Why I’d rather book a shabby motel room than an Airbnb

Once upon a time, I loved booking an Airbnb. The stays were as unique and quirky as you wanted, a yellow submarine in a New Zealand forest or a UFO in Mexico. The places were roomier and had more character than a sterile hotel room.

You could cook your own meals. Wash your knickers without being extorted $6 per item. More often than not, you had the opportunity to meet a great host local to the area, and it was generally cheaper than a hotel room.

Yellow submarine Airbnb in the redwood forests of NZ.Credit: Airbnb

Now after eight years, this traveller’s love of finding a place to rest her weary head via this short-stay model is waning. It’s lost its competitive edge. And more frequently its hospitality, particularly as more hosts pay outsiders, or co-hosts, to manage the bookings.

Hotels are easier and simpler. There’s no complicated check-in instructions and constant messaging to a host when the locked key box fails to open after you put in an 18-digit code in wrong multiple times a few minutes to midnight after a long flight.

My most recent two-week stay on the northern beaches of Sydney was plagued with problems. An unresponsive host in Dubai. An amateur paid co-host who had recently been handed the keys to manage the apartment after an epic breakdown in communication with the previous co-host and owner. And who appeared to live nowhere near the property, meaning every time something went wrong there was a lengthy delay.

It wasn’t the most amazing experience I’ve had in an Airbnb, and I was honest. Which brings me to my next gripe.

Hotels don’t rate their guests.

From its inception in 2007, Airbnb was a platform built on reviews. And those reviews formed the foundation of this community.

Guests would review hosts, hosts would review guests, and those who didn’t meet expectations would struggle to attract guests and book stays. It’s a flawed double-blind feedback loop that renders even well-mannered guests like myself anxious about what review the host is going to hand out, and it’s a system that pressures guests to leave a positive review.

But my latest gripe is the cleaning fees, the pesky one-off charge hosts tack on for cleaning the space you stay in, on top of the nightly fee. This fee is meant to cover the extra expenses hosts incur washing the bedding and scrubbing the toilet when they are getting their place ready for the next guests to arrive.

The last Airbnb I stayed at attracted a cleaning fee of $180 and a service fee of $433. A sizeable chunk of the 15-night fee that was already north of $3000.

Despite the cleaning fee, I was expected to gather all used towels, bedding, throw trash away downstairs and ensure it was tidy. It goes without saying, you leave the property in a neat and tidy condition.

However, I nearly choked on my Weeties when I went to book a spare bedroom in a private unit on the NSW Central Coast with a guy named Craig and his King Charles cavalier, Rodger. Let’s just say you’re taking a bit of a gamble here.

The bed in the listing, styled as a top-of-the-wozza donga, had a bedspread with decorative creepy monkeys and screamed: “I’m a single guy with no idea about manchester.”

The room was $85 a night, with an additional $50 cleaning fee. Oh, and there was a limit of one load of laundry per guest per week. At least the bedroom door had a lock.

So instead I booked a motel with a shared bathroom for $70 all-inclusive.

This bedroom for rent in Sydney attracted a $50 cleaning fee for one night.Credit: Airbnb

Airbnb was unable to provide data on the number of listings currently charging cleaning fees but Australia and New Zealand country manager Susan Wheeldon said hosts set their own prices for cleaning.

“Because we know affordability is top of mind for many, we encourage hosts to keep their cleaning fees as low as possible,” she said.

Last month the company released its inaugural Global Quality Report which detailed 400,000 low-quality listings had been removed from its global community of more than five million hosts.

“In Australia more than 85 per cent of reviews left by guests were five stars, less than one per cent of reviews were one-star,” Wheeldon said.

“Reviews are the backbone of Airbnb and we encourage guests to find the right stay by using features such as guest favourites, a collection of the most-loved homes on Airbnb, based on ratings, reviews, and reliability data.”

For now, I’ll leave Airbnbs for those once-in-a-lifetime unique stays. That cliffside stay, where you lodge in a see-through capsule slung off the top of a mountain in Peru. Which doesn’t have a cleaning fee.

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