Short Airbnb,
Long Hotels

In 2007 two broke designers in San Francisco couldn't cover rent. A design conference was in town and the hotels were full, so they blew up air mattresses on their living room floor, promised breakfast, and charged strangers to sleep there. They called it Air Bed & Breakfast.

That was the entire idea. You have a spare room. Someone needs a bed. You meet a stranger, make a few bucks, tell them where the good tacos are. You act like a person.

Nineteen years later, Airbnb had to write a corporate policy telling hosts they can't make paying guests do the dishes.

From breakfast to a chore chart in nineteen years.

The new rules

On October 23, Airbnb announced new house rules. For anything booked on or after November 20, hosts can't require guests to strip the beds, start a wash, wash and put away the dishes, or take the trash off the property. Nothing that takes real time or effort. Nothing a cleaner would normally handle.

Hosts also can't fine guests anymore. They can't add rules after you book, by message or by a laminated sign taped to the fridge. In Airbnb's own framing, if a rule isn't in the listing when you book, it isn't a rule. Hosts who keep doing it get flagged and pushed down in search.

You can still be asked to put dishes in the sink, gather the towels and sort the recycling. Fine. A decent person does that anyway.

Here's the funny part. Airbnb already told hosts to stop back in November 2022, and called stripping beds, doing laundry and vacuuming unreasonable. It was a suggestion. Hosts ignored it for four years, the checklists kept going viral, and now it's a rule.

The hosts took it well

They did not take it well.

A post calling the policy "bonkers" pulled 8.7 million views. Loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash and pulling the sheets off the bed were "standard things any normal person would do when staying at a house," it said. I replied with the only take that matters:

Then a host in Germany posted his checkout list. He charges a €145 cleaning fee. Guests are still expected to:

1. Strip the beds and start a wash, whites separated from colours.
2. Wash, dry and put away every dish.
3. Sweep and mop the floors.
4. Take out the rubbish, sorted into paper, cardboard, clear glass, coloured glass, plastics, metal, organic and residual waste.
5. Return the deposit bottles to the supermarket machine.
6. Send photos proving the apartment is ready before the 8:30am checkout.

Got an early flight? Do it the night before, he said. The cleaning fee "pays for professional cleaning. It does not pay for someone to pick up after you."

Eight kinds of trash. Photo evidence. A supermarket errand on the way to the airport. One reply asked the obvious question: if the guest does the mopping and the laundry, what exactly are the professionals cleaning?

The rest of the replies wrote themselves. One man had just opened a massage business: $100 an hour, mandatory $20 tip, and you massage your own back. Another ran a restaurant with a cooking fee. Guests chop the vegetables and cook the food. The professional chef sprinkles the salt, for a professional touch.

Whether that account is a real host or a very committed bit (his replies got a lot stranger from there), 1.2 million people read it and recognised every line. They'd all stayed there.

Chores become fees

Nobody thinks hosts are about to start doing their own dishes. The smart ones already know where this goes. One posted his updated listing the same week:

Cleaning fee: $180
Cleaner arrival fee: $40
Cleaner emotional support fee: $25
"Guest didn't strip the beds" fee: $35
Trash disappointment fee: $20
Checkout time: 6:15am, yeah even in winters

"Nobody is forcing you to do chores," he wrote. "You're simply choosing between chores and fees." It's a joke. It's also the business model. One rental operator told a trade site that hosts who priced their cleaning fee around guest labour now "have 30 days to fix either the checkout list or the fee." They'll fix the fee.

The disruption that failed

I'll own this one. In December 2020 I put Airbnb on a list next to bitcoin and Uber.

@GRITCULT · Dec 17, 2020 Banks call bitcoin a "bad idea"
Taxis called Uber a "bad idea"
Hotels called Airbnb a "bad idea"
…
It's simple, they're afraid.

Seventeen months later I'd worked it out.

@GRITCULT · May 11, 2022 Airbnb is way more hassle than an hotel

They failed the disruption.

Hotels aren't going to die @GRITCULT · Jun 20, 2022 Airbnb 5 years ago: "Here's a list of nearby restaurants and attractions for you to enjoy!"

Airbnb now: "Here's a list of chores! If you don't do them, we'll charge you $500. Lights out and no noise by 11PM or we'll fucking kill you"

Every disruptor ends up turning into the thing it disrupted, only worse. Uber turned into taxis with surge pricing. Netflix turned into cable with ads. Airbnb turned into a hotel with no front desk and no breakfast, plus a lockbox, a cleaning fee, a service fee and homework.

@GRITCULT · Sep 18, 2022 Netflix is having ads.
Airbnb is owning buildings.

We have reinvented tv and hotels.

Then in January 2023 I asked whether Airbnb was a zero interest rate phenomenon. When money was free, anyone could buy a second and third house, throw in some Edison bulbs and a "Live Laugh Love" sign, and call it a business. The numbers only worked if the place stayed booked almost every night. Then money stopped being free, and every investor in the country had the same idea at the same time.

By May 2023 the trade was obvious.

@GRITCULT · May 13, 2023 short airbnb

long hotels @GRITCULT · May 13, 2023 you can literally get a burger and cigarettes delivered from a 5 star restaurant at 4am in the morning by a lil guy in a suit

airbnb makes u do the laundry before checking out

What the hotel gives you

One woman posted why she and her husband switched to Holiday Inn, and it reads like a list of everything Airbnb forgot.

Nobody else has a key to the room. No disgruntled ex-tenant, no confused cousin of the host who still knows the door code. Check-in takes two minutes, with no fumbling at a smart lock in the rain. She leaves the room tidy because she wants to, not because a host might claim she scratched a lamp. Someone is always in the lobby. A receptionist once found her maxi pads at 11pm. The wifi works. The beds are good. Breakfast is free.

Breakfast. Remember breakfast? It was the B in Airbnb.

She ended on the line that should keep every host up at night: she likes knowing her money keeps locals employed instead of paying off an investor's mortgage.

The minimum wage worker at the Super 8 has cleaned up worse than anything you will ever leave behind. She doesn't send you a 2,000 word message about it. She doesn't threaten your review score. It's a Tuesday. Hotels spent a hundred years learning that hospitality means the guest never thinks about the mess. Airbnb spent ten years making the mess the guest's job.

The bill comes due

The chores were the part you could laugh at. The rest isn't funny.

Someone just back from Athens wrote that their tour guide explained how young Athenians can no longer afford to live in the neighbourhoods their families have lived in for generations. A man from Venice told them the same thing had happened there. It's happened everywhere.

Greece has frozen new short-term rental registrations in central Athens through the end of 2026, with fines up to €40,000, and is extending the freeze to Thessaloniki, Santorini, Chania, Paros and Halkidiki. Barcelona has said it will shut down all of its roughly 10,000 tourist apartment licences by 2028. New York's 2023 registration law wiped out most of the city's short stays. Venice's historic centre fell below 50,000 residents years ago. The locals keep leaving and the suitcases keep rolling in.

Now the market is finishing what the regulators started. One data firm tracked 83,892 US listings across 20 markets, year over year. The typical host raised prices 12% and lost 18% of booked nights. Occupancy fell in 19 of the 20 markets. Nearly half the hosts earned less than the year before.

Tulip on X said it better than anyone:

You didn't rent out your spare room. You rented a second and third apartment just so it could sit empty between guests. You bought entire houses in neighborhoods where families were trying to buy their first home. You turned residential streets into unstaffed hotels with lockboxes, cleaning fees, and a checklist of chores for the guest.

And the part the hosts don't want to hear:

If you have to sell at a loss, that's not a tragedy. That's the market finally sending you the bill.

The good ones

I've shit on Airbnb a lot. I'll still say this: one of the best trips of my life was an Airbnb. A remote villa in Tunisia. The host met us every day. When I ran out of cash he lent me Tunisian money. He gave us recommendations and showed us around the city.

That man was the original idea. A person with a place, being good to a stranger. He didn't need a chore chart because he wasn't running an unstaffed hotel off a spreadsheet. Hosts like him will be fine. They always were. The new rules only hurt people who priced the guest's labour into their margin.

To everyone else: sell the house. Let a family live in it.

Airbnb died the day the guest became the cleaner. The new policy is the death certificate.

Short Airbnb. Long hotels. Leave by 11. If not, that's fine.

GRITCULT