Shared lodging like bed and breakfasts, boarding houses, and room rentals are falling out of favor, replaced by contactless, host-less vacation rentals. But at what cost?
As planes take off from Mohammed V International Airport just outside Casablanca, there are usually a few common souvenir items bouncing around the cargo hold: colorful Berber rugs, freshly dyed leather jackets, delicately patterned lanterns, tightly woven baskets, and other purchases from the souks. I, however, came back with boiled eggs. They weren’t packed away in the cargo hold; they were plastered in my memory. Okay, yes, I got a few rugs and a jacket too, but three years after my trip, my affection for boiled eggs is my most enduring souvenir.
I learned to love them in a creaky, overflowing Tangier riad, the home of my Airbnb host. The doting septuagenarian welcomed me and my partner after a long train ride from Madrid and a short ferry ride across the Strait of Gibraltar, plying us with sugary mint tea and stories until our weary eyes forced us off to bed. In the morning, we were presented with eggs in delicate cups, alongside stacks of fresh flatbreads like m’semen and khobz, tiny jars of jam with intricate metal serving spoons, fresh cheese, olives, and on and on.
In the months following my trip, I came away from Morocco eating a lot of olives and dates, telling friends about meals of mechoui and b’stilla, and showing off my rugs and jacket. But the eggs stuck around long after I had new stories and souvenirs to share. Their endurance in my mind has little to do with their flavor and everything to do with the gracious host who served them.
These sorts of prizes are the rewards of a good homestay, a term that can refer to any space shared between a host and a visitor, whether that’s getting cozy at a traditional bed-and-breakfast, renting a room inside someone’s house, or roosting in a trailer parked behind a family home. The key word here is “shared” — which is what separates a homestay from a standard vacation rental or hotel.
I tend toward homestays as a matter of preference, but a recent summer trip to Portland, Maine, where my family stayed in a remotely managed house, reminded me there are fundamental differences between sharing space and renting it outright. With intermittent texts from our host, the days played out like a series of treasure hunts: for the fuse box to reset a blown fuse (it was in a basement hidden by a trap door), for the coffee in the morning (we ended up running to a cafe), for an extra fan for a room without AC (we just propped the windows open). These small inconveniences added up to a larger conclusion: This would all be better if our host was around.
When it launched in 2008, Airbnb promised to digitize short-term rentals, convince more travelers to couch surf instead of booking a hotel room, make it easier for guests to find trustworthy hosts, encourage locals to open their homes and communities to strangers, and overall make travel feel more personal. While it struggled to find customers and funding in its early years, by pre-pandemic 2019, 54 million people booked 327 million nights with over 4 million hosts on Airbnb, according to an SEC filing. It scored a hugely successful IPO in late 2020, and in 2021 recorded its strongest quarter ever. Airbnb also came to dominate and dictate the market, becoming the focus of investment hubbub in the short-term rental industry and far outpacing competitors like Vrbo (now owned by Expedia) and Homestay.com. Though Vrbo launched nearly 20 years earlier than Airbnb, Airbnb boasts 5.6 million listings, almost three times as many as Vrbo’s 2 million.
There are companies that slowly attract customers by staying true to their original ideals; that’s not what happened here. Pivot after pivot reoriented Airbnb around the kind of impersonal travel it originally tried to fix, leading the industry by the nose away from a romantic conception of immersive travel toward a more segmented, anonymous experience mediated by technology. Airbnb’s identity began changing almost immediately after its founding; it expanded into “whole place” listings in 2009. More recently, the company has expanded luxury tiers for wealthy travelers more interested in private islands than futons, and incentivized hosts to add self check-in, which could earn hosts 13 percent more money for personally interacting with guests 100 percent less.
According to Inside Airbnb — an open-source platform run by community activist Murray Cox that tracks public data on the site’s listings — entire home/apartment listings outnumber “private rooms” (aka homestays) in all 26 American destinations tracked by the website. Entire homes make up the vast majority of listings in tourist hotspots like Nashville (88 percent), New Orleans (84 percent), and Hawai‘i (84 percent). The numbers are just as extreme in international hubs like Athens (87 percent), Paris (87 percent), and Copenhagen (85 percent). (Airbnb declined to provide data on numbers of each listing type on their website.)
Pivot after pivot reoriented Airbnb around the kind of impersonal travel it originally tried to fix
Airbnb has also filled with professional renters over the years; on the eve of the company’s massive IPO, Bloomberg reported, nearly 30 percent of bookings were hosted by private companies rather than individuals. In many cities, Inside Airbnb notes that a majority of hosts offer multiple listings; while this could be homeowners renting out different rooms in the same property, the site notes, “Hosts with multiple listings are more likely to be running a business, are unlikely to be living in the property, and in violation of most short-term rental laws designed to protect residential housing.” Inside Airbnb estimates up to 60 percent of homes listed in some cities have no permanent occupants.
None of Airbnb’s moves were antithetical to old-fashioned homestays, but the company has stayed relevant by drifting away from its original conception — with real consequences. Whole house rentals have become the epicenter of disputes between residents and renters over “party houses,” leading the company to crack down on homes without permanent tenants. Some critics also point out landlords are now incentivized to evict long-term tenants, while some cities, including major tourist hubs like New York and Barcelona, have tried pushing back against the company by banning short-term rentals. It doesn’t seem so surprising to find a dystopian private theme park listed on the site.
By the time COVID shut down airports and upended the rental car industry last year, Airbnb had slipped well out of harm’s way. Despite reports heralding the company’s end in early 2020, it was actually perfectly positioned for pandemic-era travel. With a few new cleaning protocols here and a few more days between guests there, travelers (and investors) were happy to trust the company again. It wasn’t the end of Airbnb; it was the end of the original Airbnb — or it could have been.
There are places where Airbnb’s original vision is alive and well, like at Cynthia Upchurch’s house. She began renting rooms in her Fall Branch, Tennessee, home in 2020, during the pandemic. “It makes a difference to be made to feel comfortable, like you’re part of the family,” Upchurch says. She rises early on weekends to cook up feasts for the guests staying in her house, like one recent morning meal that included fried catfish, cheese grits, scrambled eggs, and toast with strawberry freezer jam from a friend’s farm nearby. Though she doesn’t include dinner as an amenity, if guests arrive late after a day of driving, Upchurch will save them a plate of whatever she’s making. “That’s why we stay full. We’ve got nothing but love and food for you.”
Food is a common selling point for homestays. Even as tech companies find ways to remove friction (aka human contact) from our daily eating routines — with job-stealing autonomous delivery robots...