Disagree, the author is using Fuck You as a proxy for customer pain. Fuck You taxi industry works because people hate taxis. Fuck You hotels worked because people hate hotels. Fuck You Google works (in terms of llms) works because Google results became shit.
Identifying industries where people begrudgingly accept the status quo because they need the service but hate everything about how it's provided is your opportunity.
> people hate hotels.
Was this the case though?
Airbnb and hotels.com and the likes have been pushing the hotels towards a race to the bottom but actual hotels are not bad in my experience. Small quasi-hotels with ordinary flats that run like a estate get rich quick scheme are though.
That's confusing things. There are bad, good and great hotels. There are bad, good and great airbnbs. The problem is what will the management of that place do or try to get away with; what can the client do; what can the intermediary / rating. That was already the case before Airbnb.
If an airbnb and a hotel choose to race to the bottom, perhaps they deserve each other and the rest of us deserve a way to avoid them? (Or use them if it came to that...)
I think Airbnb and hotels.com do not push people to the bottom - they offer a minimal bar or set of features to look for quality / price ratio. Are they perfect? No. But they make discovery much easier.
I feel like Airbnb started more on the provider side as "fuck you landlord/local government I'll sublet if I want and you won't catch me" more than a fuck you to hotels specifically. Any "fuck you hotels" on the customer side was mostly on the price side - Airbnb was indeed cheaper when it was a bed, a towel and a plate in someone's flat rather than a specially-bought and renovated property where you never see the host except to pick up a key. Maybe the "meet real new people" thing had some legs at first for some gregarious types, but it clearly wasn't that important since it's mostly gone now. It bootstrapped into a whole property market thing when it turned out to be outrageously profitable in tourist areas and created a whole new supply of holiday let properties at the expense of local residential supply.
Hotels/Booking.com are more of a fuck you to travel agents and/or opaque or fragmented hotel pricing, since they don't provide an alternative to the hotel itself.
> people hate hotels
Other than mandatory fees not displayed in the advertised daily rate, I have never heard of people hating hotels.
Airbnb listings also have mandatory fees not displayed in their advertised daily rate.
My understanding is that Airbnb took off because it was cheaper than hotels (however in general, that may not be the case anymore).
I think *people hate costs more than they hate services* (which is how airlines like Spirit and Ryanair have managed to do business).
in recent 5+ years I've not been at a hotel that had extra fees not mentioned on booking.com... I don't book very expensive ones though
Paul Graham also has a good way to frame this which perhaps I should have touched upon.
"A principle for taking advantage of thresholds has to include a test to ensure the game is worth playing. Here's one that does: if you come across something that's mediocre yet still popular, it could be a good idea to replace it. For example, if a company makes a product that people dislike yet still buy, then presumably they'd buy a better alternative if you made one."