Short: This app is all about making landlords money and has long since ceased to be about meeting the locals or having an enjoyable stay; and except for 4-6 week stays really isn't cheaper than most hotels.
Medium: I have never had an enjoyable stay with this app despite using it for 10 years (save two) despite using it about 9-12 times. Its like Frozen Yogurt; I was in denial about the truly ridiculous crap that these shadow hotels push on their customers and by allowing the landlord to rate you after the fact, they encourage you to leave happy shining reviews or you won't be able to use the crappy imitation hotels again.
Maximum Verbosity: We rented a small hidden gem in Marblehead for 6 weeks while looking for a new apartment and had a lovely time. Only a week later our puritanical former land lord filed a claim for a few hundred dollars claiming out cat had pooped and peed'd all over the place; never mind that it was water solubable hair dye and our cat is the most fastidious in the history of mankind. There is a subset of people in Massachusetts who simply take a Disney attitude towards cats. Then, after having our pet insulted by our cat, we began to remember what we had gaslit ourselves into forgetting; like the towel rack I simply bumped into that fell off the wall, the phone booth sized shower, the upstairs cleaners who made insane amounts of noise at 8am on a Saturday (The same ones who claimed that our cat pooped and pee'd everywhere). At a hotel, you have a certain expectation of service, but if you are using Grandma's Dead Empty tomb, you can save a small amount of money and meet the locals.
But we haven't met a local in the last 8 years. When we went to Montreal, we had a hermetically sealed anally retentive psycho landlord in this bizarre apartment building/shadow hotel that was build like a hotel but full of pseudo condominiums and we left a positive review but in the private notes mentioned things like hoarding toilet paper and insane weird rules including having to unlock the Davinci code and 5 phone calls to find out where to stay.
The first time we used the app we met a charming woman when we went to the Stiletto festival in Charseston. True, the second time we found that she had tons of smelly and rotten food in the fridge, but she was still a very nice person. We met our hosts one more time when we went to Del Ray which was the last positive experience we had with it.
Speaking of our Cat, we had a negative experience with another puritanical actual landlord which changed our persopective on who should or shouldn't be one; so I've been researching this problem a lot more. Airbnb is responsible for raising housing prices by tying up affordable housing in shadow hotels. New York City recently made very strict rules that it can only do what Airbnb actually originally was supposed to be which is rooms in houses that a family actually has where they live there instead of unregulated crap shadow hotels. Blackrock is a bigger problem, but Airbnb is the tool for wanna be slum lords to move from Upper Middle Class to Lower Upper Class.
Needless to say, I've literally deleted our account.
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