Agreed. For my wedding in Japan, I had my entire family fly over to Tokyo. We're big on family so everyone wanted to stick together for the duration of the trip. I booked them (if I remember I think it was 15 relatives and my parents) an entire house close to Ikebukuro). It was the only option and it turned out to be WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY cheaper than hotel rooms (Tokyo area hotels are notoriously expensive especially during Sakura season which is when my wedding was held).

Anyway, tangential story, I booked a single apartment studio for my mother and father when they came to visit (this was another time, a year or two after my wedding). It was hosted by a woman (forgot the name but it's important to the story) who claimed to have the best cleaning services and most awesome response times and blah blah blah. I picked up my parents at Haneda, brought them to the Airbnb, we checked in and it was a fucking dump. Bed had a shit ton of, what looked like male pubic hair, crusted yellow stains on the sheets and pillow cases, crusty yellow blotchy stains on the ceiling. Bathroom smelled like someone threw up in there, but it was spotless except for what looked like blood stains smeared all over one side of the wall. Floors were old as fuck. Basically, the apartment looked nothing like the photos which were heavily edited and all taken at angles to make everything look larger. I should have known better.

I reached out the host by phone. A man picks up instead of the host. He said he is the host's friend and that she's away (obviously bullshit because I was aware that in Tokyo lots of third party home managers help hosts rent their apartments or houses on Airbnb). I explain to him the situation calmly, and said I want a refund. He refused but said he could send cleaners to the apartment the NEXT day. I refused back at him and I demanded a refund. Guy said he needs to check and will call me back. Didn't call me back for 30 minutes so I try reaching out to him for the next hour and realize he is ghosting me.

Called Airbnb, they directed me to the US offices I guess. They made me send photos of the apartment, which I did. Support staff I spoke to was nice but apparently since I had already checked in they needed the host to unilaterally refund me or some bullshit excuse. I had enough, so I asked my wife (who is Japanese) to send a message in Japanese that went something like "If you don't refund me I will get the police involved. I will also reach out to NHK and other news outlets about this apartment from hell so that they have a cool story to report on. I will also seek out a lawyer and sue you into oblivion because I know you're probably illegally renting this apartment on Airbnb."

I got refunded almost right away after hitting send. Fucker. Just writing about the experience pisses me off lol, more so because I had fucked up so bad for my parents. I ended up getting them a hotel afterwards.

Excluding the bad host problems, airbnb is great for people who want to stay in a regular neighborhood around locals instead of in the touristy areas where hotels are licensed to operate. Let's say you're a parent from the midwest coming to visit your adult child who lives in queens or brooklyn, do you want to stay in wall street/times square/midtown where most of the hotels are or do you want to stay in the same neighborhood where your kid lives?

If cities didn't limit hotel locations and try to concentrate them in certain places, and hotels provided more kitchen-like amenities so people can cook for themselves when traveling this would all be less of an issue. But airbnb basically figured out that hotels aren't providing what a lot of people really want.