making the most of the backlash by offering more personalized services and often matching or undercutting Airbnb prices.

Rozenblit said travelers were more aware of the problems that could come with Airbnbs and were seeing the benefits of hotels, where they had "little of these requirements placed upon them."

Greenfield-Turk said that for Airbnb to regain its footing, it would have to implement stricter guidelines for hosts, enforce transparency with its pricing, and reconnect with the community-driven values that set it apart in the first place.

"This shift toward commercialization has alienated a segment of travelers who were drawn to the platform for its promise of unique, personal experiences," Greenfield-Turk said.

"Instead, they are now often met with impersonal, hotel-like stays — without the consistency and reliability that hotels offer."

August 27, 2024: This story has been updated to include a comment from Airbnb.

Read the original article on Business Insider