Airbnb Guest Can't Believe The Number Of Restrictions Plastered All Over The Property, Records A Virtual Tour

A fair share of travelers choose Airbnb over hotels, but since different hosts have different ways of managing their properties, some stays come with unexpected catches.

Recently, the founder of talent agency Stamped Staffing, who goes online by the name Nate2xs, booked a place in Montauk, New York. However, after getting there, he quickly noticed ridiculous restrictions plastered on every corner.

Eventually, Nate2xs took out his phone and recorded a video tour, saying that he won't be sleeping there.

More info: Instagram | Twitter

We managed to get in touch with Nate2xs and he agreed to have a chat with us about that night. "[I chose this place because] it was fairly priced, [considering that it was a] last-minute booking in the Hamptons," Nate2xs told Bored Panda.  "I was visiting my dad. Montauk is expensive. This one wasn't cheap but it was not as expensive as the rest."

"I think some hosts have so many rules because there are a lot of [lousy] guests who don't take care of other people's properties," he added. "But some hosts do go to extremes."

That being said, Nate2xs  believes that Airbnb would make a mistake if it implemented some kind of standardization for the rules hosts can impose on their guests. "I think [the company] should let hosts make their own rules. But I do think this may end up happening and Airbnb will become more of a digital hotel vs a home-sharing service ... It'll be a hotel with no singular building. Just uses people's homes as buildings and monitors everything."

The backlash against fastidious hosts is growing, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. For example, one traveler told the Journal that her $299-a-night Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona, came with a $375 cleaning fee, plus a list of chores.

But Airbnb hosts say there are two reasons for the higher fees and the chore demands: Covid-19 raised sanitation requirements, and, of course, inflation. The cost of hiring cleaners is up, as are utility bills.

Airbnb allows hosts to set their own rates and encourages them to avoid cleaning fees if possible. The company says a little over half of its active listings charge such fees, which on average make up less than 10% of the total reservation cost.

For some travelers, those added costs and labor have served as a reminder that once upon a time, before the gig economy, there were these other places you could rent in buildings across the country where the cleaning is done for you. The hotels!

One frustrated traveler told the Journal that the lakefront cottage she rented didn't have a working dishwasher or vacuum, so she had to spend the last day of her trip wiping the floor with her hands. Later, the host gave her a lowly three-star review for cleanliness.

The social media outrage about cleaning fees and chores is most definitely a PR headache for Airbnb. However, Allison Morrow, senior editor and the lead writer for the CNN Business Nightcap newsletter, thinks it's far from a crisis. According to her, the Airbnb model is now fully woven into the fabric of the hospitality industry, even if it still has some growing pains to work out.

Pent-up demand in 2022 has helped the company swing to a profit in the second quarter, even as inflation ate into travelers' wallets. (Airbnb is also leaning into the work-from-anywhere model — its own CEO, Brian Chesky, announced last year that he'd be living full-time as a digital nomad, bouncing around from one Airbnb to another every few weeks. And that's something hotels can't sell in the same way.)

While disgruntled Airbnb guests are taking to Twitter and TikTok to vent about everything from hidden fees to misleading listings, the hosts themselves have become increasingly disillusioned with the platform as well.

On message boards and Facebook groups, they are sharing their own challenges and horror stories. Emily Muskin Rathner, a digital marketing professional living in Cleveland, began renting her house on Airbnb back in 2021. She said that the endeavor has been pleasant and profitable overall, but a few guests have caused major problems.

For instance, there was a family that rented the house last June. "I went to the apartment to check what was going on, and I was in shock to discover that the tenants were still in the apartment," the host wrote on the website AirbnbHell. "They immediately called the police on me and I was kicked out of my own apartment by a team of the police — a complete shock."

While these anecdotes might seem like the natural byproduct of the largely unregulated industry, they speak to larger trends impacting hosts. A 2021 report from Bloomberg detailed how Airbnb's secretive crisis team spends millions of dollars to cover up crimes and other horror shows in its listings. Yes, the platform has taken actions to remedy the issues (such as banning parties from its listings). But you can still understand the hosts who want to protect their properties. Just not the ones that prohibit you from pooping.