Airbnb vs. hotels could come down to good pillows: Review, analysis

Airbnb
is changing, and it may not be for the better.

Image Point
Fr/Shutterstock

• I’ve been an avid user of Airbnb, the popular
  home-rental service, for nearly a decade, using the platform to
  visit 30+ countries.
• In recent years, I’ve noticed a shift on the platform
  from regular people renting out their own apartments and spare
  bedrooms to a more professionalized service with hosts who
  operate multiple locations.
• From my perspective, the shift has meant that apartment
  listings are equipped in a more basic and economical
  manner.
• My chief complaint is that many professional hosts
  dress beds with cheap, low-quality pillows, leaving me with a
  poor night’s sleep.
• If Airbnb or hosts don’t acknowledge and work toward
  fixing the issue, I’ll be using Airbnb less and less in the
  future.

Since I started traveling in my early 20s, I’ve visited 30+
countries. While traveling that much might have been
prohibitively expensive in decades past, Airbnb, the popular home-rental service, has
made traveling affordable.

Listings on the platform are generally a fraction of the cost of
hotels, while providing a lot more space and something like a
local’s perspective.

For a long time, it’s been a great deal. But over the last couple
of years, I’ve noticed a change that may turn me off the platform
forever. It all comes down to pillows.

I know what you may be thinking: pillows? He’s complaining about
pillows? Let me explain.

When I first began using Airbnb in 2011 — about three years after
the company launched — most of the listings on the site were
someone’s actual apartment. Either you were renting the spare
bedroom in the apartment or your host was staying somewhere else
for the days you were there.

It was a communal vibe where you felt like a real exchange was
taking place: You were helping them offset their rent, and they
told you their favorite restaurants and bars in the neighborhood.

But somewhere over the last few years, the dynamic shifted. Now,
in my experience, you are almost always renting from a host who
manages Airbnb listings for a living or for a lucrative
side-hustle.

Usually, they own — or rent, depending on how strict a city’s
laws are — multiple properties and use all of them for Airbnb. In
effect, they are operating a makeshift inn spread out across the
city.

While Airbnb hasn’t released official statistics, a 2017 report
from
CBRE Hotels’ Americas Research found
that the company’s growth in the US is being driven by hosts
renting out multiple units or entire homes. The report found that
revenue from hosts with multiple listings was the fastest growing
on the platform, and 64% of hosts in the US were renting out an
entire home.

As the report was issued for the American Hotel & Lodging
Association, take it with a grain of salt, but I’ve also seen the
shift toward professional hosts in my personal experience.

Just in the last 6 months, I’ve stayed at 14 Airbnbs, from Athens
to Seoul. And what I’ve seen doesn’t bode well.

Airbnbs are losing their charm

Last year, Airbnb
began “nudging,” in the words of one host, its hosts to
standardize the Airbnb experience.

Now the company is encouraging use of its “Instant Book” feature,
establishing standards of cleanliness, and recommending that
hosts carry “essential amenities” like toilet paper, towels,
soap, clean linens, and at least one pillow per guest.

And, earlier this year, the company even announced
that it was adding hotels to the platform.

Airbnb is stuck between
the standardization it needs to grow and the home-sharing ideal
that made it what it is.

Airbnb

Those two shifts — Airbnb pushing standardization and hosts
becoming more professional — has changed Airbnb from its
idealistic home-sharing roots to a booking site for cheaper,
ad-hoc hotels, inns, and bed and breakfasts.

That change is necessary in a lot of ways. People are using
Airbnb for work travel now, myself included, and more casual
users expect a level of standardization.

My issue with the professionalization of Airbnb is from a user’s
perspective. As more and more of the properties listed on Airbnb
come from professional hosts (people operating the property
solely as an Airbnb location or operating multiple locations at
once), the properties begin to resemble each other.

It is a business after all.

You can see the hallmarks of such properties: cheap furniture,
spartan decorations, a few wall prints, a kitchen with the
barebones necessities. Of course, the professional, light-filled
photos on the listing always make the apartment look dreamy.

But in the process, you lose much of Airbnb’s charm — from
staying in a local’s home, getting to browse their bookshelves —
and its function — like access to a kitchen stocked with spices
or getting to use their fancy Argan Oil shampoo.

About those pillows

And the truth is, for me, all of that would be fine … if wasn’t
for the pillows.

Let me put it to you this way: Most people don’t buy crappy
pillows for themselves. They’re critical to a decent night of
sleep. So if you stay in an Airbnb that is someone’s actual home,
you can be pretty sure you’ll have decent pillows to sleep on.

Not the case with the professional Airbnb properties.

I’ve been doing a lot of
traveling this year, and slept on a lot of bad pillows at
Airbnbs.

Harrison
Jacobs/Business Insider

The property being the professional Airbnb hosts’ primary
business, they try to outfit the property as cheaply and
efficiently as possible. That generally means you are getting
cheap bedding and cheap pillows, some that might be better
described as a few pieces of stuffing shoved into a cloth. It
doesn’t make for a good night of sleep.

While traveling for Business Insider over the last six months, I
used Airbnb a lot in the beginning. In many ways, it’s my ideal
way to travel.

But as Airbnb property after Airbnb property that I rented had
crappy pillows, I was increasingly turned off. Waking up night
after night exhausted from a bad night of sleep is no fun.

Recently, I began booking boutique hotels or bed and breakfasts,
many of which are around the same price-point as Airbnb nowadays
because they know they have to compete.

And at least with a hotel or bed and breakfast, I can be pretty
sure they will have good pillows.

In some ways, the pillows are a metaphor for where Airbnb is at
right now as a platform: stuck between the professionalization
and standardization it needs to grow, while trying to hold onto
the home-sharing ideal that made it what it is.

Pushing the platform one way or the other will likely solve the
issue. But until they do, I’ll be using it less and less.