Is the Airbnb Dream Dead? It's on Life Support

The Airbnb dream is not dead, unless you are brain dead. You can be involved in the short term rental game without Airbnb dictating how you rent.  If you've been in this game for a while, you know how it goes. You list your property on Airbnb, and cash flows in. However, depending on how long you rent out your place, it's just a matter of time before the true face of Airbnb rears its head. For me, it was the guest and host review process.

Guest Reviews

Let's face it: reviews determine views, and if your reviews stink, clicks on your listing will follow suit. This is why the internet is not short of people – namely hosts like myself – complaining about reviews. It's not necessary because of a bad review but how the process is unfair to hosts. I think a few things are going on:

• Guests ARE completely oblivious to just how determinantal reviews are for us. I had a guest give me a 3-star review because my place was deemed too small. The irony is that my listing clearly says "20 m^2" studio apartment, yet this is somehow my fault in the guest's experience. It's situations like that that drive hosts mad because no matter how clear we are, it doesn't matter. If a guest feels like leaving a 1-star review, Airbnb won't do anything about it, claiming they cannot delete the review.
• Guests ARE NOT completely oblivious to how determinantal the reviews are for us. Some guests actually feel entitled to extract whatever perks they want from us and hold the review process hostage if we don't comply. I have not experienced this personally, but I know of others who have. The guest makes all sorts of "entitled" requests, and the host pushes back – BAM 1-star for your trouble. This is unfair and not a reflection of the host or the space, but Airbnb is silent on the matter.

Local Laws

Local laws are something else to consider when using high-visibility platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com. They are being targeted by local authorities who want to extract more tax dollars from us, who are already living in a world of inflation. I won't name the place, but in certain world cities, there are limits and restrictions on how many times you can rent out your place on Airbnb. Airbnb even helps track this (this collaboration is by definition fascist). The insult to injury is that local authorities claim that STRs (short-term rentals) are creating a housing problem. I don't doubt it does affect pricing, but it's not the entire cause. The irony is that these same authorities blame us "peasants" for earning a legitimate income while taxing the very same earnings contributing to the so-called housing problem.

Laws are also changing so quickly – it's hard to keep up with them. Sometimes I think some of the so-called laws are probably not even lawful, but I digress.

AirCover and Liability Promises

Some of us wake up to a nightmare of problems when we find ourselves in shambles because of a horrible guest and Airbnb's arbitrary decision regarding how to judiciously apply coverage. Once again, there is no shortage of horror stories involving a guest who trashes our places and Airbnb is not coming to our rescue. I'm not saying that is the norm, but it does happen. I talk about this in great detail in Airbnb AirCover For Hosts – Leaving our butts in the breeze only works at Airbnb's discretion. However, the marketing behind AirCover makes it sound like they have one million reasons to have our backs with their $1 million insurance policy. Technically, it's not even an insurance policy if you read the fine print, which I did.

So, is the Airbnb dream dead? No, at least not for me. For hosts, there is an opportunity to have our cake and eat it too. We can use the marketing power of Airbnb and throw them a few bones their way while directly booking with guests. There's no reason why we ourselves cannot book directly with guests. Yes, I know – Airbnb warns against that – but once you distill all the red tape and fine print down to what it actually says, you realize we are taking the greatest risk anyway. They benefit from our fears of being alone in the cold when it comes to a rowdy guest.

We are the ones who have to keep up with local laws. We are the ones who "have to pay tax". We are the ones who expose ourselves to risk and liability through our ignorance of AirCover and what it actually entails. We are the ones who suffer if our reviews are held hostage by terrorist guests. We are the ones who suffer if Airbnb changes its policies, and we don't agree.

So at the end of the day, we are the ones who have to take charge and responsibility of hosting. That's why we have created this platform for hosts that allows us to book directly with potential Airbnb guests. For some, I know that is a scary prospect, but for others it's liberating, because we already know we cannot depend on one company for business. If you understand that, Airbnb is a dream come true.

If you want to get started with your own direct bookings click the link below or find another way. Just be your own boss and not Airbnb's lap dog.