Airbnb is not what it was. Here’s why I haven’t used it in years

I was standing in a service station in Germany a few years ago, waiting to pay for my fuel, when I caught myself singing along without even realising it.

“Aaah oooh, oooh, oooh …”

Riptide, by Vance Joy. I don’t even like the song – at least, not any more. But it’s inescapable. Even in Germany, beside an autobahn somewhere outside of Berlin that you might expect to be Vance-free, it’s playing on the radio.

Airbnb is not what it was when it first launched.Credit: Adobe Stock

I’ve heard Riptide pretty much everywhere in the world. Europe, Asia, the Americas. Even now, as I sit here in a cafe in Australia writing this column, it’s playing over the speaker system. I’m not kidding, it really is. The song is as ubiquitous as Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know once was, and that’s saying something.

That’s probably why I don’t like it. I’ve just heard it too many times. I’m stoked for Vance with all his success, but popularity breeds contempt. Once people start to love something they love it to death (even if Riptide refuses to die).

Anyone who works in travel and tourism would understand this universal truth: popularity ruins things. So many attractions and ideas start off pure and innocent and brilliant but are gradually eroded by the sheer weight of numbers that popularity in tourism now brings.

It’s not quite the same as music – it’s not the repetition that kills a travel experience. It’s the number of people who turn up for it, who reshape it and reimagine it via their sheer mass.

I think about tubing in Vang Vieng, Laos, when I consider something like this. The practice of floating down an idyllic river on an old inner tube with a few beers in a plastic bag started off as something amazing and fun.

But then word got around, bars started popping up on the sides of the river, illegal drugs came in, kids started getting hurt, people died. It was a horror by the time it was banned.

I also think about Airbnb, yet another idea in the travel and tourism world that began relatively organically, and with good intentions. For a fair while those good intentions – and good results – were fairly clear: people could share their homes and make money out of it; travellers tired of staid, overpriced hotels had an alternative.

It began with renting out spare rooms in occupied houses and apartments – “air mattress B&B”, as it was named – but soon morphed into entire properties being rented out to travellers, meaning you could stay somewhere with personality and quirk, quite often in areas that were otherwise inaccessible to visitors.

When there were only a few people doing Airbnb – or even a few million – it was brilliant. I was an early adopter not just for its convenience, but also for the hosts’ connections to local life. It had a personal feel that you didn’t get with cookie-cutter hotels.

But then Airbnb hit a critical mass, and it began to change. The local connection faded. The personality was buffed off by the corporate machine.

The writer Julia Baird recently shared an experience she had in Spoon Bay in the Central Coast, when she and two family members – completely coincidentally to the intro of this story – were caught in a rip while swimming and almost drowned.

“What about the responsibility of the Airbnb host whose house we were renting?” Baird wrote. “There was nothing in the information booklet about it.”

I would argue that that’s the old version of Airbnb she’s thinking about, the one where a local person would deck out their house for visitors and manage the changeovers, even meet guests and show them around when they checked in. Back then, it felt like staying with friends who would give you a few hot tips and warn you of local dangers.

It’s different now. I haven’t stayed in an Airbnb for a good couple of years, but my experiences before that were increasingly impersonal. Properties were generally managed by companies that would clean the house, track bookings and ensure the lockbox code was correct for the entry procedure.

Recently, I travelled to San Sebastian in northern Spain and needed a cheap place to stay for a few nights, so I figured, why not go old-school and rent a spare room in someone’s apartment? It would be fun.

I scanned the Airbnb listings and found a few candidates: nice apartments, hosts who looked friendly. But with a bit of digging through the reviews I figured out what was really going on at these places: there was no “host” living there – they were just empty apartments with each bedroom rented to a different Airbnb guest.

I ended up staying in a one-star pension, which was much cheaper (Pension Easo, tell Pilar I said hi).

There are other issues with Airbnb – the social impact of short-term rentals in areas where securing long-term housing is a problem for permanent residents; the increasingly ludicrous expectations for guests to tidy up after they’ve been hit with a huge cleaning fee; the increasing service fees.

But these things happen when something gets popular. The original idea morphs; the original attraction fades. Most of us just get caught in the riptide.