Airbnb feels like staying with a cheap, uptight friend – then paying for the privilege | Arwa Mahdawi

Once, it seemed an economical and adventurous alternative to a hotel. But I doubt I’ll be using it again

Some people call it “wasting time on Twitter”. I call it “qualitative research”. Having engaged in a lot of qualitative research recently, I’ve discovered the following: everyone is sick of Airbnb. In its early years, Airbnb was a more economical and adventurous alternative to a hotel. Nowadays, it costs a small fortune to rent a shack on Airbnb and, when you get there, you are forced to abide by a long list of rules and buy your own toilet paper. It’s become a bit like staying with your cheapest, most uptight friend – and paying them for the privilege.

I’m not the only person to have made this observation. Every few weeks a tweet dunking on Airbnb seems to go viral. The latest example comes courtesy of a writer called Jeremy Gordon, who got more than 100,000 likes for tweeting the following: “Decided to stay in a Holiday Inn instead of an Airbnb for an overnight trip and strongly feel, one hour after check-in, that there has never been a more luxurious experience in all of human history.”